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Mapmatics: How we navigate the world through numbers by Paulina Rowinska $40
How does a delivery driver distribute hundreds of packages in a single working day? Why does remote Alaska have such a large airport? Where should we look for elusive serial killers? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and maths.In Mapmatics, Dr Paulina Rowinska embarks on a fascinating journey to discover the mathematical foundations of cartography and cartographical influences on mathematics. From a sixteenth-century map that remains an indispensable navigation tool despite emphasizing the North-South divide, and maps of voting districts that can empower or silence whole communities, to public transport maps that both guide and mislead passengers, she reveals how maps and maths shape not only our sense of space and time but also our worldview. [Paperback]

Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren (translated from Norwegian by Agnes Broome) $30
Martin Berg is slowly falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer who'd almost finished his novel, his girlfriend was the shockingly intelligent and beautiful Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the up-and-coming artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript has long been languishing in a desk drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has been missing for years. Not long after they were married, she vanished from his life and left him to raise their two young children alone. So who was Cecilia? Martin's eccentric wife, Gustav's enigmatic muse, an absent mother — a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Martin's daughter Rakel stumbles across a clue about what happened to her mother, she becomes determined to fill in the gaps in her family's story. [New paperback edition]
”Utterly gripping, like the films of Richard Linklater transmuted to the page. A magnificent doorstop of a novel.” —Guardian

• Human existence of full of misery.

• We don’t get endless opportunities.

• Love, power, and art.

Collected Short Fiction by Gerald Murnane $40
This volume brings together Gerald Murnane's shorter works of fiction, most of which have been out of print for the past twenty five years. They include such masterpieces as 'When the Mice Failed to Arrive', 'Stream System', 'First Love', 'Emerald Blue', and 'The Interior of Gaaldine', a story which holds the key to the long break in Murnane's career, and points the way towards his later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. Much is made of Murnane's distinctive and elaborate style as a writer, but there is no one to match him in his sensitive portraits of family members - parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children — and in his probing of situations which contain anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight.
’Murnane is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last 50 years, and one of the best writers Australia has produced. This claim will be hotly contested by many — and perhaps most — Australian critics and readers, but I suspect it will become a commonplace sentiment internationally.” —Emmett Stinson, The Guardian

• An interview with Gerald Murnane.

• Other books by Gerald Murnane.

The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore $28
Sister Perpetue is not to move. She is not to fall asleep. She is to sit, keeping guard over the patient's room. She has heard the stories of his hunger, which defy belief: that he has eaten all manner of creatures and objects. A child even, if the rumours are to be believed. But it is hard to believe that this slender, frail man is the one they once called The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon. Before, he was just Tarare. Well-meaning and hopelessly curious, born into a world of brawling and sweet cider, to a bereaved mother and a life of slender means. The 18th Century is drawing to a close, unrest grips the heart of France and life in the village is soon shaken. When a sudden act of violence sees Tarare cast out and left for dead, his ferocious appetite is ignited, and it's not long before his extraordinary abilities to eat make him a marvel throughout the land. [New paperback edition]
”An embarrassment of riches. A sensory assault fit to slap any reader awake with its gorgeous glut of baroque prose and wise, poised lessons on life, pleasure, class, desire, and love.” —Kiran Millwood Hargrave

• Read Stella’s review.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, And other stories by Jamil Jan Kochai $33
Jamil Jan Kochai breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. In these arresting stories verging on both comedy and tragedy, often starring young characters whose bravado is matched by their tenderness. In ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’, a young man's video game experience turns into a surreal exploration on his own father's memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, ‘Return to Sender’ follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the US and care for their fellow Afghans, even when their own son disappears. A college student in the US in ‘Hungry Ricky Daddy’ starves himself in protest of Israeli violence against Palestine. And in the title story, ‘The Haunting of Hajji Hotak’, we learn the story of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker, who becomes entrenched in the immigrant family's life. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement — and one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today. [Paperback]
”An endlessly inventive and moving collection from a thrilling and capacious young talent.” —Jess Walter

The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created The Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie $28
The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By 1928, its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from astronomers to murderers, naturists, pornographers, suffragists and queer couples. Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people's history of the OED. Here, she reveals the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world. [Paperback]

Free and Equal: What would a fair society look like? by Daniel Chandler $30
Imagine: you are designing a society, but you don't know who you'll be within it — rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like? This is the revolutionary thought experiment proposed by the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. As economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler argues in this hugely ambitious and exhilarating intervention, it is by rediscovering Rawls that we can find a way out of the escalating crises that are devastating our world today. Taking Rawls's humane and egalitarian liberalism as his starting point, Chandler builds a careful and ultimately irresistible case for a progressive agenda that would fundamentally reshape our societies for the better. He shows how we can protect free speech and transcend the culture wars; get money out of politics; and create an economy where everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential, where prosperity is widely shared, and which operates within the limits of our finite planet. This is a book brimming with hope and possibility — a galvanising alternative to the cynicism that pervades our politics. [Paperback]
”A brilliantly eloquent, incredibly insightful reimagining of liberalism.” —Owen Jones
”Inspiring. Impassioned. Full of hope.” —Zadie Smith
”This is a fantastic book.” —Thomas Piketty

World Without End by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain $65
an eminent climate expert takes a graphic novelist on a journey to understand the profound changes that our planet is experiencing. The scientist, Jean-Marc Jancovici, explains the workings of superpowers and history; oil and climate; ecology, economics and energy flows. He describes, in short, the world we live in today — a world whose future is deeply uncertain. The artist, Christophe Blain, intently listens and draws. As the pair come face to face with global warming, they — along with Mother Nature, Pop Eye and Jiminy Cricket, among others — create a picture of what the solution to our predicament actually looks like. It's not just about switching to renewable energy sources, they show. It's about rethinking everything: our energy supply, our economies, and our whole world. We're left with a vision of the future in which food, education, housing, transport and communities — in other words, all of us — work together and, with a few technological fixes, succeed in creating a world without end. [Large-format hardback]

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Portrait Activity Book by Kathryn Box and James Lambert $22
An engaging and insightful introduction to portraits in art, this fun-packed children's book includes activities inspired by fourteen modern and contemporary artworks. Experiment with abstract portraiture like Pablo Picasso, design your own mask with the Guerrilla Girls, and try your hand at creating a word-only portrait inspired by Lorna Simpson! With fascinating facts about each artist's life and work throughout, this book is guaranteed to encourage a deeper understanding of art styles, techniques, and ideas, and introduce young readers to artworks in a variety of media, including photography, mixed media, sculpture, conceptual art, installation art and painting. [Large-format paperback]

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What the Wild Sea Can Be: The future of the world’s ocean by Helen Scales $37
Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomise today's increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations — critical to balanced ecosystems — have shrunk by 71 per cent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas — the apex predators — have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed. Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Amazing seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests rivaling those on land are being regenerated and expanded. They may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing. Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean. [Paperback]

Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang $38
Ash has always felt alone. Adults ignore the climate crisis. Other kids Ash's age are more interested in pop stars and popularity contests than in fighting for change. Even Ash's family seems to be sleepwalking through life. The only person who ever seemed to get Ash was their Grandpa Edwin. Before he died, he used to talk about building a secret cabin, deep in the California wilderness. Did he ever build it? What if it's still there, waiting for him to come back...or for Ash to find it?  To Ash, that maybe-mythical cabin is starting to feel like the perfect place for a fresh start and an escape from the miserable feeling of alienation that haunts their daily life. But making the wilds your home isn't easy. And as much as Ash wants to be alone...can they really be happy alone? Can they survive alone? A superb graphic novel from New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator Jen Wang — a singularly affecting story about self-discovery, self-reliance, and the choice to live when it feels like you have no place in the world.

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Slow Down: How degrowth communism can save the Earth Kohei Saito $40
The very logic of the capitalist system pits it against Earth's life support systems, and any ‘growth’ a system generates comes at an intolerable cost to our future. Drawing on cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines, Saito suggests that nothing but a transformation of our economic life can save us from climate collapse. Karl Marx himself reached this breakthrough at the end of his life, long before climate change had even begun. What few people realise is that it radically altered his vision of proletarian revolution. Now that we are entering our own end-game, we must grasp Marx's final lesson before it is too late. If we are to avoid the three terrible prospects of climate fascism, climate Maoism or mere anarchy, the future must belong to degrowth communism, a fair and humane existence within the limits of nature. There is no alternative: the endless acceleration of capital has run out of road. [Paperback]
”Slow Down has an almost magic ability to formulate complex thoughts in clear language, as well as to combine strict conceptual thinking with passionate personal engagement. What this means is that Saito's book is not just for anyone interested in ecology or in the problems of today's global capitalism, it is simply indispensable for those of us who want to SURVIVE in short, to all of us.” —Slavoj Zizek
”Philosopher Kohei Saito calls us to reject the logic of economic growth and embrace a different kind of plenty. The key insight, or provocation, of Slow Down is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. In place of a command economy, Saito puts forth a model based on local experimentation.” —The New Yorker

Oil (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Michael Tondre $23
Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the road, the euphoria of flight, and the metamorphic allure of everything from vinyl records to celluloid film and synthetic clothing. Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power. How did oil come to structure selfhood and social relations? And to what extent is oil not only a commercial product but a cultural one--something shaped by widely imagined dreams and desires? Amid a warming world unleashed by fossil fuels, oil appears as a rich resource for thinking about histories of globalization and technology no less than the energetic underpinnings of literature, film, and art. [Paperback]

• Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

The New Classics: The Broadsheet Melbourne Cookbook, Recipes from the city’s best restaurants, cafes, and bars $60
Recipes from 80 of the city's most-ordered breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes, as selected by Broadsheet. Featured venues include Soi 38, Tedesca Osteria, Hope Street Radio, Manzé, Embla, Enter Via Laundry, France-Soir, Gimlet, Grill Americano, Nomad, Reine, Stokehouse, Florian, A1 Bakery, Pidapipó, Tarts Anon, and dozens more.

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The Serviceberry: An economy of gifts and abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer $38
As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition and the hoarding of resources and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry's relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness and gratitude.  The tree distributes its wealth — its abundance of sweet, juicy berries — to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, "Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency." [Hardback]

New books for a new year! Start as you mean to go on.
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The Pets We Have Killed by Barbara Else $35
In 1959 a schoolgirl is caught in the rivalry between two male teachers. In 1982 a New Zealander in her thirties is introduced to a snake in San Diego. In 2075 a government official drafts a summary of the first stage in NZ’s new-style elections. These eighteen stories mark Barbara Else’s return to fiction for adults. They are notable for their range in genre and tone, from realism to science fiction and fantasy, from subversive humour and sharp satire to thoughtful and humane contemplation of the human condition. Many are about romantic relationships — fresh and new, would-be, or long gone. All the stories demonstrate how the problems women face change little as time passes.

Granta 168: Significant Other edited by Thomas Meaney $37
Granta's summer issue is devoted to fictions of the 'other'. ‘Significant other' calls up the anodyne invitation from a host who wishes to strip away presumption. But we insist it is a fertile concept. Some significant others we know for much of our lives; others are meteoric: we may see them only once. Fiction includes J.M. Coetzee's story, 'The Museum Guard’, Victor Heringer's 'Lígia’ , and ‘Armance’ by Fleur Jaeggy. Introducing new fiction from Sophie Collins, Kevin Brazil, and Alexandra Tanner. Non-fiction features Mary Gaitskill's 'The Pneuma Method', James Pogue on the mines of Mauritania, and Susan Pedersen on paranormal love in the Balfour family. Christian Lorentzen appraises Daniel Sinykin's Big Fiction. Snigdah Poonam follows a teenager who makes a pilgrimage to Ayodhya, where the BJP's Hindu nationalists have built their dream temple of Ram. Poetry by Najwan Darwish, Zoë Hitzig, Tamara Nassar and Bernadette Van-Huy. Photography by Rosalind Fox Solomon (introduced by Lynne Tillman), Jesse Glazzard (introduced by Anthony Vahni Capildeo) and Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (introduced by John-Baptiste Oduor). Cover art by Simon Casson.

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Bothy: In search of simple shelter by Kat Hill $45
Leading us on a gorgeous and erudite journey around the UK, Kat Hill 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, Hill 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, Hill 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. [Hardback]
”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

• The merry fellowship of bothies.

Hiroshima: The last witnesses by M.G. Sheftall $40
The stories of hibakusha - Japanese for atomic bomb survivors — lie at the heart of this compelling minute-by-minute account of 6 August 1945 — the day the world changed forever as the Enola Gay dropped its terrible payload over Hiroshima. These survivors and witnesses, now with an average age of over 90, are the last people alive who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in Hiroshima before the bombings. In this heart-stopping account they relay what they experienced on the day the city was obliterated, and what it has been like to live with those memories and scars over the rest of their lives. M. G. Sheftall has spent years personally interviewing survivors who were just adolescents at the time but have lived well into their nineties, allowing him to construct portraits of what Hiroshima was like before the bomb, and how catastrophically its citizens' lives changed in the seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years afterwards. Fluent in spoken and written Japanese, his deep immersion in Japanese society has given him unprecedented access to the hibakusha in their waning years. Their trust in him is evident in the personal and traumatic depths they open up for him as he records their stories. [Paperback]
”M.G. Sheftall's Hiroshima presents as a master class in eyewitness storytelling. As poignant as it is powerful, this gripping narrative chronicles one of history's darkest nightmare moments-the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945-and the memories of its surviving eyewitnesses. As the events fade from living memory, Hiroshima is at once a brilliant tribute and a cautionary tale. “ —Annie Jacobsen

Fear: An alternative history of the world by Robert Peckham $33
Fear has long been a driving force — perhaps the driving force — of world history: a coercive tool of power and a catalyst for radical change. Here, Robert Peckham traces its transformative role over a millennium, from fears of famine and war to anxieties over God, disease, technology and financial crises. In a landmark global history that ranges from the Black Death to the terror of the French Revolution, the AIDS pandemic to climate change, Peckham reveals how fear made us who we are, and how understanding it can equip us to face the future. [Paperback]
”Brilliant and breathtakingly wide-ranging. As Peckham shows in gripping and beautifully written detail, fear isn't just the stock in trade of wicked despots; in some circumstances it can be turned to positive effect. Could it, now, be that fear is our friend? Read Peckham and judge for yourself.” —Simon Schama

The Lantern of Lost Memories by Sanaka Hiirage $25
In Mr Hirasaka's cosy photography studio in the mountains between this world and the next, someone is waking up as if from a dream. There is a stack of photos on their lap, one for every day of their life, and now they must choose the pictures that capture their most treasured memories, which will be placed in a beautiful lantern. Once completed, it will be set spinning, and their cherished moments will flash before their eyes, guiding them to another world. But, like our most thumbed-over photographs, our favourite memories fade with age. So each visitor to the studio has the chance to choose one day to return to and photograph afresh. Each has a treasured story to tell, from the old woman rebuilding a community in Tokyo after a disaster, to the flawed Yakuza man who remembers a time when he was kind, and a strong child who is fighting to survive. [Paperback]

Her Secret Service: The forgotten women of British intelligence by Claire Hubbard-Hall $40
Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence, yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life. From encoding orders and decrypting enemy messages to penning propaganda and infiltrating organisations, the women of British intelligence played a pivotal role in both the First and Second World Wars. Prepare to meet the true custodians of Britain's military secrets, from Kathleen Pettigrew, personal assistant to the Chief of MI6 Stewart Menzies, who late in life declared 'I was Miss Moneypenny, but with more power', to Jane Archer, the very first female MI5 officer who raised suspicions about the Soviet spy Kim Philby long before he was officially unmasked, and Winifred Spink, the first female officer ever sent to Russia in 1916. Hubbard-Hall rescues these silenced voices and those of many other fascinating women from obscurity to provide a definitive account of women's contributions to the history of the intelligence services.

The First Friend by Malcolm Knox $38
Even the worst person has a best friend. A chilling black comedy, The First Friend imagines a gangster mob in charge of a global superpower. The Soviet Union 1938: Lavrentiy Beria, 'The Boss' of the Georgian republic, nervously prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from 'The Boss of Bosses', his fellow Georgian Josef Stalin. Under escalating pressure from enemies and allies alike, Beria slowly but surely descends into murderous paranoia. By his side is Vasil Murtov, Beria's closest friend since childhood. But to be a witness is dangerous; Murtov must protect his family and play his own game of survival while remaining outwardly loyal to an increasingly unstable Beria. The tension ramps up as Stalin's visit and the inevitable bloodbath approaches. Is Murtov playing Beria, or is he being played? The First Friend is a novel in a time of autocrats, where reality is a fiction created by those who rule. It is at once a satire and a thriller, a survivor's tale in which a father has to walk a tightrope every day to save his family from a monster and a monstrous society. Where safety lies in following official fictions, is a truthful life the ultimate risk?
”Crackling with energy, irony, wit and terror, The First Friend is a timely and cautionary reminder of the stifling, murderous logic of strong man politics.” —Tim Winton
“Razor-sharp, wildly imaginative, bold, brilliant and often as dark as the inside of a coffin. Another triumph from a truly extraordinary writer.” —Trent Dalton
“The First Friend is not just a cracking read, it's a masterclass in Machiavellian manoeuvres. This is a magnificent piece of gallows humour, bitingly funny and horrifyingly grim at the same time.” —Kate McClymont
”Bleak, intelligent and fearsomely well-researched — I kept telling myself I shouldn't laugh, but couldn't help it.” —Michael Robotham

War of the Worlds, A graphic novel by H.G. Wells and Chris Mould $45
In 1894, across space, this earth was being watched by envious eyes, and plans were being drawn up for an attack. What seems to be a meteorite falls to earth, but from the debris, unfolds terrifying alien life. A young man called Leon records his observations and sketches. “Those who have never seen Martian life can scarcely imagine the horror,” he tells us. “Even at this first glimpse, I was overcome with fear and dread. The earth stood still as we watched, almost unable to move.” As war descends, Leon and his scientist wife race against the clock to discover the science behind these Martians in the hopes of ending this war of all worlds. [Hardback]
”The exquisite, detailed illustrations convey as much emotion as do words in this remarkable re-imagining of War of the Worlds.” —Susan Price
”An absolute masterpiece.” —Kieran Larwood

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A bit on the Side: Reflections on what makes life delicious by Virginia Trioli $40
Virginia Trioli knows that enduring joy is often found not in the big moments but in the small. And as a dedicated, almost obsessive, foodie, she believes that food gives us the perfect metaphor for how to seek, recognise and devour the real flavour of life. When the main course is heavy going or unappetising, the 'bits on the side' make life really delicious. The sweet and the sour; the salty, the bitter - our small, meaningful selections are the ones that make life glorious. A Bit on the Side is an ode to joy, filled with wisdom, stories, memories and recipes. [Hardback]
”A warmly engaging epicurean masterclass on the pleasures of companionship and the table.” —Christos Tsiolkas

• Life’s little side dishes.

When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: A diary of Ramallah under siege by Raja Shehadeh $25
The Israeli army invaded Palestine in April 2002 and held many of the principal towns, including Ramallah, under siege. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; there were Israeli soldiers on the rooftops; his mother was sick, and he couldn't cross town to help her. Shehadeh kept a diary. This is an account of what it is like to be under siege: the terror, the frustrations, as well as the moments of poignant relief and reflection on the crisis gripping both Palestine and Israel. [New paperback edition]
”In his moral clarity and baring of the heart, his self-questioning and insistence on focusing on the experience of the individual within the storms of nationalist myth and hubris, Shehadeh recalls writers such as Ghassan Kanafani and Primo Levi.” —New York Times
”A buoy in a sea of bleakness.” —Rachel Kushner

Scandinavian Design by Charlotte and Peter Fiell $55
Scandinavia is world famous for its inimitable, democratic designs which bridge the gap between craftsmanship and industrial production, organic forms and everyday functionality. This all-you-need guide includes a detailed look at Scandinavian furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, jewelry, metalware, and product design from 1900 to the present day, with in-depth entries on 125 designers and design-led companies. Featured designers and designer-led companies include Verner Panton, Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto, Timo Sarpaneva, Hans Wegner, Tapio Wirkkala, Stig Lindberg, Finn Juhl, Märta Måås-Fjetterström, Arnold Madsen, Barbro Nilsson, Fritz Hansen, Artek, Le Klint, Gustavsberg, Iittala, Fiskars, Orrefors, Royal Copenhagen, Holmegaard, Arabia, Marimekko, and Georg Jensen. [New hardback edition]

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Songlight by Moira Buffini $33
They are hunting those who shine. Don't be deceived by Northaven's prettiness, by its white-wash houses and its sea views. In truth, many of its townsfolk are ruthless hunters. They revile those who have developed songlight, the ability to connect telepathically with others. Anyone found with this sixth sense is caught, persecuted and denounced. Welcome to the future. Lark has lived in grave danger ever since her own songlight emerged. Then she encounters a young woman in peril, from a city far away. An extraordinary bond is forged. But who can they trust? The world is at war. Those with songlight are pawns in a dangerous game of politics. Friends, neighbours, family are quick to turn on each other. When power is everything, how will they survive? An impressive start to a new YA series. [Paperback]

New books for a new year! Start as you mean to go on.
These books have just arrived — we can have your copies ready to collect from our door or dispatched by overnight courier.

The Sleepers by Sophie Calle (translated from French by Emma Ramadan) $110
In one of Sophie Calle's first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player and three painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, she subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: a curiosity, a game, an artwork, or — as Calle intended it — a job. The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and short texts. Unlike the original installation, this artist's book version of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novellalike narrative, untranslated until now. From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle reports in text and photos, as if in real time, as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat and leave. Their acute and sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities merge into something almost like an eight-day-long dream. Many seeds of Calle's subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her unrelenting curiosity. In this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too — with reciprocal candour. [Clothbound]

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• The art of watching and the art of being watched.

• Fourth sleeper.

Rosarita by Anita Desai $30
A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss. And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn't paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.
”It's been over a decade since Anita Desai's last work of fiction. She's a writer I've loved since my adolescence, whose sharp observations and elegant sentences I admire increasingly as the years go on. Every new work from her is a gift.” —Kamila Shamsie
”To compare Anita Desai's fiction with that of Chekhov or the short stories of Tolstoy is not extravagant; it is entirely warranted.” —Irish Times
”Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture.” —Alison Lurie

Maranga! Maranga! Maranga! The Call to Māori History: Essays From Te Pouhere Kōrero, 1999—2023 edited by Aroha Harris and Melissa Matutina Williams $50
Leading Māori scholars, researchers and writers of history come together in this landmark collection of essays celebrating three decades of Indigenous scholarship. Examining histories that span from moko kauae and reo Māori to the myth of Māori privilege, these essays explore subjects that include the teaching of iwi history, the role of memory and storytelling, and the integration of mātauranga within historical scholarship. Wide-ranging in both form and scope, Maranga! Maranga! Maranga! presents transformative approaches to history and makes a significant contribution to our contemporary understanding of Aotearoa’s past.
Contributors: Alice Te Punga Somerville, Arini Loader, Aroha Harris (editor), Basil Keane, Danny Keenan, Hirini Kaa, Kealani Cook, Megan Pōtiki, Melissa Matutina Williams (editor), Nēpia Mahuika, Pareputiputi Nuku, Peter Meihana, Rachel Buchanan, Rawinia Higgins, Rawiri Te Maire Tau, Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, Tiopira McDowell.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zi (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $48
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman — who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name — is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko's travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the ‘something’ is. 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. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
Winner of the US 2024 National Book Award for Fiction in Translation.
”Reading the book is like peeling an onion: the smell is at first undetectable; but with each layer you peel, the smell gets more intoxicating, pungent, intense, and at the very end, it brings tears to your eyes." —Christina Ng

• Why this Taiwanese book is masquerading as a rediscovered Japanese novel.

Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel, and one family’s story of home by Fida Jiryis $40
After the 1993 Oslo Accords, a handful of Palestinians were allowed to return to their hometowns in Israel. Fida Jiryis and her family were among them. This beautifully written memoir tells the story of their journey, which is also the story of Palestine, from the Nakba to the present-a seventy-five-year tale of conflict, exodus, occupation, return and search for belonging, seen through the eyes of one writer and her family. Jiryis reveals how her father, Sabri, a PLO leader and advisor to Yasser Arafat, chose exile in 1970 because of his work. Her own childhood in Beirut was shaped by regional tensions, the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Israeli invasion, which led to her mother's death. Thirteen years later, the family made an unexpected return to Fassouta, their village of origin in the Galilee. But Fida, twenty-two years old and full of love for her country, had no idea what she was getting into. Stranger in My Own Land chronicles a desperate, at times surreal, search for a homeland between the Galilee, the West Bank and the diaspora, asking difficult questions about what the right of return would mean for the millions of Palestinians waiting to come 'home'.
”Fida Jiryis's story, which at times reads like a thriller, has a unique trajectory which she negotiates with intelligence and eloquence, simultaneously illuminating profound and painful subjects about home and belonging.” —Raja Shehadeh

• No place like home.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller $38
December 1962, the West Country. In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering. There is affection — if not always love — in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards — a true winter, the harshest in living memory — the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can't leave home? And where, in a frozen world, could you run to?
”Andrew Miller is known for acute and unnerving historical novels such as Pure and Ingenious Pain, but in The Land in Winter, a study of two young marriages during England's 1962-3 Big Freeze, he may have written his best book yet. The shadows of madness, and of the second world war, extend into a world on the cusp of enormous social change. Miller conjures his characters and their times with a subtle brilliance that is not to be missed.” —Guardian

Reinventing Love: How the Patriarchy sabotages heterosexual relations by Mona Chollet $53
As feminist principles have taken wider hold in society, and basic ideas about equality for women can seem a given, many women still struggle in one of the most important areas of life: love. Whether it's finding a partner, seeking a commitment from one, or struggling in a relationship that is unfulfilling or even potentially abusive, women still find that deeply-engrained notions of gender and behavior can be obstacles to a healthy, loving relationship. In her new book, acclaimed French feminist Mona Chollet tackles some of these long-held and pervasive ideas that remain stumbling blocks for many women in heterosexual relationships. Drawing from popular culture, politics, and literature, Reinventing Love provides a provocative, accessible look at how heterosexual relationships can improve and evolve under a feminist lens. [Hardback]
"In this invigorating study Chollet makes a bold case that love itself is warped by patriarchy and in need of correction. Chollet's prose is both easygoing and erudite, maintaining an effortless flow as she seamlessly folds new thinkers and examples (from bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir to Sally Rooney and Princess Leia) into her ever-expanding analysis. It's a must-read." —Publishers Weekly

• Navigating romance.

Leaving the Twentieth Century: Situationist Revolutions by McKenzie Wark $47
The Situationist International, who came to the fore during the Paris tumults of 1968, were revolutionary thinkers who continue to influence movements and philosophy into the 21st century.  Mostly known for Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as well as other key texts, the group was in fact hugely diverse and radical. In Leaving The 20th Century McKenzie Wark explores the full range of the movement.  At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets,  Wark traces the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement — including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong — Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.  She also follows the narrative beyond 1968 to show what happened after the movement disintegration exploring the lives and ideas of T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet's earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti's pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho's account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord's late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

Understanding Brecht by Walter Benjamin $30
The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the 'midnight of the century', with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht's oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques such as the famous 'estrangement effect' Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin's introductions to Brecht's theory of epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin's insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamin's essay 'The Author as Producer' as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht's place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of the twentieth century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war.

• No idlers in the Garden of Chess.

Eileen: The making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp $33
In 1934, Eileen O'Shaughnessy’s futuristic poem, ‘End of the Century, 1984’, was published. The next year, she would meet George Orwell, then known as Eric Blair, at a party. ‘Now that is the kind of girl I would like to marry!’ he remarked that night. Years later, Orwell would name his greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in homage to the memory of Eileen, the woman who shaped his life and his art in ways that have never been acknowledged by history, until now. From the time they spent in a tiny village tending goats and chickens, through the Spanish Civil War, to the couple’s narrow escape from the destruction of their London flat during a German bombing raid, and their adoption of a baby boy, Eileen is the first account of the Blairs’ nine-year marriage. It is also a vivid picture of bohemianism, political engagement, and sexual freedom in the 1930s and ‘40s. Through impressive depth of research, illustrated throughout with photos and images from the time, this captivating and inspiring biography offers a completely new perspective on Orwell himself, and most importantly tells the life story of an exceptional woman who has been unjustly overlooked.

• See also Anna Funder’s Wifedom.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany $25
Babel-17 is a language that can be used as a weapon by enemy invaders during an interstellar war. Chinese starship captain, linguist, poet, and telepath Rydra Wong begins to learn the language. After several attacks have been made by the invaders who speak Babel-17, she soon realizes the potential of the language to change one's thought process and provide speakers with certain powers, and she is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy is infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. As her understanding of the language increases, she is able to predict where the next attack will be and gathers a team to go to the predicted location of the attack. Initially Babel-17 is thought to be a code used by enemy agents. Rydra realizes it is a language in and of itself. During their mission, Rydra realizes there is a traitor aboard the ship. After escaping the predicted attack, Rydra and her crew are captured by a pirate ship called a shadow-ship. While on the ship, Rydra meets a man called "The Butcher" who does not use the word "I". After teaching The Butcher the word "I," Rydra, The Butcher, and her crew leave the ship during a battle. Rydra and The Butcher, who already unknowingly spoke Babel-17, are rescued but seem incredibly altered. While their bodies are present, their minds seem elsewhere. Their ability to speak Babel-17 has altered their minds and we learn that it was Rydra who was the traitor on board the ship. Babel-17 is discovered to be a language that not only helps you understand the enemy, but become the enemy. The novel deals with several issues related to the peculiarities of language, how conditions of life shape the formation of words and meaning, and how words themselves can shape the actions of people.

• A primer on linguistic relativity.

The Outsider by Albert Camus and Ryota Kurumado $40
A manga version of Camus’ existentialist classic. When his mother dies, Mersault refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal.

• Look inside.

Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the curious world of plants by James T. Costa and Bobbi Angell $65
Charles Darwin is best known for his work on the evolution of animals, but in fact a large part of his contribution to the natural sciences is focused on plants. His observations are crucial to our modern understanding of everything from the amazing pollination process of orchids to the way that vines climb. Darwin and the Art of Botany collects writings from six often overlooked texts devoted entirely to plants, and pairs each excerpt with beautiful botanical art from the library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. [Hardback]

• Look inside.

The Bridge Between Worlds: A brief history of connection by Gavin Francis $45
In The Bridge Between Worlds, Gavin Francis explores bridges old and new, human-made or natural, musing on the view from the bridge through history, geopolitics, psychology and literature. Against the ever-growing obsession with national borders in politics and the media, bridges — whether seen as functional, emblematic or aesthetical — both unite and divide us. From Ponte Sant'Angelo to Brooklyn Bridge, from Victoria Falls Bridge to Tavanasa Bridge, The Bridge Between Worlds reflects on the bridges between nations and individuals, how they act as frontiers and reflects on the lives of people either side of the border. [Hardback]
”Gavin Francis has written an exquisite book on a human structure we usually take for granted. This is a fascinating and delightful read.” —Alexander McCall Smith"
”It's rare and interesting to see bridges explored both as metaphors and as structures. The Bridge Between Worlds is a valuable reminder that the physical environment we build has immense social and cultural consequences.” —Sarah Moss

Yours from the Tower by Sally Nicholls $23
Three very different young women make their way through late Victorian England — can they each find true happiness? Tirzah, Sophia and Polly are best friends who’ve left boarding school and gone back to very different lives. Polly is teaching in an orphanage. Sophia is looking for a rich husband at the London Season. And Tirzah is stuck acting as an unpaid companion to her grandmother. In a series of letters, they share their hopes, their frustrations, their dramas, and their romances. Can these three very different young women find happiness?
"Building on her previous historical fiction exploring the restrictions on women in society, the award-winning, always-excellent Sally Nicholls moves to the late Victorian era. This immersive, uplifting book is an absolute delight" —Irish Times
"The novel is heart-warming, intelligent and exciting, and thoroughly recommended for girls (and boys) hovering on the cusp of adolescence. I loved it." —Philip Womack

Freedom: Memoirs, 1954—2021 by Angela Merkel $55
For sixteen years, Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany. She led the country through numerous crises, shaping both Germany and international politics with her actions and attitudes. In her memoirs, co-written with her long-time political advisor Beate Baumann, she reflects on her life in two German states — thirty-five years in the German Democratic Republic, thirty-five years in reunited Germany. More intimately than ever before, she talks about her childhood, youth, and studies in the GDR and the dramatic year of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and her political life began. She also shares recollections and insights from her meetings and conversations with the world's most powerful people. Discussing significant national, European, and international turning points, she shows how the decisions were made that shaped our times. The book offers a unique insight into the inner workings of power.

An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals by Polly Toynbee $30
While for generations Polly Toynbee's ancestors have been committed left-wing rabble-rousers railing against injustice, they could never claim to be working class, settling instead for the prosperous life of academia or journalism enjoyed by their own forebears. So where does that leave their ideals of class equality? Through a colourful, entertaining examination of her own family — which in addition to her writer father Philip and her historian grandfather Arnold contains everyone from the Glenconners to Jessica Mitford to Bertrand Russell, and features ancestral home Castle Howard as a backdrop — Toynbee explores the myth of mobility, the guilt of privilege, and asks for a truly honest conversation about class in Britain.[Now in paperback]
”Fascinating. Toynbee has spent a lifetime highlighting the need for social change, and her book fizzes with that continuing purpose.” —Spectator

The Passenger: South Korea $40
Eighty years ago, at the end of a devastating fratricidal war, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, completely dependent on the United States for security and development. Today it's the tenth economy in the world, dynamic and innovative, a lively participatory democracy that nevertheless simultaneously shows both its vulnerability and its strength (as recent news has demonstrated). "Hallyu" — the Korean wave of contemporary entertainment — has reached every corner of the world. This rapid, astonishing transformation inevitably brought with it rifts and contradictions. If global youth look at Korea as previous generations looked at Hollywood and New York, young Koreans, on the other hand, view it as "Hell Joseon": an aging country, an economic system dominated by powerful families, with a fiercely competitive education system, a wide generational gap, and, at the centre of it all, the role of women — one of the keys that The Passenger has chosen to decipher a complex, fascinating country, central to the dynamics of the contemporary world, het little understood. The Passenger’s mix of articles, reportage and photography give insight and background to contemporary issues.

• Look inside.

• Other places visited by The Passenger.

Get ready for the reading season! We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

What Kingdom by Fine Gråbøl (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken) $42
Fine Gråbøl’s narrator dreams of furniture flickering to life. A chair that greets you, shiny tiles that follow a peculiar grammar, or a bookshelf that can be thrown on like an apron. Obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives, the nameless narrator lives in a temporary psychiatric care unit for young people in Copenhagen. This is a place where you ‘wake up and realise that what’s going to happen has no name’, and days are spent practicing routines that take on the urgency of survival — peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice, listening through thin walls. In prose that demands that you slow down, expertly translated by Martin Aitken, What Kingdom charts a wisdom of its own.
”Gråbøl’s eye is unsparing and convincing, her prose vivid and alive. The narrator doesn’t deny that she needs help, but at the same time, she has questions: Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment?... about the relationship between compulsion and compliance?... care and abuse?... between surrender and obliteration?”   —Kirkus
”It has been a privilege to read this extraordinary work. The unnamed narrator’s absolute vulnerability is transformed into compelling beauty by the authority and precision of her language. I love the pace of the writing. How, after a passage in which the raw pain and hurt break through into anger, a sentence of clear transcendent poetry can follow. The perfect emotional control is astonishing. It is a very exposing, brave book. It lays open the narrator’s frustration at her inability to be heard, to be considered, within the cold strictures of the institution where she passes her days: ‘the basis of our lives is powerlessness plus capitulation.’ I was riveted by the attention to detail – it demands our attention, in return; the objective way the narrator perceives the confined world she lives in, without a trace of self-pity, compels us to know she is speaking the truth. There is an urgent need for the system to be changed, for an individual to be listened to, not just dealt with. This book makes us listen.   —Celia Paul
”In this striking novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines — ‘benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles’ — and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction. Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain.” —The New Yorker

• United in torment.

The White Flower by Charlotte Beeston $40
In contemporary and Edwardian London, two women are grieving the loss of a loved one. Stella, turning thirty, is increasingly isolated after her mother died of cancer; Julia, surrounded by friends, is longing for solitude as she mourns her daughter, a young photographer who died after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka. Mysteriously connected across time and space by a haunting image, each explores, in her own voice, the complexities of the mother-daughter bond and family estrangement. From the banks of the Thames in present-day south-east London to the coast of East Devon and the Sri Lankan rainforest a hundred years earlier, Charlotte Beeston's delicate debut novel moves with aching lucidity between tenderness and raw emotion. Charting the ebb and flow of the grieving process, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the psyche and the permanence of love, art and friendship.
”Sensitively and tenderly written, The White Flower performs the mother-daughter bond as a loving tug-of-war between present and past, forgetting and remembering, loss and joyful reparation.” —Michèle Roberts
”Charlotte Beeston's gorgeous debut novel, The White Flower, is a wonderfully intelligent and sensitively handled portrait of grief, how it leaves us obsessively circling the same moments, scenes and images. Literary in the best sense (language matters) the novel is full of incidental pleasures and deserves to be widely read.” —Andrew Miller

• Beauty out of grief.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti (translated from German by Peter Filkins) $30
In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that “by definition, he could never live to complete”, as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death — published in English for the first time — interposed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate who dies in 1994 is a reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicisation, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one's own death, while considering death as a force exerting itself upon culture and fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power.
”Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti's great strength. He is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words. His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.” —Susan Sontag

• Those who end life and those whose lives end.

• A metaphysical mistake.

Bound: A memoir of making and remaking by Maddie Ballard, illustrated by Emma Dai'an Wright $34
In a new home, relationships shift, and ties fray. Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking is a collection of essays about sewing and knowing who you are. Each chapter in this sewist's diary charts the crafting of a different garment. From a lining embroidered with the Cantonese names of her female ancestors to a dressing gown holding the body of a beloved friend, Maddie Ballard navigates love, personal connections, and self-care, drafting her own patterns for ways of living.
“I cut more carefully than usual, bothering to iron first, and lay the fabric out on the flat tiles of the bathroom rather than just the carpet. I trace the pattern off my own shop-bought dressing gown, then add a back pleat so it will float behind her and shorten the sleeves a little so they won’t trail when she’s making her coffee. I cut tiny rectangles of fabric to make belt loops and a loop for hanging. I cut vast pockets, for holding snacks and notebooks and her phone when she needs to flip the pancakes. I remember all the little details I would skim past if I were making this for myself. I stitch care into every seam.”
Maddie Ballard is a writer and editor of mixed Chinese heritage. Born in Syracuse, New York, she grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and currently lives in Wellington.

The Missing Thread: A new history of the Ancient World through the women who shaped it by Daisy Dunn $40
Spanning 3,000 years, from the birth of Minoan Crete to the death of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Rome, this new history of the ancient world is told through the lives of women. These pages present Enheduanna, the earliest named author; the poet Sappho; and Telesilla, who defended her city from attack. Here is Artemisia, sole female commander in the Graeco-Persian Wars, and Cynisca, the first female victor at the Olympic Games. Cleopatra may be the more famous, but Fulvia, Mark Antony's wife, fought a war on his behalf. Many other women remain nameless but integral. Through new examination of the sources combined with vivid storytelling Daisy Dunn shows us the ancient world through fresh eyes, and introduces us to an incredible cast of ancient women, weavers of an entire world.
”A brilliant concept, executed with enviable elegance.” —Lucy Worsley
”I loved this radical new take on the familiar stories of the ancient world we all think we know but clearly only know the half. Dunn succeeds magnificently not in erasing men but in bringing out of the shadows some extraordinary women and giving them much more than merely reflected glory. The book sparkles with fresh ideas.” —Anne Sebba

Butter by Asako Yuzuki $43
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can't resist writing back. Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night and survives on cheap, convenience store fare, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought? Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, ‘The Konkatsu Killer’, Asako Yuzuki's Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
”An unputdownable, breathtakingly original novel. I will be spoon-feeding Butter to every woman I know.'“ —Erin Kelly
”Exuberant, indulgent romp of a novel. Butter is a full-fat, Michelin-starred treat that moves seamlessly between an Angry Young Woman narrative and an engrossing detective drama and back again. Yuzuki has crafted an almost Dickensian cast of fleshy characters, with just as many surprise connections. Let this book bring you under its spell.” —The Sunday Times

The Enemy Within: The Human cost of state surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Maire Leadbeater $40
Like so many others involved in social justice movements, author Maire Leadbeater was subjected to state surveillance during a long life of activism. With the help of archival material, released SIS files, and other formerly secret material, she has been able to examine the depth of state intrusion into the lives of individuals and movements that challenged the social order. An adverse security record not only harmed those directly affected but also denied the community the valuable contributions of highly talented individuals, many of whose stories feature here. This book explodes the myth that our major intelligence agencies, the SIS and the GCSB, work in our interests. They were set up to work closely with our traditional allies and the ‘Five Eyes’ network. Instead of protecting us from foreign interference, they have compromised our sovereignty and our ability to pursue an independent foreign and defence policy. Tellingly, on the few occasions when New Zealand has experienced terrorist crime, it has been the police working openly and accountably who have taken the key role. The Enemy Within mounts the argument that unaccountable intelligence agencies harm our democracy and should be disbanded, and their work left to the police.

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and independence by Christopher Turner $66
Emerging in the death throes of colonial rule, the story of Tropical Modernism is one of politics and power, decolonisation and defiance.  Its leading proponents, British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, adapted a utopian Bauhaus-derived Modernist aesthetic to hot and humid conditions.  After Independence, Tropical Modernism was championed by leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah as a symbol of freedom, progressiveness and internationalism in monumental projects such as Chandigarh in Punjab planned by Le Corbusier and Black Star Square in Accra designed by Victor Adegbite. Scrutinising the colonial narratives surrounding Tropical Modernism, and foregrounding the experience of African and Indian practitioners, this book reassesses an architectural style which has increasing relevance in today's changing climate.

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The Burrow by Melanie Cheng $38
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
”How rare, this delicacy-this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.” —Helen Garner
”Melanie Cheng's The Burrow is stupendously good. This is a novel that deals with the crucial elements of our lives — love and family and grief and guilt and responsibility — and does so without a whiff of sentimentality and does so fearlessly. As in real life, the characters keep surprising us. The power of The Burrow is in the unflinching yet empathetic command of the novelist, in the candid beauty of the language. It's a remarkable work, nuanced and human and adult.” —Christos Tsiolkas

In a Flight of Starlings: The wonder of complex systems by Giorgio Parisi $30
The world is shaped by complexity. In this enlightening book, Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work to show us how. It all starts with investigating the principles of physics by observing the sophisticated flight patterns of starlings. Studying the movements of these birds, he has realised, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds — collections of everything from atoms to planets to other animals like ourselves. Along the way, Parisi reflects on the lessons he's taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth — the importance of serendipity to the discovery of new ideas, the surprising kinship between physics and other fields of study and the value of science to a thriving society. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and brings it into the real world. Complexity is all around us — from climate to finance to biology, it offers a unique way of finding order in chaos.

The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A true story of science and sacrifice in a city under siege by Simon Parkin $40
In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad and began the longest blockade in recorded history. By the most conservative estimates, the siege would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million people. Most died of starvation. At the centre of the embattled city stood a converted palace that housed the greatest living plant library ever amassed — the world's first seed bank. After attempts to evacuate the collection failed, and as supplies dwindled, the scientists responsible faced a terrible decision: should they distribute the specimens to the starving population, or preserve them in the hope that they held the key to ending global famine? Drawing on previously unseen sources, The Forbidden Garden tells the remarkable and moving story of the botanists who remained at the Plant Institute during the darkest days of the siege, risking their lives in the name of science.

• Risking lives.

National Dish: Around the world in search of food, history, and the meaning of home by Anya von Bremzen $28
Anya von Bremzen sets out to investigate the eternal cliche that 'we are what we eat'. Her journey takes her from Paris to Tokyo, from Seville, Oaxaca and Naples to Istanbul. She probes the decline of France's pot-au-feu in the age of globalisation, the stratospheric rise of ramen, the legend of pizza, the postcolonial paradoxes of Mexico's mole, the community essence of tapas, and the complex legacy of multiculturalism in a meze feast. Finally she returns to her home in Queens, New York, for a bowl of Ukrainian borsch - a dish which has never felt more loaded, or more precious. As each nation's social and political identity is explored, so too is its palate.
 “A fast-paced, entertaining travelogue, peppered with compact history lessons that reveal the surprising ways dishes become iconic.” New York Times
”This voyage into culinary myth-making and identity is essential reading. Its breadth of scope and scholarship is conveyed with such engaging wit. I couldn't love it more.” —Nigella Lawson
”This dazzlingly intelligent examination of how foods become national symbols is so enlightening as well as so much fun to read. Von Bremzen is a superb describer of flavours and textures — but she also understands that food is never just about food.” —Bee Wilson
”For all its dry wit and vivid descriptions of puttanesca and tortillas, this is a serious book - a skilful blend of academic research and lived experience. It's a sparklingly intelligent examination of, and a meditation on, the interplay of cooking and identity.” —Spectator

Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki $28
In this melancholy and delicately written Japanese classic, a student befriends a reclusive elder at a beach resort, who he calls Sensei. As the two grow closer, Sensei remains unwilling to share the inner pain that has consumed his life and the shameful secret behind his monthly pilgrimages to a Tokyo cemetery. But when the student writes to Sensei after his graduation to seek out advice, the past rushes unbidden to the surface, and Sensei at last reveals the tale of romantic betrayal and unresolved guilt that led to his withdrawal from the world. Set at the end of the Meiji era and rife with subtle, psychological insight, Kokoro is one of Japan's bestselling novels of all time and a meditation on the essence of loneliness.
”Sōseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.” —Haruki Murukami
”Kokoro is exactly what you would ask a novel to be. Sōseki manipulates every detail with the same thrilling mastery'' - Spectator

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog $28
Werner Herzog is the undisputed master of extreme cinema — building an opera house in the middle of the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears — he has always been intrigued by the extremes of human experience.  From his early movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of exploring the boundaries of human endurance — what we are capable of in exceptional circumstances and what these situations reveal about who we really are. But these are not just great cinematic themes. During the making of his films, Herzog pushed himself and others to the limits, often putting himself in life-threatening situations. As a child in rural Bavaria, a single loaf of bread had to last his family all week. The hunger and deprivation he experienced during his early years perhaps explain his fascination with the limits of physical endurance. All his life, Herzog would embrace risk and danger, constantly looking for challenges and adventures. Now in paperback.

Thunderhead by Sophie Beer $20
Meet Thunderhead: awkward, music-obsessed and a magnet for bad luck. Their favourite things in life are listening to records and hanging out with their best (and only) friend Moonflower. But Thunderhead has a big secret. And when Moonflower moves schools, they're faced with the reality of surviving the wilderness of high school alone. Make new friends? NOTHANKYOUVERYMUCH. As two big life events approach, Thunderhead posts playlists and heartfelt diary entries as an outlet to try to make sense of their changing world, to try to calm the storm brewing in their brain and to try to find the courage to unfurl their heart. Drawing on Sophie Beer's own experience of hearing loss, this indelible illustrated novel about music, disability, friendship and fandom is immediately engaging and authentic. 
”Thunderhead is my new hero: so smart, funny and true. What a good soul. This beautiful and important story deals with so much and is so heartfelt. An absolute cracker of a story.” —Karen Foxlee

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Unfinished and Far Far Away: The architecture of Irving Smith Architects edited by Aaron Betsky $75

The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites. Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings. 

• The book was runner-up in the international Architecture Book of the Year awards this year.

• Loosely garbed and lightly shod.

Counterfutures 16 edited by Neil Vallelly $25
Māori Marx, Māori Modernism: Hone Tuwhare — Dougal McNeill. A study of Ngāpuhi poet Hone Tuwhare’s body of poetry in the context of his Communist Party activities and reading of Marxist and socialist thought, illustrating how Tuwhare makes audible collective forms of working-class agency and subjectivity. 
The Neck and the Sword — Rashid Khalidi. An interview with the prominent historian of Palestine, who discusses the history of the Palestinian national movement, the importance of understanding the Arab
Revolt of 1936–39, the evolution of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the emergence of Hamas, and Palestine’s complicated relationship with neighbouring Arab regimes.
A Real Piece of Work — Lydia Le Gros. A review of Louise Wallace’s first novel Ash, focusing on motherhood, reproductive labour, and the gender politics of workplaces.
Whakapapa of a Prison Riot: Prison Censorship, Free Speech, and the Fight against Fascism — Emmy Rākete and Ti Lamusse. An analysis of the Waikeria Prison Uprising of 2020–21, focusing on the suppression of prisoners’ free speech, the authors’ censorship at the hands of the Crown, and the need for mass struggle in the face of liberal ‘safetyism’.
At the Edges of Islands — Emma Powell and Emalani Case. A conversational reflection on the legacy of the influential scholar, teacher, poet, and activist Teresia Teaiwa’s thought and practice, exploring Teaiwa’s use of the ‘edge’ as a conceptual device, her insistence on reflective and reflexive thinking, and her understanding of the island as a verb.
Towards a Counter-Nihilistic Politics — Wendy Brown. An interview with the renowned political theorist, who discusses the recent pro-Palestinian encampments at US universities, considers the relationship between her work on nihilism and melancholia, and reflects on her contribution to critical studies of neoliberalism and sovereignty.
The Politics of Infrastructure and Anti-Roads Campaigns in Australasia — Morgan Hamlin. A review of James C. Murphy’s The Making and Unmaking of the East-West Link, which reflects on the planning, and eventual cancellation, of the East-West Link motorway in Melbourne, providing lessons for anti-road campaigners.
China and Its Discontents — Toby Boraman. A review of Ralf Ruckus’s The Communist Road to Capitalism—a study of political, economic, and social transformations in China since 1949. 
Counterfutures is a journal of Left thought and practice, seeking connections with the work of labour, trade union, Māori, Pasifika, global indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, queer, environmental, and other social movements in Aotearoa and internationally – with an especial focus on the Pacific. [Paperback]

Everest by Ashani Lewis $38
A dying woman dedicates her life to Antarctic ice; an All-American star longs for a romance that defies convention — to the detriment of his carefully curated reputation; a woman seeking her exes' opinions on a breast augmentation takes us on a whirlwind tour of the complicated, intertwined lives of urbanites; a singer prepares for her film debut, pushing her humanity to its limits at an unusual acting school; a newlywed couple put their marriage to the ultimate test: Everest. In these twenty-one striking stories, Lewis creates a stark world of fleeting infatuations, violent compulsions, unexpected solace and the sombre ghost of memories. [Paperback]

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates $45
Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories — our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking — expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist — and named for Nubian pharaoh — Coates had never set foot on the African continent until finally he travelled to the coast where the enslaved were transported to a new world. Everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once — a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. In Palestine, he discovers the devastating gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the vivid reality on the ground. He travels the singular landscape and meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians — the old, who remember their dispossession, and the young who dream of revolution. The final essay takes place in the USA — in Columbia, South Carolina, where Coates visits a school district in the process of banning one of his books. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened and her community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalised by the ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020. Written at a dramatic moment in global life, this work eloquently expresses the need to interrogate our myths and liberate our truths. [Paperback]

Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux $65
Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia. Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Includes 70 colour images. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

The Party by Tessa Hadley $32
Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She'd have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn't explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students' party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn's misgivings.  As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives. [Hardback]
”The Party is a coming-of-age story humming with all the tightly packed resonances of a poem. Tessa Hadley is one of our finest chroniclers, and this novella is a glimmering, sensuous addition to her supremely elegant oeuvre.” —Financial Times

The New Sustainable House: Planet-friendly home design by Penny Craswell $80
Designing with the environment in mind is not 'new'. What is new is the increasing number of ways houses can be more sustainably built. With a fresh focus on design ingenuity, new technologies and materials, The New Sustainable House demonstrates that there is more to ecologically motivated construction than solar panels and water tanks. From a mud-brick single-storey box built in the Texas desert to an all-timber Swedish cabin that is completely petrochemical-free, what unites this diverse collection of houses is the shared motivation of the architects and clients to do as little damage as possible to the planet, without compromising on comfort or aesthetics. This compelling survey shows that the environmental impact of every home, no matter the size or location, can be greatly reduced with creative and responsible design. Well illustrated. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

• The list of projects featured in the book includes The Anawhata House by Paul Davidson.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif) $28
The first narrative work of the well-known Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is an autobiographical memoir about the ironies of homecoming. The bridge that Barghouti crosses as a young man leaving his country in 1966 to pursue university studies in Cairo is the same bridge that he uses to cross back in 1996 after thirty long years in the Diaspora. I Saw Ramallah is about home and homelessness. The harrowing experience of a Palestinian, denied the most elementary human rights in his occupied country and in exile alike, is transformed into a humanist work. Palestine has been appropriated, dispossessed, renamed, changed beyond recognition by the usurpers, yet from the heap of broken images and shattered homes, Barghouti repossesses his homeland. [Paperback]
”As powerful, moving and vital as it was twenty years ago.” —Andrew McMillan
”Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile.” —Independent

• Other books giving insight into Palestine/Israel.

Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj $38
With humour and poignancy, Behind You Is the Sea delves into the intimate lives of three primary Palestinian immigrant families in America — the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars — whose destinies and struggles electrify the community dynamics, occasionally sparking tension and turmoil. Through shifting perspectives, it intricately weaves a rich social tapestry filled with weddings, funerals, shattered hearts, and closely-guarded secrets. This captivating narrative amplifies the voices of a diverse Palestinian community, capturing the struggles of young activists pushing against tradition and the marginalised labouring for survival. Lives intersect across class, generation, and religion, painting a vivid portrait of resilience and complexity. [Hardback]
”We desperately need more books like this in which Palestinian people are presented as beautiful, richly complex human beings, not consigned to insulting, diminishing references. Gratitude to Susan Muaddi Darraj for her very necessary, beautiful work.” —Naomi Shihab Nye

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $28
”In the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, man struggles to achieve infinity only to find madness as his consolation prize. In A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, the pretty grandson of a prince seeks a mythical garden that haunts his every waking moment. His search leads him through a labyrinthine and seemingly abandoned monastery, whose astonishing beauty and inevitable decay the author painstakingly details. His work details a deeply deterministic worldview, in which suffering and sublimity are equally arbitrary conditions of existence. His prodigious sentences (translated from the Hungarian by faithful collaborator Ottilie Mulzet) are burdened with an accumulation of constitutive detail; they fold in, double back, and refract upon themselves, ever more quickly accelerating our attentions toward the anxieties of oblivion, which rapidly approaches but never seems to arrive.” — Alex Watkins, Vulture [New paperback edition]

• A garden in this wretched world.

The Book of Wild Flowers by Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks $40
A particularly lovely book. Illustrator Angie Lewin and author Christopher Stocks celebrate wild flowers and their place in the landscape with The Book of Wild Flowers. Christopher Stocks reveals the interesting and unusual history and science of British wildflowers, including guidance on where they can be found and tips for identification. The book features twenty-one of Lewin's favorite wildflowers, and include reproductions of her paintings and illustrations, many created specifically for the book.[Hardback]

• Look inside!

Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance $40
Amongst the hard, physical landscape, the rational landscape of the geologist, ecologist, and cartographer, there lies the more elusive, but no less real, soft landscape of the poet, psychologist, and artist. This soft landscape is, for the most part, a fabrication of our minds; a fabrication so ingrained in us that it has become a language we understand without ever appearing to have formally learned it. Combining essay and memoir, Matt Vance takes us on a sharp-eyed and poignant journey through our everyday places, places that have been shaped in our minds by the unseen influences of words, images, and memories. It is a journey that takes us from park benches, malls, and mudflats to the modest suburbs of New Zealand. Innerland reveals a fresh way of seeing and understanding the ordinary landscapes around us.

First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite politics and the decline of great powers by Richard Lachman $45
The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America's relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands' similarly short primacy and Britain's far longer era of leadership. Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites' success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world. Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mould the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance's cannibalisation of the US economy. [Paperback]
”Masterful. Lachmann shows us that, far from being unique to the period of British denouement, the destructive pursuit of such narrow self-interest by elites has repeatedly caused the decline of great powers throughout historical capitalism.” —Journal of World-Systems Research

The Book at War: Libraries and readers in an age of conflict by Andrew Pettegree $40
Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture — from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank — has shaped, and been shaped, by the vast conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war — and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace. [Paperback]
”Rich, authoritative and highly readable, Andrew Pettegree's tour de force will appeal to anyone for whom, whatever the circumstances, books are an abiding, indispensable part of life.” —David Kynaston

Fire by John Boyne $35
On the face of it, Freya lives a gilded existence, dancing solely to her own tune. She has all the trappings of wealth and privilege, a responsible job as a surgeon specialising in skin grafts, a beautiful flat in a sought-after development, and a flash car. But it wasn't always like this. Hers is a life founded on darkness. Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become — or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being? [Hardback]

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik $40
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world, centred on a two-storey rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers and drugs. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also the breaking and then the remaking — and thus the true making — of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (and many others). Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters as the key to unlocking Didion. [Paperback]

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord by Garth Nix $20
All Kim wants to do is play Dungeons & Dragons with his friends and ride his bike around the local lake. But he has always lived in the shadow of his younger sister. Eila is a prodigy, and everyone talks about how smart she is, though in Kim's eyes, she has no common sense. So when Eila finds an enigmatic, otherworldly globe which gives her astonishing powers, Kim not only has to save his sister from herself, he might also have to save the world from his sister!

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others.
Click through for your copies. We can dispatch them by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

On the Calculation of Volume, Book I and Book II by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Barbara J, Haveland) $40 each
”What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do?” Tara Selter has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.") Balle is hypnotic in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume's gravitational pull — a force inverse to its constriction — has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Book II beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language. And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara's own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? [Paperbacks]
”A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration." —Nicole Krauss
"What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it's a fantastic book." —Karl Ove Knausgård
"Existential questions about the core and functioning of human relationships are raised here in a virtuosic and seemingly incidental manner. On the Calculation of Volume is a dazzling, poetic, tremendously multi-layered novel. Temporal anomalies and great literature have never been so successfully combined. Fascinating, extraordinary." —Horazio
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down." —Kate Briggs

• Day 121.

• Here there be monsters.

Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 stories of Azrael by Joy Williams $30
Joy Williams offers ninety-nine illuminations on mortality as she brings her powers of observation to Azrael, the Angel of Death and transporter of souls. Balancing the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, the book presents Azrael as a thoughtful and troubled protagonist as he confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death and his friendship with the Devil. In this follow-up to Williams's 99 Stories of God, a collection of connected beings - ranging from ordinary people to great artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Bach and Rilke to dogs, birds, horses and butterflies - experience the varying fate of the soul, transient yet everlasting. Profound, sorrowful, witty and ecstatic, Concerning the Future of Souls will leave readers awestruck in their confrontation of life in the face of death. [Paperback with French flaps]

• Some reservations.

• Read an extract.

• Unloosed, unstoppable intelligence.

• Read Thomas’s review of 99 Stories of God.

• Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks.

Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk $45
For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him. A beautiful object in its own right, in Memories of Distant Mountains readers can explore Pamuk’s inner world and have an intimate encounter with the art, culture, and charged political currents that have shaped an outstanding literary voice. A very pleasing volume. [Paperback]

• Look inside this beautiful book.

The Watermark by Sam Mills $40
Rachel and Jaime: their story isn't simple. It might not even be their story. Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels. And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again. Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all. The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it asks: how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings? [Hardback]
”Playful, romantic and very, very clever. Like Inception for booklovers. Sam Mills packs more ideas into one work of metafiction than most writers would manage in several lifetimes.” —Clare Pollard
”A thrilling and original novel: an existential mystery, a love story, an absurdist quest.... A playful enquiry into ideas about freedom, fate, utopias, dystopias, AI, ethics and where truth might reside in a world of fakes. Richly imagined, wild and wise.” —Joanna Kavenna

• Who is controlling the plot?

Landfall 248: Aotearoa New Zealand arts and letters edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
The Spring issue announces the winner of the 2024 Landfall Essay Competition, an annual essay competition that celebrates the art of essay writing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The winning essay is featured. Landfall 248 also includes essays from the 2024 collaboration with RMIT University's nonfiction/Lab. These trans-Tasman essays focus on the theme of 'making space,' and what it means to use writing as a tool to create space for different voices, perspectives and ideas. Landfall 248 also announces the winner of the 2024 Caselberg International Poetry Prize, judged by poet and writer, Alan Roddick, and includes the winning poems. [Paperback]

If Only by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $27
”A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.” So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? — and proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life. [Paperback]
”The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience — one that we can't extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: 'If only there was a cure, a cure for love.' And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don't actually mean it at all.” —Sophie Haigney

Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In pursuit of remarkable mushrooms by Richard Fortey $70
They do not seem of this world, yet fungi underpin all the life around us: the 'wood wide web' links the trees by a subterranean telegraph; fungi eat the fallen trunks and leaves to recycle the nutrients that keep the wood alive; they feed a host of beetles and flies, which in turn feed birds and bats. Fungi produce the most expensive foods in the world but also offer the prospect of cheap protein for all; they cure disease, and they both cause disease and kill; they are the specialists to surpass all others; their diversity thrills and bewilders. Richard Fortey has been a devoted field mycologist all his life. He has rejoiced in the exuberant variety and profusion of mushrooms since reading as a boy of nuns driven mad by ergot (a fungus). Drawing on decades of experience doing science in the woods and fields, Fortey starts with the perfect 'fungus day' - eating ceps in Piedmont. He introduces brown rotters and the white, earthstars and death caps; fungal annuals and perennials, dung lovers and parasites, even fungi that move through the trees like mycelial monkeys. We learn that the giant puffball produces more spores than there are known stars in the universe and fetid stinkhorns begin looking like arrivals from the planet Tharg. He tells of the fungus that turns flies into zombies, the ones that clean up metallic waste the delicious subterranean fungi truffe de Perigord, the delight of gourmets. Amongst these and many other 'close encounters' of a fungal kind, the book attempts to answer the questions: what are fungi? Why did their means of reproduction escape discovery for so long? What role do they play in the development of life? Fascinating and well written. [Hardback]
”This is the way science should be written: so engagingly that it makes you forget that you're actually learning something (actually, you're learning a lot), and carrying you swiftly from page to page. Filled with insight, science, history, charm and wit.” —The Times

• Meet the mushrooms.

The Art of Not Eating: A doubtful history of appetite and desire by Jessica Hamel-Akré $40
The day Jessica Hamel-Akré discovered the ideas of George Cheyne - an eighteenth-century polymath and London society figure known as 'Dr Diet' — it sparked an intellectual obsession, a ten-year study of women's appetite and a personal unravelling. In this bold and radical book, Hamel-Akré follows Cheyne through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body. In doing so, she uncovers the eighteenth-century origins of both today's diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting. Blending history and memoir, The Art of Not Eating will change the way we look at appetite, desire, rationality and oppression, and show how it all got tangled up with what we eat. [Paperback]

The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said $42
A major work by one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century, The Question of Palestine was the first book to narrate the modern Palestinian experience in English. Edward Said’s project to ‘bring Palestine into history’ was unquestionably a success – there is no longer a question of whether Palestine had a history before colonization – and yet Palestinian self-determination is as distant as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and shaped by his own life in exile in New York, Said’s account of the traumatic national encounter of the Palestinian people with Zionism is still as pertinent and incisive today as it was on first publication in 1979. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This reissue of The Question of Palestine only lends more weight and value to Edward Said’s work, to his vision and analysis, to the enduring need for his core principles of justice and empathy. Principles that have perhaps never been as severely tested as they are today. Passionate and patient, the book displays all the features that made Said a great thinker and a powerful advocate, whose absence continues to be felt.” —Ahdaf Soueif
”In this seminal text, Edward W. Said stridently diagnoses western hypocrisy and makes the case for Palestinian liberation, paving the way for so many thinkers who came after him. I wish it were not so, but The Question of Palestine is just as relevant now as it was in 1979.” —Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe $34
The devastation of 7 October 2023 and the horrors that followed astounded the world. But the Israel-Palestine conflict didn't start on 7 October. It didn't start in 1967 either, when Israel occupied the West Bank, or in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. It started in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Ilan Pappe untangles the history of two peoples, now sharing one land. Going back to the founding fathers of Zionism, Pappe expertly takes us through the twists and turns of international policy towards Israel-Palestine, Palestinian resistance to occupation, and the changes taking place in Israel itself.
”A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is the best primer available on one of the world's most persistent settler-colonial tragedies. Amid the carnage of the Gaza genocide, it is essential to listen to Ilan Pappe, a preeminent historian of the Middle East, and a heroic scholar committed to justice and freedom.” —Abdel Razzaq Takriti
”Ilan Pappe clearly and concisely exposes the brutal history of Israeli occupation and apartheid over more than a century, providing some compelling insights into the origins of the current conflict.” —Grace Blakeley

Time of the Child by Niall Williams $37
The eagerly anticipated new novel from the author of This Is Happiness. Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in the little town of Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from his community. A visit from the doctor is always a sign of bad things to come. His youngest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed her chance at real love and passed up an offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever. 
”There is something of Trollope's Barsetshire here, in the sense of an entire place rendered in fine detail. Williams's phrasing is immaculate and even the smallest characters are drawn with attention and detail. But Dr Troy is the heart of this slow, rich novel. The scene in which he dances with the baby in a quiet kitchen is one of the most affecting I've read.” —The Times

The Twisted Chain by Jason Gurney $35
In the winter of 1969, a 14-year-old Whangārei schoolboy called Keg went to a weekend rugby tournament and came home with a sore throat. Soon he was bedbound with a blazing fever, painful wrists, elbows and knees, and – most worrying of all – damage to his heart. He had been diagnosed with rheumatic fever, and his life was changed forever. Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory autoimmune disease, usually contracted in childhood. It starts with a sore throat; left untreated it can cause serious, life-long damage to the heart. Despite its status as a developed country, Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the highest rates of rheumatic fever in the world. More than 90 percent of the country’s cases occur in Māori and Pasifika communities. Author and researcher Jason Gurney knows Keg’s story intimately; he is Keg’s son. In The Twisted Chain, Gurney describes living in the long shadow cast by this disease. He writes of emergency night-time drives to Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, of panicky hours waiting for medical help. He describes how these frighteningly vulnerable experiences sparked some of the questions that led him to a career in public health. ‘I wanted,’ he writes, ‘to research the causes and effects of rheumatic fever. It was my way of fighting back against the illness that had changed the trajectory of my family’s life.’ The Twisted Chain chronicles the profound impact of rheumatic fever on individuals and whānau and critiques the socio-political decisions (or lack thereof) that enable this preventable disease to thrive in modern-day Aotearoa New Zealand.

Order now. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier, or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door at 15 Church Street, Whakatū.

The Gavin Bishop Treasury: Ten favourite fairy stories and original tales by Gavin Bishop $45
Two hundred pages of fabulous storytelling and stunning artwork. This beautiful gift collection will entrance families of all ages and sizes and is the ideal inducement to snuggle up and read together. The 10 gorgeous stories included in this treasury are: ‘Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant’; ‘Bidibidi’; ‘Mr Fox’; ‘Chicken Licken’; ‘A Apple Pie’; ‘The Three Little Pigs’; ‘Little Rabbit and the Sea’; ‘Stay Awake, Bear!’; ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’; and ‘Rats!’ — four of Bishop’s delightful original tales, featuring such characters as drab Mrs McGinty, who becomes a sensation when a fast-growing plant takes off in her yard, along with a rainbow-chasing sheep, a little rabbit who longs to visit the sea, and a bear who decides he can go without his winter sleep. There are also six humour-filled fairy tale retellings, including crafty Mr Fox with an empty food sack to fill, the gloriously illustrated ‘Three Little Pigs’, and ‘Rats!’, in which Mrs Polly Piper, vexed by an infestation of cheeky rodents, accepts help from the dashing, accordion-playing Rapscallion Claw. This is an exciting publication, as most of these favourites have been out of print and very hard to find. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Giant by Mollie Ray $45
One morning, a teenage boy wakes to find that he has grown to the size of a giant… Inspired by the journey of the author's younger brother, this wordless wonder of a book follows the experience of a family as one of their own faces a life-threatening illness. As his health declines, can the family remain resilient on his long journey through treatment? Mollie Ray's debut graphic novel is a resonant story of empathy, healing and hope. [Hardback]
”Wonderful, moving, original book. It teaches us a new visual language for love, for worry and for family.” —Robert Macfarlane
”Mollie Ray's exquisitely rendered drawings guide us tenderly through this tale of family, courage, fear and joy.” —Katie Green

• Look inside!

• Creating Giant.

• Silent comics.

• On the cover.

French Cooking for One by Michèle Roberts $45
”Part of the beauty of the art of cooking is that it involves transience, making something delightful that then vanishes, and that in turn involves cherishing the time we spend on perfecting a dish. Cooking yourself something delicious is rewarding, satisfying, cheering. It makes us feel capable, creative, able to take care of ourselves. Cooking for yourself makes you feel spoiled and cherished.” - Michèle Roberts
A unique work of literary and culinary joie de vivre, part food memoir, part recipe book, French Cooking for One is Michèle Roberts' first cookbook, and a personal and quirky take on Édouard de Pomiane's ten-minute cooking classic. Once a food writer for the New Statesman, Roberts was born in 1949 and raised in a bilingual French-English household, learning to cook from her French grandparents in Normandy. Her love of food and cookery has always shone through in her novels and short stories. French cuisine, classic though it is, still holds delicious surprises. From quick bites for busy days to sumptuous main courses for those who enjoy spending more time in the kitchen, the focus throughout this book is on dishes that are simple and fun to prepare, and results that are mouthwatering to contemplate and, of course, to eat. With over 160 delicious recipes, the majority of which are vegetarian, combined with piquant storytelling and feminist wit, French Cooking for One is a working cook's book with French flair, bursting with life and illustrated with the author's original ink drawings, full of charm and humour. More than a handbook of classic French dishes, French Cooking for One also bears testimony to a singular literary life. Vignettes of Roberts' childhood in Normandy and of her years living in Pays de la Loire are peppered with anecdotes about intellectual and artistic luminaries: an omelette prepared by Gertrude Stein's cook for Picasso; a simple pasta dish calling to mind the French philosopher Julia Kristeva and the Scottish poet Alison Fell's images of female orgasm; and Emma Bovary's extraordinary wedding cake, among others. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Michèle Roberts’s enchanting book French Cooking for One proves la cuisine française can be enjoyed alone, when there is nothing to interrupt the joy of preparing good ingredients and turning them into enticing dishes. Her anecdotes and notes of wisdom that accompany the recipes make her the perfect companion in the kitchen.” —Carolyn Boyd

• The art of writing a cookbook.

Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle) $40
Fifteen years after killing her husband's lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they've started a business — FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies — dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs — she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband's lover, too. Crimes against women versus crimes by women; culpability, fallibility, and our responsibilities to each other — this is Piñeiro at her wry, earthy best, alive to all the ways we shape ourselves to be understandable, to be understood, by family and love and other hostile forces. Includes an intermittent chorus of feminist voices: Rebecca Solnit, Rita Segato, Judith Butler, Vivian Gornick, Marguerite Duras! From the author of Elena Knows. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Time of the Flies is orchestral: a page turner that is also a crime novel, a thriller, a meditation on feminism, our choices, our lack of choices. As Piñeiro unpacks her Pandora’s box of stories, voices, preoccupations, characters, you wonder, how on earth will she weave them together? Not that you care — her ability to be everybody and everything, including flies, carries you along. An absorbing read, for sure, and oh what a satisfying pleasure to see all the pieces come together — painful satisfaction, because then, you know, the novel will soon be over." —Julia Alvarez

Taboon: Sweet and savoury delights from the Lebanese bakery by Hisham Assaad $60
"There is bread and salt between us." This phrase, symbolizing the act of breaking bread together, welcome, gratitude, friendship, and trust, epitomizes the spirit of the baking culture of the Middle East. And the oven is the beating heart of every community. This beautifully photographed cookbook explores the vibrant baking culture of Lebanon. Perfectly poised between the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Lebanese food draws influences from myriad cultures and offers a delicious collection of baking recipes to tempt the home baker seeking new taste adventures. Lebanon is a land of culinary richness and a vibrant spirit, and this book tells the story of its baking cuisine: exploring all its regional influences and traditions. Here you will find over 80 recipes for classic home-style breads, traditional family favorites that have been handed down through generations, alongside pastry-shop delicacies, classic cakes, and street-food treats. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Palo Alto: A history of California, Capitalism, and the world by Malcolm Harris $30
The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an extraordinary story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative. Palo Alto's weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, racial genetics, and ‘broken windows’ theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. The book ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.[New paperback edition]

Quarterlife by Devika Rege $38
The Bharat Party has come to power after an intensely divisive election. Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai by their promise of ' better days '. With him is Amanda, eager to escape her New England town by volunteering in a Muslim-majority slum. Inspired by them, Naren's charismatic brother Rohit sets out to explore his ancestral heritage in the countryside, where he falls in with the very young men who drive the Hindu nationalist machine. As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterised by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets — and the simmering unrest erupts. [Paperback]
”What begins as a novel of ideas becomes the secret history of a nation. A superb read, both moving and inspiring.” —Jeet Thayil

Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud by Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt $48
In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realisation or failure of second chances — outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone. The authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, "it is the mending that matters." [Hardback]
"A fearless book. Greenblatt and Phillips speak to each other, and to us, with unflinching candor, wisdom, and tenderness about the possibility of renewing or remaking our lives. Second Chances stages a grand reckoning with fate and free will, fantasy and reality, and, above all, with the excitement and the terror of suddenly finding ourselves in a strange story, in a brave new world." —Merve Emre

• Redeeming time.

Walking Practice by Dolki Min (translated from Korean by Victoria Caudle) $35
After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth's gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food As they discover, humans are delicious. Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shifts their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit a prey's sexual preference, then attacks at the pivotal moment of their encounter. They use a variety of hunting tools, including a popular dating app, to target the juiciest prey, and carry a backpack filled with torturous instruments and cleaning equipment. But the alien's existence begins to unravel one night when they fail to kill their latest meal. Thrust into an ill-fated chase across the city, the alien is confronted with the psychological and physical tolls their experience on Earth has taken. Questioning what they must do to sustain their own survival, they begin to understand why humans also fight to live. But their hunger is insatiable, and the alien once again targets a new prey, not knowing what awaits.  Dolki Min's haunting debut novel is part psychological thriller, part searing critique of the social structures that marginalize those who are different — the disabled, queer, and nonconformist. Walking Practice uncovers humanity in who we consider to be alien, and illuminates how alienation can shape the human experience.  [Paperback; 21 line drawings throughout]
"Walking Practice explores the burden of gender expectations, the struggle of having a flesh prison body, having to feed yourself and wanting to be loved, and even the awkwardness of dealing with other people on the subway. But what really makes this story sing is the uniqueness of the narrator's voice — both compelling and witty. It is moving and funny, critical and crass. This one is for anyone who is made to feel like an alien in their own body." —Tor

• A more elastic state.

• Drawn to aliens.

Myths of Geography: Eight ways we get the world wrong by Paul Richardson $40
Our maps may no longer be stalked by dragons and monsters, but our perceptions of the world are still shaped by geographic myths. Myths like Europe being the centre of the world. Or that border walls are the solution to migration. Or that Russia is predestined to threaten its neighbours. Richardson challenges recent popular accounts of geographical determinism and shows that how the world is represented often isn't how it really is — that the map is not the territory. Along the way we visit some remarkable places: Iceland's Thingvellir National Park, where you can swim between two continents, and Bir Tawil in North Africa, one of the world's only territories not claimed by any country. We follow the first train that ran across Eurasia between Yiwu in east China and Barking in east London, and scale the US-Mexico border wall to find out why such fortifications don't work. [Paperback]
”As continents, borders, nations, economic growth and sovereignty become the buzzwords of today's global conflicts, Paul Richardson's Myths of Geography skewers each one with elegant precision. His book places political geography at the heart of how we understand the challenges of the twenty-first century. A bracing and important book.” —Jerry Brotton

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (translated from Arabic by Robin Moger) $45
Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat's suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence, her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat's death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it's as if al-Zayyat never existed. Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love and Silence in the nineties, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel's rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love and Silence disappear from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat's life, interviews family members and friends, reconstructs the afterlife of Enayat in the media, and tracks down the flats, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums among which Enayat divided her days. Touching on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse and divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema, this wide-ranging, unclassifiable masterpiece gives us a remarkable portrait of a woman artist striving to live on her own terms. [Paperback]
”A brooding, atmospheric read charged with a singular magical beauty. Iman Mersal conjures up the zeitgeist of artistic Cairo after the July revolution and reveals a merciless and inflexible world behind the genteel, cultivated image.” —Leila Aboulela

• A nexus.

Black Village by Lutz Bassmann [Antoine Volodine] (translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman) $38
Tassili, Goodmann, and Myriam. Two men and a woman, dressed in rags — former poets, and former members of a dystopian military service — walk the bardo, the dark afterlife between death and rebirth. The road is monotonous and seemingly endless. To pass the time, they decide to tell each other stories: bizarre anecdotes set in a post-apocalyptic world, replete with mutant creatures, Buddhist monks, and ruthless killers. The result is a mysterious, dreamlike series of events, trapped outside of time as we know it, where all the rules of narrative are upended and remade. [Paperback]
"With Black Village, Lutz Bassmann, a heteronym of Antoine Volodine, pens a collection of rare intensity, carried by writing of staggering power. By breaking the codes of narrative, by upsetting genres, he offers, within the disaster that this book tells, a literature that reinvents and affirms the infinite potential of language." —Art Press

Land Is All That Matters: The struggle that shaped Irish history by Myles Dungan $39
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived 'off the land' in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived 'on the land' as well. Agriculture was the only economic resource for the vast majority of the population outside the north-east of the country. Land was vital. But most of it was owned by a class of Protestant, English, and often aristocratic landlords. The dream of having more control over their farms, even of owning them, drove many of the most explosive conflicts in Irish history. Rebellions against British rule were rare, but savage outbreaks of murder related to resentments over land ownership, and draconian state repression, were a regular feature of Irish rural life. The struggle for the land was also crucial in driving support for Irish nationalist demands for Home Rule and independence. Dungan examines two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. It explores the pivotal moments that shaped Irish history: the rise of 'moonlighting', the infamous Whiteboys and Rightboys, the insurrection of Captain Rock, the Tithe War of 1831-36, the Great Famine of 1845 that devastated the country and drastically reduced the Irish population, and the Land War of 1878-1909, which ended by transferring almost all the landlords' holdings to their tenants. These events take place against the backdrop of prevailing British rule and stark class and wealth inequality. Land Is All that Matters tells the story of the agrarian revolution that fundamentally shaped modern Ireland. [Paperback]

Unreel: A life in review by Diana Wichtel $40
Born to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a 1950s Kiwi tradwife too busy to police her viewing, Diana Wichtel cut her teeth on the Golden Age of television. But in the 1960s, things fell apart. Diana's fractured family left Canada and blew in to New Zealand, just missing the Beatles, and minus a father. Diana watched television being born again half a world away, and twenty years later walked into the smoky, clacking offices of the Listener where she became the country's foremost television critic — loved and loathed, with the hate mail in seething capital letters to prove it. Meanwhile, television's sometimes-pale imitation — real life — unreeled. This is a sharply funny, wise and profound memoir of growing up and becoming a writer, of parents and children, early marriage and divorce, finding love again — and of the box we gathered around in our living rooms that changed the world.

Other Rivers: A Chinese education by Peter Hessler $40
An account of two generations of students in China's heartland, chronicling a country in the midst of tumultuous change through the prism of its education system. More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties - members of China's "Reform generation" - and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student - an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler's new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China's boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme 'meritocracy' at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him a first-hand view of raising a child in China.In Peter Hessler's hands, China's education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what's happened to the country, where it's going, and what we can learn from it. [Paperback]

Island (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Julian Hanna $23
Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago "a little world within itself," unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path - strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and traveling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison - we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? [Paperback]

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson $26
a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles's return. Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it's like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem — moving, disturbing and delightful. 
”This book is amazing — I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing.” —Alice Munro 
”Anne Carson has created, from fragments of the Greek poet Stesichoros, a profound love story told as forty-seven compulsively readable long-lined poems of intense cinematic detail.” —Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review 
”Totally engrossing.’ —Ocean Vuong 

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Click through to our website for your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Gliff by Ali Smith $45
A new book from Ali Smith is always hugely exciting — here is a writer of immense capacity, who is always driven by the urgency of the modern world but responds with a humanity and playfulness that show us possibilities hidden inside crises. Gliff is the first of a new two-book project. It's a truism of our time that it'll be the next generation who'll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? And what's a horse got to do with any of this? Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature. [Hardback]
”Here is a voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear. Smith is good at fable-ising, and at taking a young perspective in order to question afresh systems and inherited knowledge. Smith's fiction teaches with vitality that there is no such thing as a futile question.” —Financial Times
”Gliff is one of Smith's most propulsive stories — a dark adventure with high stakes, which, despite its bleak subject matter, is still a sparklingly crisp read. Typically tantalising stuff from one of our most playful writers. Smith is as frisky as ever, peppering with puns, and making hay with homonyms imbues her characters with this linguistic exuberance. A new Ali Smith book is always an event.” —Holly Williams

• Hope for the future.

The Position of Spoons, And other intimacies by Deborah Levy $50
Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, Levy shares the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of her own. Each short essay draws upon Levy's life, encapsulating the precision and depth of her writing, as she shifts between questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is reveals a questioning self. [Hardback]
”Under the blowtorch of Levy's attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful. This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial.” —Guardian

• Delight in the details.

• Language is her plaything.

Poutini: The Ngāi Tahu history of the West Coast by Paul Madgwick $75

A landmark publication, bringing together a lifetime of knowledge and research by kaumatua and 'Coaster' Paul Madgwick (Kati Mahaki, Kai Tahu). Beginning with mythology associated with Te Tai Poutini (the West Coast), this richly illustrated work follows the story of human settlement including migration and occupation by different iwi, creation of different Māori settlements, the role of pounamu, the earliest interactions between Pākeha explorers and Ngāi Tahu, the Kai Tahu land sales and Maori reserves, through to the 1998 Ngāi Tahu Settlement and today's challenges and opportunities. [Hardback]

• Look inside / find out more.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami $55
When a young man's girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own. When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library — a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he's willing to lose. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times. [Hardback]
”A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is quietly miraculous.. The greatest books are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami's narrator enters his mysterious libraries.” —Telegraph
”No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. “ —Financial Times

• Clocks with no hands.

• The me I might have been.

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman $38
At a superstore in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every day at 3.55 am. Under the red-eyed scrutiny of their self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty delivery trucks of mountains of merchandise, stock the shelves and stagger home (or to another poorly paid day job) before the customers arrive. When Big Will the store manager announces he's leaving, everything changes. The eclectic team members now see a way to have their awful line manager promoted up and away from them, and to dream of a promotion of their own. Together they set an extravagant plan in motion. [Hardback]
 “A brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us whose full humanity has simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered.” —Joshua Ferris
”A classic of our age. Adelle Waldman turns the seemingly unremarkable matter of a retail job vacancy into a gripping study of conscience, morality and camaraderie. Help Wanted illuminates an entire universe that rarely features in literature revealing rich, nuanced, characters and the choices they face.” —Catherine O'Flynn
”Finally, the profoundly human big-box store truck-unloading novel you were waiting for. Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market. The characters are so richly drawn — so full, under all their defences, of the desire to be loved — that even the annoying ones will win your heart. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master.” —Elif Batuman
”Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It's a book about work; about the retail industry in the age of Amazon; and about the effects of late capitalism on human relations. It is also hard to put down. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won't be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy.” —Keith Gessen

• A literary critique of neoliberalism.

Shattered by Hanif Kureishi $40
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, in a pool of blood, he was horrified to realise he had lost the use of his limbs. He could no longer walk, write or wash himself. He could do nothing without the help of others, and required constant care in a hospital. So began an odyssey of a year through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home, to his house in London. While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed — a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage. This book takes these hospital dispatches — edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing — and charts both a shattering and a reassembling: a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings — of gratitude, humility and love. [Hardback]
”Extraordinary, unique and unputdownable. An exceptional volume as original as Jean-Dominique Bauby's stroke classic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and as profound and affected as Salman Rushdie's Knife . This fall provoked a rare, and inspiring, defiance, Shattered, with its unique authorship, has become a life-saver. For the reader, this compounds the intensity of its witness.” —Robert McCrum, Independent

• Eternal recurrence.

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks $40
One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home, Rebanks couldn't stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly — and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly — her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather. Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. [Paperback]
”Humane, beautifully paced, gentle, and strangely compelling, The Place of Tides feels like, not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now.” —George Saunders
”A magnificent book — wonderfully unlike any other. The Place of Tides is big-hearted and transporting, a quietly gripping reckoning with self-sufficiency and interdependence, with the lives that make us and the lives that we make. I didn't want it to end, and I can't wait to reread it.” —Philip Gourevitch
”James Rebanks has done a miraculous thing. He takes the reader with him to a stark, remote island on the strangest mission in the toughest circumstances and makes you feel like you're coming home. A profound, transformative, uplifting story.” —Isabella Tree

Head in the Clouds by Rocío Araya (translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses) $45
Sofia goes to school every day but she still has a lot of questions. Why are grown-ups always in a rush? What number comes after infinity? Sofia's teacher says she has her head in the clouds, she's seeing birds. In collages of graph paper, worksheets, and newsprint, punctuated by scratches of graphite and bold swaths of bright paint, Sofia's world springs to life. When she gives one of her birds to her teacher, her teacher's monochrome world of blank paper and grey lines bursts into colour, affirming the joy and necessity of always being curious. Inquisitive children, with a supply of questions as limitless as their imagination, will recognize themselves in Sofia, delighting in pondering her questions - and in coming up with more of their own. [Hardback]

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The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home cooking recipes from the leading chefs of Africa by Alexander Smalls and Nina Oduro $75
A vibrant library of home cooking recipes and texts contributed by 33 chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, cooks, and writers at the heart of Africa's food movement. Organised geographically into five regions, The Contemporary African Kitchen presents 120 warm and delicious dishes, each beautifully photographed and brought to life through historical notes, personal anecdotes, and thoughtful serving suggestions. Home cooks will discover a bounty of diverse, delicious dishes ranging from beloved classics to newer creations, all rooted in a shared language of ingredients, spices, and cooking traditions. Learn to make Northern Africa's famed couscous and grilled meats; Eastern Africa's aromatic curries; Central Africa's Peanut Sauce Stew and Cocoyam Dumplings; Southern Africa's fresh seafood and street food; and Western Africa's renowned Chicken Yassa. With text contributions from experts including Pierre Thiam, Selassie Atadika, Anto Cocagne, Coco Reinarhz, and Michael Adé Elégbèdé, the essay and recipe contributors to this ground-breaking survey are at the heart of the food movement of Africa, making it an essential addition to every cook and food lover's library. [Hardback]

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The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe $38
Post-university life doesn't suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow's Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He's been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that's been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that's finally poised to put their plans into action. But speaking truth to power can be dangerous - and power will stop at nothing to stay on top. As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn and a murder enquiry is soon in progress. But will the solution to the mystery lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old? [Paperback]
”Wonderfully accomplished and darkly funny. The Proof of My Innocence is a murder mystery, a satire on Britain's ever right-ward drift, culminating in Liz Truss; and an inquiry into truth and perception. Jonathan Coe gets better and better.” —Luke Harding
”A brilliant, shrewd, satirical novel — gimlet-eyed, funny, very clever and a searchingly profound look at the state of this strange country of ours.” —William Boyd

The Britannias, And the Islands of Women by Alice Albinia $37
The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles — from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias — transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britanniaslooks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. [Paperback (though we do have the lovely hardback available too)]
”A dazzlingly brilliant book. Travelling by boat, swimming through kelp, riding on a fishing trawler, Alice Albinia takes us on an extraordinary journey around the British isles, revealing a liquid past where women ruled and mermaids sang and tracing the sea-changes of her own heart.” —Hannah Dawson
”An artful book of waterways and wildernesses, monastic havens and tax havens. A fascinating demonstration that Britain 'singular' is shorthand for something tectonically, volcanically plural. “ —Amy Jeffs
”There are books crafted from research, worthy and informative. And there are books that happen. That need to happen. That feel inevitable. As if they have always, somehow, been there waiting for us. The voyages of Alice Albinia around our ragged fringes range through time, recovering and resurrecting the most potent myths. A work of integrity and vision.” —Iain Sinclair

• Telling the story of the other.

Leave Your Big Boots at the Door: Pākehā confronting racism against Māori edited by Lorraine McLeod $40
The effects of colonisation and the racism that accompanies it are seen in the lives of many Māori living in the inequitable, disadvantaged margins of society, heavily influenced by the loss of their land and cultural knowledge, and often living in poverty. The Pakeha interviewed in this book have all come to recognise how this racism blights our country, and they come from a range of occupations, including police, education, health, psychology, social services, Corrections, business, and the law. As well as each providing an historical angle on the subject, they offer positive suggestions about addressing bias, power and privilege in our country's constitutional documents, systemic racism in our institutions and organisations, and in personal ways of confronting racism. All advocate for a society in which Maori regain tino rangatiratanga (power and control) over their own lives. This is an important and inspiring book, one that encourages Pakeha to face up to our past and embrace an optimistic future for Aotearoa.

The Chess Deck: 50 cards for mastering the basics by Levy Rozman $45
Chess is all about practice. With this interactive, immersive deck of 54 cards, Levy Rozman distills the most important information players need to know in order to practice right. Fifty cards with chessboard diagrams feature the best openings for black and white; tactics to know like forks, pins, and skewers; historical games to learn from; and brainteasers to test your skills. Two introductory cards explain how each of the six pieces moves and how to understand chess notation so you can analyse positions. Suitable for those who have a rudimentary understanding of chess but challenging enough for more seasoned players.

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A Thousand Feasts: Small moments of joy… A memoir of sorts by Nigel Slater $45

Nigel Slater has always been good company in the kitchen — and in the armchair. His relaxed and personable style, and his depth of understanding of flavours, combinations and processes, make his books enjoyable on many levels — always rewarding but never challenging. a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy. Slater has always kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman's hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei; recording the small things, events and happenings that give pleasure before they disappear. In A Thousand Feasts he details a soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese. This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end. Nigel hones in on the scent of a bunch of home-grown sweet peas, the sound of water breathing at night in Japan, the occasional 'pfuff' as a tiny avalanche of snow falls from leaves. You will love his company in this nicely presented book. [Hardback]
”Slater is at his best on food and travel: his ability to evoke a culture and a mood (and his food writing by itself does both) is remarkable. He is a purveyor of the good life, simplicity, cosiness and warmth.” — Sunday Times
”Slater's greatest talent is making the ordinary extraordinary, showing us how to revel in a ripe fig or a piece of cheese. He may worry that he sounds trite and that his musings on diminutive pleasures are trivial, that he hasn't answered any of the big questions about the universe, but as I leave I feel grateful for Slater, the god of small things.” —The Times
”I loved this. It is a secular book of hours — thoughts and pleasures beautifully cadenced and generously placed.” —Edmund de Waal
”Nigel Slater has a magical capacity to find beauty in the smallest moments. A nourishing, sustaining book.” —Olivia Laing

Illumipedia: Discover the world with your magic three-colour lens by Carnovsky $45

Illumipedia is a bumper treasury of marvels specially curated from the beloved ‘Illumi’ series, revealing worlds of natural wonder with the signature magic viewing lens. In Illumipedia, discover animals, insects, dinosaurs and the ocean deeps with your three-colour lens as you explore the world and its natural phenomena like never before. Bringing together content from five books in the iconic ‘Illumi’ series, this new treasury spans the best of Nature, Oceans, Bugs and Dinosaurs — across six continents. Each spectacular artwork is really three images in one: use the magic lens to reveal different layers to the environment you're in. Each chapter begins with an introduction to one of six continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America and Australasia & Oceania. In the Nature section, your red lens reveals daytime animals, your blue lens reveals nocturnal animals, and your green lens reveals the environments they live in. In the Oceans section, your red lens reveals fish, your blue lens shows the other creatures that call each ocean home, and your green lens sheds light on underwater seascapes. In the Bugs section, meet insects through your red lens, other creepy-crawlies through your blue lens, and the miniature worlds they inhabit through your green lens. In the Dinosaurs section, witness — what else? — dinosaurs through your red lens, other prehistoric creatures through your blue lens, and long-gone environments through your green lens. From the redwood forests of modern-day North America to the vast, prehistoric expanse of Gondwana, and from the tiniest ant to the blue whale, Illumipedia is a journey through time and around the world to champion nature in all its forms. With updated facts and stats and brand-new artworks from the inimitable Carnovsky, this new instalment designed for the bookshelf is sure to inspire awe and wonder at the natural world. [Large-format hardback]

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Crumbs: Cookies and sweets from around the world by Ben Mims $80

The is the best biscuit encyclopedia we have seen — you will be pleased to have it on your kitchen bookshelf. Bake your way around the world with this collection of 300 irresistible, authentic, and delicious biscuit recipes from nearly 100 countries. Whether enjoyed at breakfast, with afternoon tea, on holidays, or as a late-night snack, biscuits are a universally beloved treat. In Crumbs, food writer, recipe developer, and self-confessed baking obsessive Ben Mims takes home cooks on a delicious tour across countries and cultures, presenting a sweet and satisfying guide to crumbly, crunchy, chewy desserts — from Snickerdoodles, Date-Filled Maamoul, and Almond Macaroons to Cardamom Biscuits, Italian Waffle Cookies, and Okinawan Brown Sugar Shortbread. Organised geographically, Crumbs is chock-full of old-world and modern classics, and intriguing local recipes from more than 100 countries. Each begins with a fascinating origin story, followed by clear, step-by-step instructions and notes on regional variations. Beginners will appreciate Mims's introduction to essential equipment, ingredients, and techniques such as shaping, rolling, and slicing, while bakers of all skill levels will find inspiration in the bounty of recipes, each carefully tested and perfected for home kitchens. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, the book features delectable photographs and special icons designating dairy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan recipes, as well as approachable, easy-to-make options that come together in 30 minutes or less. Recipes include: Chocolate-Glazed Elisenlebkuchen, Danish Pepper and Spice Cookies, Egyptian Stuffed Eid Cookies, Filipino Powdered Milk Shortbreads, French Macarons, Icelandic Gingerbread, Malaysian Milky Cashew Cookies, Nigerian Coconut Macaroon Balls, Pakistani Cumin Seed Cookies, Portuguese Biscoitos, Puerto Rican Guava and Almond Thumbprint Cookies, Rugelach, Spanish Almendrados, Shrewsbury Biscuits, Speculaas, Sri Lankan Crunchy Sugar Cookies, Syrian Sesame and Pistachio Cookies, Thai Rolled Wafer Cookies, Venezuelan Shortbread Cookies, and Welsh Griddled Currant Cookies, plus international variations on wedding cookies, Christmas cookies, and other sweet treats for special celebrations. [Hardback]
”Crumbs is the most well-researched and diverse cookie book I have ever encountered. Traveling through time and across cultures and lands, this is a unique and dynamic investigation of what the small-but-mighty cookie means to different people. Ben Mims has written an instant classic.” —Hetty Lui McKinnon

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Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale $30

The new poetry collection from Emma Neale is fascinated by our doubleness. Prompted by the rich implications in a line from Joseph Brodsky — “The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie” —it combines a personal memoir of childhood lies with an exploration of wider social deceptions. From the unwitting tricks our minds play, to the mischievous pinch of literary pastiche; from the corruptions of imperialism or abuse, to the dreams and stories we weave for our own survival, these poems catalogue scenes that seem to suggest our species could be named for its subterfuge as much as for its wisdom. Yet at the core of the collection are also some tenets to hold to: deep bonds of love; the renewal children offer; a hunger for social justice; and the sharp reality that nature presents us with, if we are willing to look. [Paperback]

McGlue by Ottessa Mosfegh $35

Salem, Massachusetts, 1851 — McGlue wakes up in prison, too drunk to be sure of how he got there, or even his own name. They say he killed a man, and that man may have been his best friend. That man may have been his lover. Now, McGlue wants one thing and one thing only — a drink. Because when he is sober he remembers, and McGlue wants to forget. As he is visited by people demanding answers — the authorities, his well-meaning lawyer and his weeping mother — McGlue struggles to bury the memories that haunt him, of a violent childhood, swashbuckling adventures, and the only man who ever loved him. [New hardback edition]
”Wonderful.” —Guardian
”Strange and beautiful.” —LA Times
”A gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur. You're in safe, if sticky hands with an Ottessa Moshfegh story. Everything bulges and reeks in this novella, which feels as if it was written in a permanent state of nausea. The plot spins faster than its main character's head. What elevates this novella are the scalpel-sharp observations about McGlue's nihilism and her prose, which is as distilled as the liquor McGlue necks. It's a wild ride.” —The Times

• A sailor with a hole in his head.

My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar $45

A novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi. Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States — whose perspective sheds its own light on his story. All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India — from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID — and buffet both Jadu’s and Jugnu's lives. Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence. [Hardback]
”This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.” —Salman Rushdie
”Kumar's late father's life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story. Kumar's beautiful, truthful fiction finds and provides great strength — too late for Kumar's parents, but in good time for his grateful readers.” —James Wood

Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby $40

After her university department is closed due to budget cuts, a philosophy professor tests the limits of the soul and body by performing dehumanising experiments on unwilling subjects. Violent Faculties follows a philosophy professor influenced by Sade and Bataille. She is ejected by university administrators aiming to impose business strategies in the interest of profit over knowledge (does this sound familiar?). She designs a series of experiments to demonstrate the value of philosophy as a discipline, not because of its potential for financial benefit, but because of its relevance to life and death. The corpses proliferate as her experiments yield theoretical results and ethical conundrums. She questions why it is wrong to kill humans, what is it about them that makes their lives sacred, and then attempts to find it in their bodies, their words, their thoughts, and their souls. [Paperback]
"I've never read anything quite like Charlene Elsby's Violent Faculties and I suspect I never will again. Part tenure application, part manifesto of sadistic feminism, Elsby's story of a professor pushed to rational excess by administrative powers-that-be reads like an overview of Western philosophy as written by your brilliant and bloodthirsty best friend who happens to be a malignant narcissist. Elsby's voice is daring, original, and wholly uncompromising. Violent Faculties is a work of true transgressive transcendence." —Paula Ashe
"Elsby's voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron." —B.R. Yeager
"Fusing philosophy and horror, Charlene Elsby's Violent Faculties is a masterful tale of human misery and the macabre, a story that transcends its innermost psychosocial experiments and becomes a cautionary tale by way of academic study. Elsby is at the peak of her powers, and this book is her calling card. I can't wait to see what sadistic experiments she has in store for us next." —Michael J. Seidlinger
”A disturbing dissertation on humanity that lures you into its extreme experiment in philosophical flagellation and doesn't dismiss you until the final footnote." —Brian McAuley

• It’s academic.

Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee $28

Can it possibly matter that we allow two young people to imagine that they love one another when in two days' time they will in any event be parted? It is the summer of 1851 and Charlotte Morrison is on holiday in Germany with her brother and his wife. On the surface, Charlotte is an unmarried aunt with a sparse, unfulfilled life. But beneath that quiet respectability lie unsuspected depths hidden murmurings. On a day trip boating down the Rhine, Charlotte sights a fellow traveller, Edward Newman, who releases the hissing floodwaters of her subconscious. Dark and dangerous, they sweep Charlotte towards the watershed of her life, stretching her imagination to its limit; almost to breaking point. [Paperback with French flaps]

• Specificity and reach.

Kia Mau: Resisting colonial fictions by Tina Ngata $25

An excoriation of the decision by the New Zealand government to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain James Cook and the implications of that decision both for Maori and for the wider global struggle against colonialism. Analysing these thinly veiled celebrations alongside the role of the Doctrine of Discovery while charting Cook’s crime spree of murder, rape and pillage, Ngata urgently calls for a practice ethical remembering that requires unlearning the falsehoods of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ and coming to terms with the horrifying reality of ongoing colonisation. [Paperback]

The Dream of a Tree by Maja Lunde (translated from Norwegian by Diane Oatley) $40

Longyearbyen, 2110: Far to the North, buried deep in the mountains, is a massive vault filled with seeds from every corner of the Earth. Tommy grows up in the brutal landscape of Spitzbergen alongside his two brothers, for whom he would do anything, and his grandmother, the seed keeper of the vault. Life just to the South of the North Pole is demanding, but their tiny community has found its shape. It has been many years since they cut off contact with other countries, and in their isolation, they live in harmony with nature. When Longyearbyen is hit by a disaster, Tommy, his brothers, and his grandmother are among the few survivors. Six lonely people in a deserted landscape, in possession of a treasure the world thought forever lost. At the same time, in a place far, far away, Tao subsists on the memories of her son Wei-Wen, whom she lost twelve years ago. Every day is the same; she is numb with sadness. And she is starving, like the rest of her people, trapped on a barren, impoverished land where countless species have disappeared. But everything changes the day Tao is asked to lead an expedition to the North. The destination is Spitzbergen and its legendary seeds. The Dream of a Tree is a chilling and gripping tale about our responsibility to this planet, both as a species and as individuals. Past, present and future are woven together, and the novel poses questions that our age is striving to answer: How did homo sapiens become the species that changed everything? Do we deserve to be masters of nature? And are we, too, an endangered species? [Paperback]

The Lost Music of the Holocaust: Bringing the music of the camps to the world at last by Francesco Lotoro $40

For more than thirty years Francesco Lotoro, an Italian pianist and composer has been on an odyssey to recover music written by the inmates of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps and the gulags of Stalin's Soviet Union. Between 1933, the year of the opening of the Dachau Lager in Germany, to Stalin's death in 1953 when thousands of Soviet prisoners were released, Lotoro pieces together the human stories of survivors whose only salvation was their love of music. Across three decades of relentless investigation, his findings as captured in Lost Music of the Holocaust are extraordinary and historically important. Lotoro unearthed over eight thousand unpublished works of music, ten thousand documents (microfilms, diaries, notebooks, and recordings on phonographic recordings), as well as locating and interviewing many survivors who in a previous life had been trained musicians and composers. Be it a symphony, an opera, a simple folk song or even a gypsy melody, Lotoro has travelled the globe to track them down. Many pieces were hastily scribbled down ow whatever the composer could find: food wrappings, a vegetable sack and even a train ticket stub. To avoid discover by camp guards, Lotoro even discovered forgotten pieces of code inmates had invented to hide their real meaning - music. In many cases, the composers would be murdered in the gas chambers or worked to death, not knowing whether their music would be heard by the world. Until now. [Paperback]

• Can music save lives?

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich $38

In Argus, North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to all of his problems; Kismet can't even imagine her future, let alone the kind of future Gary might offer. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say 'no' and so the die is cast. Hugo has been in love with Kismet for years. He has been her friend, confidante and occasionally her lover — and now she is marrying Gary, Hugo is determined to steal her back. Meanwhile Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly truck drives along the highway from the farm to the factories, she tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future — both her daughter's and her own. Starkly beautiful like the landscape it inhabits, this novel is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets. [Paperback]
”Erdrich's achievement is pretty remarkable: a narrative voice with brio and lightness that wends and weaves between modes and moods. It's unpredictable and multifaceted.” —Michael Donkor, Guardian

Ten Birds that Changed the World by Stephen Moss $28

For the whole of human history, we have lived alongside birds. We have hunted and domesticated them for food; venerated them in our mythologies, religions, and rituals; exploited them for their natural resources; and been inspired by them for our music, art, and poetry.  In Ten Birds That Changed the World, naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells the gripping story of this long and intimate relationship through key species from all seven of the world's continents. From Odin's faithful raven companions to Darwin's finches, and from the wild turkey of the Americas to the emperor penguin as potent symbol of the climate crisis, this is a fascinating, eye-opening, and endlessly engaging work of natural history.

How to Feed the World: A factful guide by Vaclav Smil $40

A myth-busting book about how the world produces and consumes its food and how to do so without killing the planet. Why are some of the world's biggest food producers also the countries with the most undernourished populations? Why is food waste a colossal 1,000kcal per person daily, and how can we solve that? Could we all go vegan and be healthy? Should we? How will we feed the ballooning population without killing the planet? How to Feed the World shows how we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. [Paperback]

Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of the world by Dorian Lynsky $40

As Dorian Lynskey writes, "People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia." In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularised in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them, from H.G. Wells, Jack London, W.B. Yeats and J.G. Ballard to The Twilight Zone, Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max and The Terminator. Prescient and original, Everything Must Go is a brilliant, sweeping work of history that provides many astute insights for our times and speaks to our urgent concerns for the future. [Paperback]
”So engagingly plotted and written that it's a pleasure to bask in its constant stream of remarkable titbits and illuminating insights.” —The Guardian
”So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end — the world, or the book.” —Adam Rutherford

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The Royal Free by Carl Shuker $38
Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum, The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing — by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake (now a film by Christine Jeffs). James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the 'third oldest medical journal in the world', the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices — the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?). His job is utterly boring, but — or so he tells himself — totally crucial: the Royal London is a stronghold of care for the human body, a bastion of humanism in a disintegrating world. In the London outside of the office, the prognosis for the body politic is bad: civic unrest is poised on the brink of riots. Attempting to grieve for his lost young wife, while haunted by a group of violent North London teenagers in a collapsing city, James is brought to crisis. [Paperback]
”His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.” —NZ Listener

• The superb Mr Shuker.

Toi te Mana: An indigenous history of Māori art by Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki $100
A landmark account in words and pictures of Māori art, by Māori art historians, covering everything from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Māori artists. In 600 pages and over 500 images, this very impressive volume invites readers to climb on to the waka for a remarkable voyage — from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists at the Venice Biennale, from whare whakairo to film, and from Te Puea Herangi to Michael Parekowhai. The authors explore a wide field of art practice: raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattoo), whakairo (carving),rakai (jewellery), kakahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media and film. And they do so over a long time period — from the arrival of Pacific voyagers 800 years ago to contemporary artists in Aotearoa and around the world today. Through wide-ranging chapters alongside focused breakout boxes on individual artists, movements and events, Toi te Mana is a waka eke noa — an essential book for anyone interested in te ao Māori. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer $38
Slender Volumes locates the cypress trees of Buddhist folklore in Onehunga and the teachings of the Zen tradition along its foreshore. Elaborating on kōans collected by poet-philosopher Eihei Dōgen, each poem fastens centuries and distances together to find insight in everyday things: seagulls on a handrail, insects drinking from a pan of water, sump oil glistening in a white bucket. Clear-sighted and compassionate, Slender Volumes recovers what it means to be intimate with our surroundings and to meet the particulars of our world with perfect curiosity. Very nicely written and produced. [Paperback with French flaps]

• Some other books by Richard von Sturmer.

• RvS wrote the lyrics for this song.

/slanted by Alison Glenny $30
A field guide to the spirit and endeavours of Edwardian mountaineer Freda Du Faur (1882–1935), the first woman to summit Aoraki Mount Cook, the highest peak in the Southern Alps of Aotearoa New Zealand. Through flights of verse, pages of concrete visual poetry, and fragments of archival materials, this new collection is glistening with newness on every page.
”/slanted is to me three things: one; a finely-made poetry of the eye, which becomes simultaneously and intensely a poetry of the ear and the echo, two; an historical poetry interested in the language of prior texts, and three; a deeply civilisational poetics, because it approachesEnglish through a non-Western and anti-imperialistic lens. Combining these three things, Glenny is a marvellous and challenging Antipodean experimentalist.” —A.J. Carruthers
”Glenny is as devoted to the ridges and valleys of the line and letter as her collection’s real-life muse and subject, climber Freda Du Faur, is to scaling the peaks. /slanted brings together paraphrase, erasure, shape and LANGUAGE poetry in an elliptical, challenging book. This is poetry that knows the power of form—of ordering, arrangement, selection—a collection that knows the power of placing one foot after another.” —Jake Arthur
”/slanted feels created by hand and by foot. The hardened heels, the ice-cut steps and the glacier-wear (in this case, skirts!) are palpable, while the snow and stalactites and steep-angled slopes sprawl like obstacles across the page. Through it all, Freda Du Faur treads slowly over two-faced mountains, a “sporting female” battered by altitude and her time in history, straining to see but never knowing what she means to us now. Climbing becomes poetry, and poetry a way of climbing up and out of the past.” —Laura Williamson

Paper Boat: New and selected poems, 1962—2023 by Margaret Atwood $60
Tracing the legacy of a writer who has fundamentally shaped our contemporary literary landscapes, Paper Boat assembles Atwood's most vital poems in one volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voices to remarkably drawn characters — mythological figures, animals and everyday people — all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. 'How can one live with such a heart?' Atwood asks, casting her spell upon the reader, and ferrying us through life, death and whatever comes next. Walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy as only she can, Atwood's journey through poetry illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears. Spanning six decades of work — from her earliest beginnings to brand new poems — this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors. [Hardback]
”What a book of magic Paper Boat is a bright and cornucopic life force of a book. It resounds with the acuteness of Atwood's wisdom, the warmth of her cold eye, her uniquely lit courage.” —Ali Smith, Guardian

Future Jaw-Clap: The Primitive Art Group and Braille Collective story by Daniel Beban $50
Future Jaw-Clap tells the story of a highly influential movement in New Zealand music: the self-made musicians of pioneering free jazz ensemble Primitive Art Group, who carved out their own radical musical language in the cold, hard reality of 1980s Wellington, and have gone on to richly diverse careers in music. From their beginnings as ‘the punks of jazz’ in small clubs and the anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid protests of the early 1980s, through the heyday of the Braille Collective's many colourful groups, self-released records and intersections with dance, theatre and visual arts, to the Six Volts providing music for the iconic album Songs From the Front Lawn, and beyond, these musicians and the many others they have drawn into their orbit have done much to shape the music of Aotearoa. Based on a deep oral history project and extensive archival research, and illustrated with photographs and other items, Future Jaw-Clap is a portal into an extraordinary musical world of free music in Aotearoa. [Flexibound]
”Astounding and illuminating.” —Thurston Moore
”Wonderful.” —Nick Bollinger
”A must-read.” —Mike Nock
”Everyone who wants to start a band in Aotearoa should read this book.” —Don McGlashan

• Look inside!

• Last month, Primitive Art Group released a new double LP, 1981–1986, from Amish Records, available from Flying Out. This gatefold, 2XLP combines the group’s only two albums, consisting of one LP of Five Tread Drop Down cuts plus 'Cecil Likes to Dance', a never-before-released live recording from Thistle Hall (1984) and the full 1985 LP Future Jaw-Clap.

• The digital album.

• Predicament.

Petroglyphs by Craig Foltz $30
US Ex-pat Craig Foltz’s latest collection continues his interrogation of language, space and time. More than simple time stamps, these Petroglpyhs chart the inner workings of consciousness via the examination of mythical creatures, strip malls and various bodies of water. The form of these works morph and dissolve over time. A book becomes paper. Becomes fire. Becomes ashes. Sometimes it is only through the prism of an unimagined other that we can fully locate ourselves. [Paperback]
”In the poems of Petroglyphs, Craig Foltz is like a burlesque artist who begins the act wearing dozens of layers and strips down until he is covered by only the most strategically-placed phrases. The book’s three sections—by turns expansive, lapidary, and fragmentary—show how a great deal of what we ‘know’ can be summoned up by mere suggestion, and that attempts at explanations don’t necessarily make things clearer.By the end you’ll feel naive for having believed in stable concepts in a world where there are curious semantic slippages, where ‘practical experience is no substitute for practical experience’.” —Erik Kennedy
”This is poetry that makes me want to write poetry. Causation and correlation tease apart like pulled jackfruit; a phrase could be a ladder ora riptide. Dextrous, inquisitive and rich—swap where are we going? for how are we having this much fun?” —Ya-Wen Ho
”This is a sparkling work, transporting the reader through layers of biology, paleontology and deep time. The only constant is an overarching imagination, transforming itself, sentence by sentence, into something wonderful and strange.” —Richard von Sturmer
”1. Affixes of lithic matter escape morphology. 2. Meaning buckles under the pressure of cellular mysticism. 3. Taxonomy spreads limbic.4. Under a microscope, a diatom may appear as a smooth pebble or an aperture of light. 5. Poets are advised to bring a headtorch, waterproof footwear and to mind the stalactites.” —Toyah Webb

Living Things by Munir Hachemi (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches) $28
Living Things follows four recent graduates — Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex — who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living in a campground, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling. [Paperback]
"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." —Dizz Tate
"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." —James Greer

• Read an extract.

An Absence of Cousins by Lore Segal $28
Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but 'elective cousins'. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to - a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares — the institute's director and his wry, acerbic wife — hold the key? In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door. [Paperback]

• Jennifer Egan reads ‘The Reverse Bug’.

• The impossible life of Lore Segal.

• Catherine Lacey on Lore Segal.

Into a Star by Puk Qvortrup (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $38
'Three in the bed. One not yet born, another dead, and I'm alive.' Puk is 26 years old, preparing for the birth of her second child, when her husband has a heart attack on his morning run. She leaves their toddler with a friend and dashes to the hospital, where Lasse lies unresponsive in a coma. He dies a few hours later. Into a Star follows Puk and her young family for one year after this tragedy, which has shattered the ordinary life she thought she would live, as she finds her way slowly through the enormous grief and, eventually, out the other side. With remarkable dignity, candour and attention to the domestic details that make us human, Puk Qvortrup invites us into the hardest moments of her life. And she reveals, amid the devastation, a powerful thread of hope. [Paperback]
"Into a Star is a luminous meditation on loss and renewal. Despite the heart-breaking subject matter, it filled me with a sense of life’s beauty, and of the unexpected paths we take to happiness.” —Hermione Thompson
”Into A Star is written with an immediate simplicity that it's impossible to resist. A private tragedy reminiscent of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. But Puk Qvortrup writes younger, more exposed, more from the body.” —Svenska Dagbladet

New Stories by Owen Marshall $38
Accidental meetings, unexpected turns in the road, job offers that take you into new territories- our lives seem arbitrary and unpredictable. In Marshall’s latest collection of short stories , people teeter on the brink of experience. From murder to an affair, to a promotion or a breakdown, the array of vivid characters aren't always aware of what they encounter, not sure whether they are being given an opportunity, a challenge, a temptation, a lesson, or just another day to get through. Meanwhile, feelings of fear, lust, curiosity and frustration simmer beneath the surface. Will the people grasp what life throws at them? [Paperback]

The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank $35
We all used to be something else, and we will all be something new again in the worlds to come. Written in an effort to ward off existential dread, and to find new understandings and consolations for those similarly afflicted, The Chthonic Cycle is an eccentric and brilliantly curated tour through time, in which fascinating objects glint and spark and the transience of humanity flickers. At the heart of Una Cruickshank’s debut are Earth’s interlocking cycles of death and reuse. The blood of a billion-year-old tree emerges from the sea as a drop of amber; 4,756,940 pieces of Lego float towards the Cornish Peninsula; a giant squid’s beak passes through a whale’s intestines into bottles of Chanel No. 5. The violence of colonisation underpins some of the transformations illuminated here, as we follow wave after wave of ruin and remaking. This is a rare kind of writing, both galaxy-sweeping and microscopically specific. The Chthonic Cycle reminds us to be chastened and scared by our world — its mind-bending age, the insane complexity of its systems, the violent upheavals and mass extinctions — as well as to be awed.
”Rich and lyrical, gorgeous and astonishing, scientific and poetic — this stunning collection has left me smiling, looking afresh at the world. I loved this book for its intensity and curiosity and its vivid language.” —Rebecca Priestley
”Una Cruickshank reaches across the history of life on Earth to hold a mirror up to our lives. With exacting precision, charisma and curiosity, The Chthonic Cycle casts light on the links between everything in the vast web of earthly delights, putting each of our lives in the perspective of deep time and the ever-present cycles of evolution and extinction. Every page of this rich and illuminating debut is a feast.” —Ash Davida Jane

Nights Out at Home: Recipes and stories from twenty-five years as a restaurant critic by Jay Rayner $55
”For the past twenty-five years, I have been reviewing restaurants across Britain and beyond, from the humblest of diners to the grandest of gastro-palaces. And throughout I've been taking the best ideas home with me to create glorious dishes for my own table. Now I get to share those recipes with you.” In Nights Out at Home, Jay Rayner's first cookbook, the award-winning writer and broadcaster gives us delicious, achievable recipes inspired by the restaurant creations that have stolen his heart over the decades, for you to cook in your own kitchen. With sixty recipes that take their inspiration from restaurants dishes served across the UK and further afield, Nights Out at Home includes a cheat's version of the Ivy's famed crispy duck salad, the brown butter and sage flatbreads from Manchester's Erst, miso-glazed aubergine from Freak Scene and instructions for making the cult tandoori lamb chops from the legendary Tayyabs in London's Whitechapel; a recipe which has never before been written down. It also features Jay's irresistible, MasterChef Critics-winning baked chocolate pudding with cherries, and his own personal take on the mighty Greggs Steak Bake. Seasoned with stories from Jay's life as a restaurant critic, and written with warmth, wit and the blessing, and often help, of the chefs themselves, Nights Out at Home is a celebration of good food and great eating experiences, filled with dishes to inspire all cooks. [Hardback]
”A fantastic collection of heart warming, full-flavoured recipes from one of Britain's leading food writers. A must buy for anyone who loves food, restaurants and cooking.” —Tom Kerridge
”Jay has a way with words, but he's also a dab hand in the kitchen. This book is not just a collection of food memories but also of recipes that make you want to roll up your sleeves and start cooking.” —Michel Roux

Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman $37
Some family stories, fragments of their lives, continue to nag and haunt us. Lily Hasenburg was just such a figure in Holman's growing years. She was whispered into his ear by grandmother Eunice — in memorable stories of her older sister, who married and moved to Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and was later caught up in the Nazi web spun around Adolf Hitler. Unable to shake loose this story, Holman pursued her to Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. Here, we have an account of his pilgrimage; the kind of family history we might bury, and forget — to our loss. [Paperback]
”Holman travels, learns German, encounters the lost who were always right there. Lily, Oh Lily is family memoir at full stretch, made with love, yearning and just a hint of reproach. A wise, timely, beautiful read.” —Diana Wichtel

• Interrogating ourselves and our ancestors.

The Horse: A galloping history of humanity by Timothy Winegard $45
The Horse is an epic history that begins more than 5500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe when the first horse was tamed and an unbreakable bond with humans was forged — a bond that transformed the future of humanity. Since that pivotal moment, the horse has carried the fate of civilisations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transport, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion and a formidable weapon of war. With its unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse has influenced every facet of human life and widened the scope of human ambition and achievement. Horses revolutionised the way we hunted, traded, travelled, farmed, fought, worshipped and interacted. They fundamentally modified the human genome and the world's linguistic map. They determined international borders, moulded cultures, fuelled economies, and decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have been integral to both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives. [Paperback]

Jewish, Not Zionist by Marilyn Garson $30
Raised in Zionism, Marilyn Garson worked four years in Gaza and let it challenge everything she thought she knew. She returned to Aotearoa seeking both Jewish community and justice in Palestine. Painfully excluded by some, she co-founded Alternative Jewish Voices to let belief fuel activism. Nationally and internationally, this story comes from the front line of a principled movement for Jewish solidarity with Palestine. Garson grew up in Canada, the youngest of four sisters in a Zionist-Jewish household. She immigrated to Hokianga in the mid-1980s. From 1998 she worked in Cambodia and Afghanistan. In 2011, she received an offer to work in the Gaza Strip—an extraordinary invitation to live among people she had been told were her enemies. Her first book, Still Lives – a Memoir of Gaza tells the story of four years, two wars, and an unlikely social enterprise. Garson returned to Aotearoa in 2015. [Paperback]

The 113th Assistant Librarian by Stuart Wilson $24
Oliver Wormwood thinks his new job in the library will be boring. Until he learns that books hold great power — and danger. By the end of his first day, Oliver has witnessed the librarian's death, been frozen by a book, met a perplexing number of cats, and fought off a horde of terrifying creatures. With only a mysterious girl called Agatha to show him the ropes, Oliver needs to learn fast — if he wants to live longer than the 112 assistant librarians before him. [Hardback]

Eleven Writers and Leaders on Democracy, And why it matters by Margaret Atwood, Mary Beard, Elif Shafak, Lea Ypi, Lola Shoneyin, Aditi MIttal, Yuan Yang, Erica Benner, Adela Raz, Kaja Kallas, and Vjosa Osmani $19
Urgent reflections on the value of democracy from eleven women writers and thought-leaders 2024 is an exceptional year for democracy. Nearly half the world's population will take part in a national election, with billions heading to the polls. It's a thrilling, unprecedented moment for change — yet democracy is also under threat. Women are at the forefront of the fight for democratic rights, as well as most vulnerable when those rights disappear. Here eleven extraordinary women — leaders, philosophers, historians, writers and activists — explore democracy's power to uplift our societies. Between its ancient origins and its modern challenges, they share a vision for a better future — one we can build together. A bit late for some but even more urgent because of this. [Paperback]
 “2024 is a year of elections. But will it be remembered as a year of democracy? That is in the balance. Democracy cannot be limited to a campaign, a vote, a victory speech. It is a process - or, to be more precise, a series of processes - that go to the heart of what a society really is. It depends on our shared understandings and on our commitment to making it work.” —Juliet Riddell

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Click through to our website to secure your copies:

Invisible dogs by Charles Boyle $36

“They ran wild in packs. They spread disease. They fouled the pavements. They kept us awake and then infected our dreams. They bred faster than rabbits. They laughed at the police. Whole districts became no-go areas. Finally the government took action: they were rounded up and slaughtered and buried in pits and now there are no dogs.” Invisible Dogs is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs — but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city. [Paperback with French flaps]
“Invisible Dogs is such a direct, lucid text that the reader might mistake it for a simple record of a visit to an authoritarian country. But Boyle’s wry and wiry prose, an invisible dog in itself, makes an eye contact you can’t break and produces thereafter a quietly deadly picture of the viewed and the viewer, the destination and the traveller.’” —M. John Harrison
”Funny, sinister, thought-moving like light, subtly then increasingly terrifying. Its intelligence reads like relief. Its determination not to language- or life-launder leaves it and the experience of reading it clean and cleansing re the shining and the very dark and the strangeness of us.” —Ali Smith
”I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now.” —Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
"The eponymous absence of dogs is not, it turns out, actually an absence — just an act of collective bad faith. The dogs are still there, but the locals have agreed to pretend they aren’t. Though Mike knows what’s going on —  ‘It’s the things they are not telling us that we should be paying attention to’ — he’s soon all-too-willing to toe the official line. As for the narrator, his apparent superiority to his hosts soon erodes: ‘I told the journalist that in my country it’s not dogs but beggars that are invisible.’ Eventually, the pair tire of answering inane questions about their writing and appearing at official events; they start to explore for themselves, visiting off-grid street markets — and losing their hosts’ trust. Invisible Dogs is a layered book. To paint it as one big Swiftian metaphor about the ease with which we accept the erasure of the most vulnerable, or a simple parable about the smiling removal of freedoms of recent years, wouldn’t be enough. It also contains satirical meta-swipes at the fact that, as writers, ‘we were all in sales’, a subtle portrait of the paranoia induced by surveillance, and more besides. Boyle has created something dread-making, with real elegance.’ —Declan Ryan, Daily Telegraph

Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn $35

Contradictions, misunderstandings, oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges — these messy troubles are the stuff of life. In Pretty Ugly, Gunn reminds us of her unparalleled acumen in handling ambiguity and complication, which are essential grist to the storyteller's mill. These 13 stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are a testament to Gunn's ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. Gunn's is a steady, unflinching gaze. In this collection, Gunn practises 'reading and writing ugly' to pursue the deeper (and frequently uncomfortable) truths that lie under the surface, at the core of both human imagination and human rationality. Each story is an exquisite, thorn-sharp bouquet. [Paperback]
”I am fully in love with Kirsty Gunn's stories. They hit the heart of life so truly it makes me quiver.” —Jane Campion
”Fiercely conflicting energies are in play in these sparkling stories, as Kirsty Gunn at once lavishly evokes and savagely destroys the worlds of propriety and respectable community.” —Tim Parks  

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (translated from French by Mark Hutchison) $37

Hailed in Le Point as a “masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance”, this novel is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s younger sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell. [Paperback]
”The story of Fanny and the Narrator is a story about our impulse to understand one another and about the way in which unknowability is what makes someone interesting; it is about, in fact, the relationship between unknowability and the desire to know, neither existing without the other, as a narrator does not exist without a story nor a story without a narrator. Exuberantly anti-realist and avowedly fictional.” —The Brooklyn Rail
”In her ability to dip down, over and over, into her secret life, and emerge with a small, sparkling patch of that whole cloth, Serre strikes me as extraordinarily luck. Serre’s primary subject, as always, is narration, and it’s thanks to this obsession that A Leopard-Skin Hat sidesteps memoir, not only by replacing siblings with friends and adopting a male Narrator but by plunging into the volatile spacetime of writing.” —The Baffler

• Hope and despair.

Dusk by Robbie Arnott $38

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal. [Paperback]
”Dusk is a sublime novel of loss and redemption, fight and surrender, that left me in absolute awe. Robbie Arnott's prose is incandescent, his storytelling mythic and filled with a wisdom that extends beyond the page. With Dusk, he asserts himself as one of Australia's finest literary writers.” —Hannah Kent

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life by Lulu Miller $45

When Lulu Miller’s relationship falls apart, she turns to an unlikely figure for guidance — the 19th-century naturalist, David Starr Jordan. Poring over his diaries, Lulu discovers a man obsessed with nature's hidden order, devoted to studying shimmering scales and sailing the world in search of new species of fish. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake sends more than a thousand of Jordan’s specimens, housed in glass jars, plummeting to the ground, the story of his resilience leads Lulu to believe she has found the antidote to life’s unpredictability. But lurking behind the tale of this great taxonomist lies a darker story waiting to be told: one about the human cost of attempting to define the form of things unknown. An idiosyncratic, personal approach to this fascinating scientific biography, Why Fish Dont Exist is an astonishing tale of newfound love, scientific discovery and how to live well in a world governed by chaos. [Hardback]
 “I want to live at this book's address: the intersection of history and biology and wonder and failure and sheer human stubbornness. What a sumptuous, surprising, dark delight.” —Carmen Maria Machado
”Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review
”A story told with an open heart, every page of it animated by verve, nuance, and full-throated curiosity.” —Leslie Jamison
”This book will capture your heart, seize your imagination, smash your preconceptions, and rock your world.” —Sy Montgomery
”Moves gracefully between reporting and meditation, big questions and small moments. A magical hybrid of science, portraiture, and memoir-and a delight to read.” —Susan Orlean

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Ryder by Djuna Barnes $35

Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of eccentricity and anarchy; through sparkling detours and pastiche, cult author Djuna Barnes spins an audacious, intricate story of sexuality, power, and praxis. Ryder, like its namesake, Wendell Ryder, is many things — lyric, prose, fable, illustration; protagonist, bastard, bohemian, polygamist. Born in the 1800s to infamous nonconformist Sophia Grieve Ryder, Wendell's search for identity takes him from Connecticut to England to multifarious digressions on morality, tradition, and gender. Censored upon its first release in 1928, Ryder's portrayal of sexuality remains revolutionary despite the passing of time and the expurgations in the text, preserved by Barnes in protest of the war 'blindly raged against the written word'. The weight of Wendell's story endures despite this censorship, as his drive to assume the masculine roles of patriarch and protector comes at the sacrifice of the women around him. A vanguard modernist, Djuna Barnes has been called the patron literary saint of Bohemia, and her second novel, Ryder, evinces her cutting wit and originality. [Paperback]

Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser $38

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art. [Paperback]
”A hugely talented author.” —Sarah Waters
”Michelle de Kretser is a genius — one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There’s no writer I’d rather read.” —V.V. Ganeshananthan
”In the midst of a late coming-of-age plot effervescent with romantic and intellectual misadventure, de Kretser considers memory — how we enshrine our cultural heroes and how we tell ourselves the stories of our own lives — with absolute rigor and perfect clarity. Structurally innovative and totally absorbing, this is a book that enlivens the reader to every kind of possibility. I savored every word.” —Jennifer Croft"
”Michelle de Kretser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.” —Neel Mukherjee
”One of the living masters of the art of fiction.” —Max Porter
”Thrillingly original.” —Sigrid Nunez

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth by Markus Zusak $40

“There's a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us. It's love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things.” What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs — Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm? The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed — not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning. There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love — and the joy and recognition of family. From one of the world's great storytellers comes a tender, motley and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder; but it's also a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty — but also the visceral truth of the natural world — straight to our doors and into our lives, and change us forever. [Hardback]

• Wanting to be decimated.

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim $27

Today the once flourishing Jewish community of Iraq, at one time numbering over 130,000 and tracing its history back 2,600 years, has all but vanished. Why so? One explanation speaks of the timeless clash between Arab and Jewish civilisations and a heroic Zionist mission to rescue Eastern Jews from backward nations and unceasing persecution. Avi Shlaim tears up this script. His parents had many Muslim friends in Baghdad and no interest in Zionism. As anti-Semitism surged in Iraq, the Zionist underground fanned the flames. Yet when Iraqi Jews fled to Israel, they faced an uncertain future, their history was rewritten to serve a Zionist narrative. This memoir breathes life into an almost forgotten world. Weaving together the personal and the political, Three Worlds offers a fresh perspective on Arab-Jews, caught in the crossfire of Zionism and nationalism. [Paperback]
”Three Worlds, by the Oxford historian of the modern Middle East Avi Shlaim, is an often enchanting memoir of his childhood in Baghdad. A lost world in Iraq is brilliantly brought back to life in this fascinating memoir.” —David Abulafia

• Weeping for Babylon.

To Free the World: Harry Holland and the rise of the labour movement in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific by James Robb $50

“He devoted his life to free the world from unhappiness, tyranny and oppression,” reads Harry Holland’s memorial in Wellington. Militant unionist, socialist agitator, writer and organiser, Holland was a firebrand leader of workers — in Australia, where he was jailed for sedition during the Broken Hill miners’ strike of 1909 — in Aotearoa NZ, from his arrival during the 1912Waihī Strike, to his death at the tangi of the Māori King in 1933. Elected an MP in 1918 and NZ Labour Party leader from 1919 to 1933, Holland was the “compassionate champion of the common people.” He campaigned against military conscription and war, forged a political alliance with Māori, supported strikes by indentured labourers in Fiji, defended the Samoan Mau movement against the NZ colonial administration, and condemned the mass layoffs and wage-cutting during the Great Depression. When Labour was elected to government in 1935, Michael Joseph Savage cabled Holland’s widow, Annie: “Harry’s life of service enabled us to win.” James Robb’s fresh, uncompromising biography features excerpts from Holland’s own writings, on matters as diverse as Massey’s Cossacks, industrial accidents, the poetry of Robert Burns, the White Australia policy and the Russian revolution. We rediscover this visionary socialist leader through his own words. [Paperback]

The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston $30

Dictionary wishes she could tell a story just like the other books. So one day she decides to bring her words to life. How exciting it is, she thinks, that an adventure is finally happening on her very own pages! But what will she do when everything gets out of control, all in a jumble, and her characters collide causing the most enormous tantrum to explode. This isn’t what she wanted at all! How on earth will she find sense in all this chaos? Her friend Alphabet knows exactly what to do and sings a song that brings calm and order to Dictionary’s pages once again. [Hardback]

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Mother Tongue Tied: On language, motherhood, and multilingualism — Disrupting myths and finding meaning by Malwina Gudowska $40

It is estimated that more than half of the world's population communicates in more than one language and over a third of the population in the United Kingdom is multilingual. And yet life in multiple languages is rarely discussed publicly, myths and misconceptions prevail and the pressure to keep heritage languages alive has become a private conflict for millions. Linguistic diversity is more prevalent than ever, but so is linguistic inequality. Linguist Malwina Gudowska, herself trilingual, sheds light on the ways in which we navigate language, its power to shape and reshape lives, and the ripple effects felt far beyond any one home or any one language. It takes one generation for a family language to be lost. One generation — like mother to child. Mother Tongue Tied explores the emotional weight of raising multilingual children while grappling with your own identity and notions of home. At what cost does a mother save a language? Or does she let it slip away and, with it, a part of herself her children may never know. [Hardback]
”Mother Tongue Tied brilliantly illustrates how multilingual mothers are disproportionately tasked with preserving linguistic heritage on one hand and preparing children for public society on the other — all while finding a language for their own new maternal identity. A thought-provoking, political and empathetic book.” —Eliane Glaser

• Visit the author’s Substack.

Persian Feasts: Recipes and stories from a family table by Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller, Lila Charif, Laya Khadjavi, and Bahar Tavakolian $70

When Leila Heller's mother, Nahid Taghinia-Milani came to the United States in 1979, she brought her recipes with her. Persian Feasts features Iranian delicacies from Iran in a dazzling tapestry of textures and aromas, from Shiraz in the south to Tabriz in the north. This exquisite collection of 100 dishes includes hearty stews, saffron-infused rice dishes, succulent kebabs, and delicate rosewater desserts — each one telling a story that is steeped in tradition and has been passed down from generation to generation. Unexpected ingredient combinations create distinctive tastes and aromas to every dish - from a simple Herb Frittata to a comforting Eggplant, Walnut & Pomegranate Stew to a delicately perfumed Cardamom and Rose Water Pudding. This highly personal book for home cooks — including family stories, historical accounts of food culture, recipe origins, and celebratory menus — is a feast for the senses, celebrating an abundance of spectacular food prepared with seasonal ingredients, fresh herbs, and fragrant spices. [Hardback]

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Small Acts by Kate Gordon and Kate Foster $19

There are people everywhere who need help, who might seem okay on the outside but aren't on the inside. People whose whole entire day can be changed ... Josh wants a friend but he doesn't know how to find somewhere to belong ... Ollie wants to express herself but doesn't want to be noticed ... Small Acts introduces two kids with great hearts who know that helping others can start with one small act of kindness. Josh has a plan to start with just that. So does Ollie. What Josh and Ollie don't know yet is that they need each other to make their plans work. [Paperback]

Determination by Tawseef Khan $40

Jamila Shah is twenty-nine and exhausted. An immigration solicitor tasked with running the precious family law firm, Jamila is prone to being woken in the middle of the night by frantic phone calls from clients on the cusp of deportation. Working under the shadow of the government's 'hostile environment', she constantly prays and hopes that their 'determinations' will result in her clients being allowed to stay. With no time for friends, family or even herself (never mind a needy partner), Jamila's life feels hectic and out of control. Then a breakdown of sorts forces her to seek change — to pursue her own happiness while navigating the endless expectations that the world seems to have of her, and still committing herself to a career devoted to helping others. In this polyphonic, character-driven novel, we meet the staff of Shah & Co Solicitors, who themselves arrived in the UK not too long ago, and their clients, more recent arrivals who are made to jump through hoops to create a life for themselves whilst trying to achieve some semblance of normality. [Hardback]
”A compassionate, beautifully told portrait populated by lives that circle the UK's lamentable immigration story. This is a story of determination, also grief, hope, loss and desperation, as well as a reminder of the care, patience and kindness at the human end of a broken system.” —Guy Gunaratne
”Tawseef Khan dramatises timely quests for migrant justice amid the grinding frustrations and punitive hypocrisy of the modern British state. Resisting stereotypes and easy moralising, this is absorbing, witty, eloquent fiction, as well as a trenchant political critique.” —Tom Benn
”Determination is a hymn to empathy, alive with care and love. This is a novel not just to spend time with for the joy of the richly detailed world Khan has created but to be enlivened and challenged by. Embedded in his compelling and compassionate novel is an emphatic rebuttal to the racism and xenophobia rife in this country.” —Rebecca Watson
”A heart-breaking, honest, and deeply important story, providing a window into the world of a UK immigration lawyer and the lives touched by her work. This is a moving, immersive, and vital piece of fiction.” —Jyoti Patel

Insectarium by Dave Goulson and Emily Carter $55

Insects are essential for life as we know it. There are at least one million species of insects, together making up over 80 per cent of all living species on Earth. Around 10,000 new species of insects are discovered every year. In Insectarium learn about the secret world thriving right underneath your feet. How did insects evolve into what they are today? How do they work together and how do they defend themselves? Explore the rooms of Insectarium and meet the beautiful demoiselle and the gigantic goliath beetle. Learn why these small creatures have such a huge impact on the world around us, and why we should be protecting them. [A beautifully done large-format hardback]

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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher $28

The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags. But America is stifling her — her wilfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness and the narrator unravels spectacularly. In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging — all while resisting easy moralising. [Paperback]
”A masterpiece.” —Slavoj Zizek
”A filthy, elegant book.” —Raven Leilani
”Glamorous and sordid.” —Elif Batuman
”Chipping away at Western hegemony one scalped it-bag at a time.” —New York Times

• Dissecting privilege.

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The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30

Kartik Popat breezes through his teenage years despite having no friends. He has no time for his fellow Indians or immigrants. He wants to earn money, without doing any work. He dreams of being a filmmaker, but ends up working at Parliament, racing through the ranks of advisors and party hacks. As the Covid lockdown sets in, he learns that there are more grifts in the world, than doing a half-arsed job. (Mr Popat disputes all of the above characterisations.) The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa. The novel lampoons the concept of the model minority, as Kartik makes a mockery of representational politics and reacts to the echo chambers and political movements of the day. [Paperback]
“It’s the best book I’ve read all year. It is so good. It is such a good salve for any despair you’re feeling about politics at the moment. It’s just the most wonderful, wonderful book. It’s funny. It’s crack-up funny. It’s all very astute, very clever. It’s a brilliant book.” —Pip Adam (RNZ, 22.10.24)

Final Cut by Charles Burns $85

The much-anticipated and exquisitely unsettling new graphic novel from the author of Black Hole, probing not only the personal and creative obsessions of its artist character but the deeper psychosexual territories of American film and culture. As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood.  Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie — his reluctant muse — set off to a remote cabin in the woods. Armed with an old 16-millimetre camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, a homage to Brian's favourite movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams — both his damsel in distress and his saviour. Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art. [Hardback]
”I love everything about this book: the story, the drawings, its way with all things extraterrestrial. It's wraparound wonderful, as close to immersive as any comic could be — a book to be read and reread.” —Observer
”Burns's new book is a joy to read and a welcome return to his long form storytelling that he's been sorely absent from for years. The central plot is beautifully told with subtle meanderings from a bygone age of youth, but accompanied with the strange and often disturbing imagery we're so used to seeing from a creator at the top of his game. A great melding of both style and substance.” —Charlie Adlard

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• Watch the trailer.

The White Review Anthology of Writing in Translation edited by Rosanna McLaughlin, Izabella Scott, and Skye Thomas $37

The White Review Anthology of Writing in Translation brings the most innovative and exciting international writers working today to an Anglophone audience. The anthology places the work of celebrated authors and translators alongside emerging voices. It includes excerpts from novels, full-length short stories and narrative non-fiction previously unpublished in English. Contributions to the anthology include: 'Butterflies', a short story by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell; 'Peach', a short story by Sema Kaygusuz, translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely; 'Red (Hunger)', an extract from a novel by Senthuran Varatharajah, translated from German by Vijay Khurana; 'Alegría', a story by Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo, translated from Spanish by Carolina Orloff; 'Mulberry Season' an excerpt from the novel Darkness Inside and Out by Argentinian writer Leila Sucari, translated from Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy; and the short story 'Jackals' by Haytham El-Wardany, translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls. Part of the content was selected from a global 'open call to translators'. {Paperback]
”Throughout its existence, The White Review has served as the most sparkling of birthing wards for the delicate, difficult, and delightful children of other languages' literatures that might have otherwise never found their way into life in English.” —Polly Barton
”Since the very beginning The White Review has demonstrated its aesthetic and political commitments to work in translation, actively giving space to marginalised languages, debut translators, and all manner of transcultural connections. It has always been a home for collaboration, community, experiment, and daring.” —Lauren Elkin
”Nothing less than a cultural revolution.” —Deborah Levy

[ … ] by Fady Joudah $33

Fady Joudah's powerful collection of poems opens with ‘I am unfinished business’, articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people.  A rendering of Joudah's survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine's daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens — a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be — and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold.  But "Repetition won't guarantee wisdom," Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language "before our wisdom is an echo." These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. Joudah reminds us, "Wonder belongs to all." [Paperback]
"Joudah's [...] offers a stunning magnification of consciousness that undertakes the work suggested by the title: reembodying in the text-beautifully, painfully-what has been systematically removed." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Within [...] pages, the poet's voice travels across centuries and continents, historicising the fate of the Palestinian people while illuminating the bewilderment, eros, and spirituality of everyday life. Joudah's integrity and craftsmanship elasticise the boundaries of the lyric and embrace a reckoning with colonial violence. But these glimmering, layered poems defy easy categorization, even as they brim with the wisdom we inherit from the dead." —Aria Aber, Yale Review

• More than a repository of wounds.

• Read a poem.

• Trust in time.

• Volume Focus: Literary Palestine.

The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams $40

Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists, with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines. Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright. In Leiden, among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining 'King Alfred', a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming 'to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society'. Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fuelled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb. This is a book white people are not ready to read yet; neither are most black people. But it is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.” —Chester Himes (1967 review)
”If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.” - Walter Mosley

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt $36

A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends. “Maman was exigeante — there is no English word — and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.” Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge's, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York? [A beautifully produced hardback from the New Directions' ‘Storybook ND’ series.]
"A staggeringly intelligent examination into the nature of truth, love, respect, beauty and trust. This is that rare thing, or merle blanc, as maman might say: a perfect book. I've read it four times, which you can do between breakfast and lunch." —Nicola Shulman, The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a short, sharp sliver of a story — only 64 pages — but every single word is pitch perfect. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a shot of ice-cold vodka-Belvedere or Grey Goose only, of course." —Lucy Scholes, Prospect
"For a wonderfully sideways take on the complex intersections between class, wealth and power — intersections that invariably favour those who have most of them already — I recommend reading The English Understand Wool, by the American writer Helen DeWitt." —Alex Clark, The Observer
"The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt's best and funniest book so far — quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading." —Heather Cass White, The Times Literary Supplement

Nine Minds: Inner lives on the spectrum by Daniel Tammet $45

Meet nine extraordinary people on the autism spectrum. A Japanese researcher in psychology sets out to measure loneliness while drawing on her own experience of autism. A quirky boy growing up in 1950s Ottawa sows the seeds of his future Hollywood stardom. In the US, a non-verbal man explores body language, gesture by eloquent gesture, in his mother's yoga classes. Nine Minds delves into the extraordinary lives of nine neurodivergent men and women from around the globe. From a Fields Medal-winning mathematician to a murder detective, a pioneering surgeon to a bestselling novelist, each is remarkable in their field, and each is changing how the world sees those on the spectrum. Exploding the tired stereotypes of autism, Daniel Tammet — autistic himself — reaches across the divides of age, gender, sexuality and nationality to draw out the inner worlds of his subjects. Telling stories as richly diverse as the spectrum itself, this illuminating, life-affirming work of narrative nonfiction celebrates the power and beauty of the neurodivergent mind, and the daring freedom with which these individuals have built their lives. [Hardback]
”Tammet's exquisite portraits remind us that the variety of brains is every bit as essential as any other form of diversity.” —Andrew Solomon
”Daniel Tammet's wonderful portraits of autistic people's inner lives illustrate the range of neurodivergent talents and experiences, and celebrate human cognitive diversity.” —Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre
”Beautifully rendered, painstakingly researched, and completely absorbing, Nine Minds offers something that autistic people urgently need: it humanises us.” —Katherine May
”In Nine Minds, Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant and author of Born on a Blue Day, reports on the unique lives and cognitive differences of nine neurodivergent people. This fascinating book engages by imaginatively entering its subjects' inner worlds. Each profile is based on hours of interviews. Readers will discover a spectrum filled with valuable different kinds of minds.” —Temple Grandin

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on hope and freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (translated from Arabic by Luke Lefgren) $50

This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and did. Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall. This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom as a question that demanded an answer, in order to preserve it as a dream. The wall becomes his stable point of reference, his anchor, both physically and psychologically. As each year brings with it new waves of releases of prisoners, he dares to hope, and seeks refuge in the wall when these hopes are dashed. And, in a small miracle, he finds love with a lawyer from the outside — while in her absence, the wall is his solace and his curse. A testimony of how the most difficult of circumstances can build a person up instead of tearing them down, The Tale of a Wall is an extraordinary record of the vast confinement and power of the mind. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The Tale of a Wall is the reason we have literature. Nasser has made art out of poison with his honesty and golden pen. He brings to light the specificity of experience of the Palestinian prisoner in a manner that makes every reader think about the incarcerated in their own countries without forgetting Palestine. It helps us understand the consequences on others when we do not wield whatever power we each hold for solidarity. A profound and important work.” —Sarah Schulman

• A prisoner writes.

• Translation and incarceration.

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru $37

A novel about beauty, power, and capital's influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it. Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height — the greater public panicked in quarantine — and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn't recovered from the effects of a recent Covid infection. When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see again: Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more different: as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well, setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion. Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind. [Paperback
"That wild time of youth is brilliantly conjured throughout Blue Ruin in flashback scenes that seem to pulsate with the roar of drunken parties and the thump of dance music. We are instantly swept along by the laconic grace and psychological acuity of Mr. Kunzru's writing and by the commotion he unleashes at will and to great effect. Indeed, Mr. Kunzru has drawn a narrator so appealing that we forgive him almost anything. In a novel where little happens, at least on the surface, and where the making and selling of art is examined at length, Jay's odyssey also broadens a narrative that might otherwise have become fatally introspective or, worse still, pretentious. But Mr. Kunzru's satirical eye, keen wit and compassionate intelligence guard against any such slide. Blue Ruin may end with the fate of a valuable painting hanging in the balance and millions of dollars about to vanish with a single drunken gunshot. By then, however, we care as little as Jay does about the fate of objects. Mr. Kunzru has made his point." —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal
”Even as Blue Ruin delves into the past with Proustian specificity, it does not succumb to nostalgic cliche about a time when young artists could achieve success almost overnight. Rather, Kunzru focuses on how the lives of the three friends diverge. Blue Ruin's success stems from its uncompromising connection between the pains of the past and the decomposition of the present, without celebrating either. Through the simple story of a once-lauded artist becoming a delivery driver in an effort to push his career-and himself-to the limit, Kunzru creates a trajectory in which social tensions are rising, liberalism is disappearing and fascism is once more gathering momentum." —Ed Luker, Frieze

• The men are not OK.

• Where radical art meets obscene wealth.

• Time of no time.

Happy Apocalypse: A history of technological risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz $45

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas. But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose. In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity. Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.
”Happy Apocalypse offers a compelling, powerful and very timely critique of the claim that we live in a period unprecedentedly marked by an awareness of technological crises and environmental risks. Fressoz shows instead, and in striking detail, how in France and Britain in the decades around 1800, in major fields of concern such as public health, industrial safety and environmental impact, calculations of risk and estimates of safety were both impressively widespread and energetically debated. The book offers a brilliantly original analysis of how industrialists and entrepreneurs, legislators and scientists, public lobbies and private interests, all made sense of the processes that accompanied the establishment of new kinds of capitalist society and their models of welfare, profit and security. Happy Apocalypse will be required reading for anyone concerned with the ways in which current crises of safety and survival can be better understood in their proper historical settings.” —Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge

• Chaos in the Heavens.

England: A natural history by John Lewis-Stempel $70

England's landscape is iconic — a tapestry of distinctive habitats that together make up a country unique for its rich diversity of flora and fauna. Concentrating on twelve habitats, John Lewis-Stempel leads us from estuary to park, chalk downland to woodland , river to field, village to moor, lake to heath, fen to coastal cliffs, in a book that is unquestionably his magnum opus. Referencing beloved great writers in whose footsteps he treads — Gilbert White, John Clare, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas — and combining breathtakingly beautiful prose with detailed wildlife observation, botanical fact and ancient folklore, Lewis-Stempel immerses himself in each place, discovering their singular atmosphere, the play of the seasons; the feel of the wind in midwinter; the sounds of daybreak; how twilight settles. England: A Natural History is the definitive volume on the English landscape, and the capstone of John Lewis-Stempel's nature writing. [Hardback]
”No-one comes close to Lewis-Stempel's ability to paint the English landscape in words. Maddeningly brilliant.” —Sally Coulthard
”It is now expected of the modern nature writer to draw together landscape, wildlife, history and culture, but few — if any — do it as deftly as Lewis-Stempel does here. There is still a place for this kind of assured and expert countryside writing. Not just a place, but acres of room.” —Richard Smythe, Times Literary Supplement

A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $37

Mariana Enriquez's first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past. [Paperback]
”One of Latin America's most exciting authors.” —Silvia Moreno-Garcia
”A mesmerising writer who demands to be read. Her fiction hits with the force of a freight train.” —Dave Eggers

• Horror inheres within the benign.

• An entire generation was gaslighted.

• No help from real things.

The Hotel Balzaar (A Norendy tale) by Kat DiCamillo, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $28
In the land of Norendy, tales swirl within tales-and every moment is a story in the making. At the Hotel Balzaar, Marta's mother rises before the sun, puts on her uniform, and instructs Marta to roam as she will but quietly, invisibly — like a little mouse. While her mother cleans rooms, Marta slips down the back staircase to the grand lobby to chat with the bellman, study the painting of an angel's wing over the fireplace, and watch a cat chase a mouse around the face of the grandfather clock, all the while dreaming of the return of her soldier father, who has gone missing. One day, a mysterious countess with a parrot checks in, promising a story-in fact, seven stories in all, each to be told in its proper order. As the stories unfold, Marta begins to wonder: could the secret to her father's disappearance lie in the countess's tales? [Illustrated hardback]

• Look inside!

• Read Stella’s review of The Puppets of Spelhorst.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst $38

A dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man's acutely observed and often unnerving experience.  It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age. Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles's envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys' careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician. Our Evenings is Dave Win's own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.
”The best novel that's been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It's funny but desperately moving too.” —The Sunday Times
”The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time.” — The Guardian
”Our Evenings is a truly astonishing novel, by turns delicate and ferocious, radical in the way it explores questions of race, class, sexuality and origins in a genteel English Home Counties setting. It is the story of a country undergoing great change, even if its people aren't aware of it — the novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end.” —Tash Aw

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) $40

In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo's nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door. As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend — all under the bright lights of Tokyo's 'sleepless town', Kabukicho. In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author's own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent. [Paperback]
”Demonstrates that death is the only way forward. Oozes with maternal cruelty.” —Yoko Ogawa

The Hidden Globe: How wealth hacks the world by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian $40

Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. The Hidden Globe is a riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had—bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by by foreign governments and multinational foreign corporations—and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. By mapping the hidden geography that decides who wins and who loses in this new global order—and how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires. [Paperback]
”In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.” —Pankaj Mishra

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian cartographer and the quest to map the world by Andrea di Robilant $38

In the autumn of 1550, an anonymously authored volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). This was closely followed by two further volumes that, when taken together, constituted the largest release of geographical data in history, and could well be considered the birth of modern geography. The editor of these volumes was a little-known public servant in the Venetian government, Giovambattista Ramusio. He gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo to detailed reports from the Muslim scholar and diplomat Leo Africanus. In an enthralling narrative, Andrea di Robilant brings to life the man who used all his political skill, along with the help of conniving diplomats and spies, to democratise knowledge and show how the world was much larger than anyone previously imagined.
”An extraordinary story that reads more like a thriller than a book about history. A dazzling tale, brilliantly told.” —Peter Frankopan

Kai Feast: Food stories and recipes from the maunga to the moana by Christall Lowe $50

Nau mai, haere mai ki tenei kai hākari wainene! Christall Lowe invites you to a hākari at her family table — replete with mouthwatering dishes infused with the flavours of Aotearoa, brimming with manaakitanga, and served with wonderful tales of nostalgia. In this illustrated story of feasting you'll find a bountiful basket of kai and korero gathered all the way from the mountains to the sea. It's lip-smackingly good kai — from soul-warming kaimoana hot pot, umu pulled pork and hāngī infused with native rongoa, to kūmara donuts, sweet korimako cake and burnt sugar steamed pudding. Recipes are woven with stories of traditional gathering and feasting, tips on cooking for a crowd and notes on foraging and using native herbs. With Kai Feast in your kitchen, you'll be prepared for any occasion, big or small. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Party Rhyme! by Antonia Pesenti $24

It's PARTY RHYME! Put on your PARTY BAT, enjoy the LIZZIE DRINKS, but don't eat too much HAIRY BREAD! Flip the flaps to reveal clever puns, witty rhymes, and playful language. Perfect for children's love of birthday parties, Party Rhyme combines bold illustrations and kid-friendly jokes that will appeal to both younger and older children. Huge fun. [Board book with reverse gatefold flaps]

• Look inside!!!

• Rhyme Cordial.

• Rhyme Hungry.

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Click through for your copies:

The Remarkables: The most incredible children I’ve met — So far! by Clotilde Perrin $40

A large-format treasure trove, featuring portraits of 40 extraordinary imaginary children with descriptions of each one's superpower. Meet the most extraordinary children you'll ever see — or might ever see. An electric child, a flying child, a stone child, an invisible child, a thunder child, a cake child — what superpower would you wish for? On each spread, the children describe their characteristics, tell anecdotes, and present the superpowers that makes them unique. A ‘class photo’ brings the children together at the end, alongside a quiz for the reader to find out their own superpower. (BTW: The perfect present!)

• Look inside!

• The author talks without moving her lips.

Episodes by Alex Scott $40

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

• Look inside!

• Making (it) work.

• On the radio: a love letter to television (it's a book).

• Other graphic novels from the wonderful Earth’s End.

Vehicle: A verse novel by Jen Calleja $40

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, this title is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.
”A high-stakes speculation, an adventure into a new world order as well as the possibilities of the novel-form, Vehicle is a feat of ungovernable imagination. Bold, bracing, brilliant.” —Kate Briggs
”To say that Vehicle is a feminist Pale Fire for the Brexit generation may not be high enough praise for this intoxicating, thrilling and endlessly inventive work.” —Joanna Walsh
”Jen’s work brilliantly surfs the wave of engagement with translation, marginalised and re-assertive cultures within and beyond Europe, necessarily calling out the connection between colonial and patriarchal attitudes and actions in literary culture. Bringing a deliciously non- realist and wittily self-aware tone that is unusual in UK writing, it strikes an important balance that fits with a new wave of writing that is brilliantly romantic and feminist.” —So Mayer

• Experimental writing and transformative politics.

• Other books from Prototype Publishing.

Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens $40

A selection of short fiction from a purveyor of comical, techno-millenarian unease. Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognisable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for — or neglect — one another. The stories examine big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective
”Ghost Pains is a brilliant, sophisticated collection. Jessi Jezewska Stevens is one of the rare writers capable of taking both life and literature seriously while giving you reasons to laugh.” —Nell Zink
”Jessi Jezewska Stevens's stories gleam with their wonderfully bleak comic swerves, keen observation and fresh syntax. The world may be a goner, but short fiction is in good hands here. Ghost Pains is alive, an invigorating pleasure.” —Sam Lipsyte
”I remember the first time I read a short story by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. I was immediately drawn to its strangely rhythmic sentences, its playful sense of humour. There is a brilliant feeling of both absurdity and sincerity in these stories, of the time we are living through. I know I will want to read her always.” —Amina Cain

• Disintegrating worldviews.

• The question of selfhood.

• A new book of grotesques.

Good Cooking Every Day: Simple recipes. Beautiful menus. All year round. by Julia Busuttil Nishimura $50

We use Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cookbooks frequently at home — her recipes are very user-friendly and her methods and proportions guarantee perfect and delicious dishes that immediately become favourites.
”Every meal is something to celebrate — a casual gathering with friends, a weeknight dinner, a long birthday lunch in the garden. It doesn't matter what the occasion, there is an unspoken joy in sharing food with others.” This collection of recipes includes a guide to creating menus for any occasion, from a celebration of summer produce to pure comfort food in cooler weather, a simple family dinner to a relaxed lunch with friends. Julia pairs ingredients in harmonious and delicious ways, with recipes for every season.

• Look inside!

He Kupu nā te Māia — He Kohinga Ruri nā Maya Angelou (Ngā Ika a Whiro o Te Panekiretanga o te Reo) $35

Kua haurua rautau te roa o Maya Angelou e whakarākei ana i te ao ki ana kupu me ōna whakaaro, i hua mai ai ko te huhua o ana titonga kanorau, pukapuka mai, tuhingaroa mai, whakaari mai, ruri mai. I runga anō i te whāriki o tana ao toi, kua tuituia ngā kupu whakatuma, ki te kaikiri, ki te tohe, ki te whai ora, ki ngā wheako hoki o te wahine me te kirimangu, mā roto i tōna reo ahurei. Kua huia ngā ruri ki ngā wāhanga e whitu e hāngai ana ki te ao tonu o Maya, e whai pānga ana anō hoki ki a ngāi Māori: te whanaungatanga, te mate kanehe, te oke o te ia rā, te kirimangu, te whakatōrea, te rere o te wā me te whakaao māramatanga. I te pukapuka nei rere ai ko te reo o te kāhui wāhine o Te Panekiretanga o Te Reo, me ōna kanorautanga. Kuia mai, māmā mai, rangatahi mai, teina mai, tuakana mai, he wāhine kua rongo, kua kite i te ihi o te whai reo, me te wehi o te reokoretanga. Ka titi tonu ngā kupu a te māia ki te ngākau o te hunga e āritarita ana ki te reo Māori i tēnei huinga ruri āna.
A selection from the collected poems of Maya Angelou, translated into te reo Māori by thirty-four wāhine from across Aotearoa. This collection of ruri/poems will warm the hearts of Maya Angelou’s most ardent admirers and will also introduce new readers to the legendary poet, activist and teacher. Presented with English and Māori on facing pages, as well as poetic biographies of each translator, this book is a taonga that welcomes a literary icon to Aotearoa.

• A good fit.

Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and narrative by Isabella Hammad $26

Author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history. In this moving and erudite melding of literary and cultural analysis, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
”Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose. This is a book that calls us to witness our place in history. Isabella Hammad deserves our thanks for sharing it with the world.” —Sally Rooney
”A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.” —Max Porter
”Hammad's writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.” —Olivia Sudjic
”Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.” —Rashid Khalidi

• Other books on Palestine/Israel.

The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel $25

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women's art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman - a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola — to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession. She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
”Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It's also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel's protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction.” —Daisy LaFarge
”The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page.” —Sophie Mackintosh

• I want to read about women who can’t make things.

• The archive as potter’s field.

• Ubiquity.

rock flight by Hasib Hourani $33

Hasib Hourani's rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora.
Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family. rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.
”rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don't.” —Alison Whittaker
”Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is propelled by urgent anaphoras and compelling fragmented imagery. Scrolling and sprawling across the page and downward and outward, as attempts to articulate and scrawl the horrors facing the Palestinian people. Out of such scrawls are new languages, new refusals.” —Victoria Chang

• The imperative voice.

• Writing into silence.

Pātea Boys / Ngāti Pātea by Airana Ngarewa $37

A lively and playful bilingual collection of stories about growing up in Pātea. Interlinked and full of recurring characters, these stories are about growing up in small-town Aotearoa — sneaking away during cross country, doing bombs while the lifeguard isn't looking, peeling spuds on the marae, crashing a car at age four, and learning to live by the tikanga 'don't ask, don't tell'. Exuberant, exciting, poignant and heartfelt, each story is featured in English and te reo Māori. The perfect resource for those on their reo learning journeys as well as for readers who enjoyed The Bone Tree.

Nature, Culture, and Inequality by Thomas Piketty $35

In his new work, Thomas Piketty explores how social inequality manifests itself very differently depending on society and epoch in which it arises. History and culture play a central role, inequality being strongly linked to various socio-economic, political, civilisational, and religious developments. So it is culture in the broadest sense that makes it possible to explain the diversity, extent, and structure of the social inequality that we observe every day. Piketty briefly and concisely presents a lively synthesis of his work, taking up such diverse topics as education, inheritance, taxes, and the climate crisis, and makes a lively contribution to the debate on the existence or otherwise of ‘natural inequality’.
”A profound and optimistic call to action and reflection. For Piketty, the arc of history is long, but it does bend toward equality. There is nothing automatic about it, however — as citizens, we must be ready to fight for it, and constantly (re)invent the myriad of institutions that will bring it about. This book is here to help.'“ —Esther Duflo

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel $28

Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight. This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we've been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon? Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls' lives, which intersect for a moment — a universe that shimmers and resonates.
Long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
 “As blazing and distinctive a performance as I've beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel's figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters' bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I'm amazed.” —Jonathan Lethem

• Read an extract.

• Shapeshifting power.

The Zone: An alternative history of Paris by Justinien Tribillon $43

In The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh's paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine, the Zone, so often misun- derstood, is the key to understanding today's Paris, and even France itself. Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed makeshift housing, allotments, and dancehalls in the nineteenth century, the Zone has performed many functions and been a place of contention for two centuries. Dismantled in the 1920s, the fortifications were first replaced with gardens, stadia and homes. After the war came the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road promising seamless travel in a futuristic car-centric Paris. With the ring road came new dreams of modernity in reinvented suburbs: new towns, high-rise architecture and social housing built at record speed. Yesterday's Paris made way for tomorrow's banlieue. But the metropolitan dream was never realised. The Zone became a symbol of division: between inner and outer cities; between the bourgeois centre and the working-class immigrant outskirts; between 'us' and 'them'. The Zone, both a physical space and a powerful myth, came to crystallise the social, spatial and ethno-racial differences between Paris and the banlieue. The Zone is a brilliant anatomy of the true heart of Paris. An essential book for urbanists and historians.
”Shows how to read the recent history of Paris from its edge towards its center. How do the complicated conditions in the banlieue shape life for the Paris of tourists, monuments and bourgeois amenities? This book is innovative in its methods and absorbing in its analysis. More than this, Justinien Tribillon has worked out a way to understand other cities from the outside in.” —Richard Sennett

• Some other books about Paris.

History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the past for the future of humanity by Roman Krznaric $40

What can humankind's rich history of radical revolts teach us about the power of disobedience to change climate policy? What inspiration could we take from seventeenth century Japan to create a regenerative economy today? How might the history of financial capitalism help us understand what it takes to bring AI under control? Here, leading social philosopher Roman Krznaric unearths fascinating insights and inspiration from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. From bridging the inequality gap and keeping AI under control, to reviving our faith in democracy and avoiding ecological collapse, History for Tomorrow shows that history is not simply a means of understanding the past but a way of reimagining our relationship with the future. Krznaric shows how, time and again, societies have risen up, often against the odds, to tackle challenges and overcome crises. History can offer a vision for radical hope that could turn out to be our most vital tool for surviving and thriving in the turbulent decades ahead.
”This joyful and informative book opens our minds and souls, helping us to see with new eyes and to believe in ourselves as a species, so we can meet our predicament with a belief that change really is possible.” —Gail Bradbrook, Co-Founder, Extinction Rebellion
”An amazing feat of synthesis and imagination, weaving together many different strands of world history to make a pattern that can guide us in the present toward a vibrant future. Krznaric's book is immensely suggestive of positive actions that have track records; they've worked before, and in new formulations they can work again. Wise and practical inspiration.” —Kim Stanley Robinson

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All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles $36

Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can't escape his anger. As the world — and men in particular — continue to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal. A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy — even when that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity.
“This is the best debut I have read in at least a decade. Anyone who has wished for an English Bernhard need look no look no further.” —Stephen Mitchelmore
“A beautiful war machine. Bowles’s novel discovers a language, a mode of narration, to shelter the legitimate madness, the loneliness and rapture of a very singular individual.” —Lars Iyer
“A devastating satire on the way in which class, education and masculinity act as a kind of trap.” —The Telegraph 
”All My Precious Madness is an exhilaratingly intelligent, hilariously foul-mouthed monologue: partly a crankish rant, railing violently – and digressively – against the crushing idiocies of contemporary life, partly an affecting Bildungsroman, centred on the narrator’s relationship with their father. At once crackling with spontaneity and beautifully controlled, alternating between a curmudgeon’s uproarious disgust and a child’s poignant wonder, Bowles’s novel is a wonderful piece of writing which you will be sorry to finish." —Goldsmiths Prize judges' citation

• Bad subsidence.

• Read an extract.

• Quite a small number.

• Evolve and escape.

• Other books on the excellent 2024 Goldsmiths Prize short list.

Delirious by Damien Wilkins $38

It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older sister’s shortened life. Pete is increasingly haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered. An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing, Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.
”A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.” —Witi Ihimaera
”This is just a beautifully powerful, wonderful book.” —Pip Adam, RNZ
”Funny, sharp, sad and profound, Delirious made me laugh, think, weep and actually beat my breast. A masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Knox, The Conversation

• Above water.

The Book of Disappearance by Ibitsam Azem (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Sinan Antoon) $45

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa's neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. That search, and Ariel's reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv — café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters — against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.
”In this immensely readable novel, Ms. Azem does not resolve for us the calamity of Palestine's occupation by Israel. But stylishly and with jeweled virtuosity she makes us understand that acts of great and humane imagination will be required, and with this potent book points where and how we must all go.'“ —Richard Ford
”A wonderful book, showing what the Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer.” —The Modern Novel
“A masterpiece which immediately leads the reader to ponder the historical foundations of the 1948 Nakba, as well as the Zionist intentions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land where they belong.” —Middle East Monitor

• Absence, presence, and disappearance.

• Reclaiming space through absence.

• The lost and disappeared voice.

• Many themes.

• A certain degree.

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton $40

 In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create. 'Prairie' is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest, replete with wildflowers, ominous rivers, fireflies, cattle lowing and ghostly apparitions; 'Dresses' paints a wild and moving portrait of literary fashions; 'Art' is an imaginative illustrated essay which explores the relationship between fiction and visual art; and 'Other' offers an assemblage of irregular stories and essays that are hilarious or heartbreaking by turns. Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness and indefinable beauty.
"Pieces included in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other are not short stories or essays in the strict (and limited) sense, but spells, incantatory hallucinations, organically shared phantasmagoria, bodily immersions in materials worldly and other-wordly. It is a book and yet it is definitely way more: a field of irruptions. This is Dutton at her best yet." —Cristina Rivera Garza
"Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close, marveling at how her writing combines such extraordinary acts of precision, drawing forth strangeness and new presentations of beauty, with her own singular and searching, expansive style of intelligence. Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it." —Kate Briggs

• Stitches, stems, and pockets.

• Prose possibilities.

• How to say nothing.

• Fictions and forms of reading.

The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for life, love and art by Jans Ondaatje Rolls $55

The Bloomsbury Group fostered a fresh, creative and vital way of living that encouraged debate and communication ('only connect'), as often as not across the dining table. Gathered at these tables were many of the great figures in art, literature and economics in the early twentieth century: E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, J. M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, among many others. Here the Bloomsbury story is told in seven broadly chronological chapters, beginning in the 1890s and finishing in the very recent past. Each chapter comprises a series of narratives, many of which are enhanced with an appropriate recipe, along with sketches, paintings, photographs, letters and handwritten notes, and featuring original quotations throughout. Part cookbook, part social and cultural history, this book will appeal to lovers of food and lovers of literature alike.

• Look inside!

I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson $38

It's been six years since Rosa last saw her brother. Six years since they last spoke. Six years since they last fought. Six years since she gave up on the idea of having a brother. She's spent that time carefully not thinking about him. Not remembering their childhood. Not mentioning those stories, even to the people she loves. Now the distance she had so carefully put between them has collapsed. Can she find a way to make peace - to forgive, to be forgiven - when the past she's worked so hard to contain threatens to spill over into the present? From the acclaimed author of little scratch, this is a powerfully honest novel about how we love, how we grieve and how we forgive.
“I Will Crash places the reader firmly in the consciousness of a narrator confronted with the myriad and often conflicting impulses that arise from childhood trauma. Watson’s scattered sentences produce a deeply mesmeric and almost destabilizing effect on the reader. It’s profoundly moving, funny, and beautifully written. A masterclass on the art of ellipsis.” —Michael Magee

• Trauma and memory.

• What are siblings?

• Read Thomas’s review of little scratch.

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on hope and freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Luke Leafgren) $50

Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall.This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom as a question that demanded an answer, in order to preserve it as a dream. The wall becomes his stable point of reference, his anchor, both physically and psychologically. As each year brings with it new waves of releases of prisoners, he dares to hope, and seeks refuge in the wall when these hopes are dashed. And, in a small miracle, he finds love with a lawyer from the outside - while in her absence, the wall is his solace and his curse. A testimony of how the most difficult of circumstances can build a person up instead of tearing them down, The Tale of a Wall is an extraordinary record of the vast confinement and power of the mind.
”The Tale of a Wall is the reason we have literature. Nasser has made art out of poison with his honesty and golden pen. He brings to light the specificity of experience of the Palestinian prisoner in a manner that makes every reader think about the incarcerated in their own countries without forgetting Palestine. It helps us understand the consequences on others when we do not wield whatever power we each hold for solidarity. A profound and important work.” —Sarah Schulman
”A stunning book. A poetic and remarkable account of decades of imprisonment and the effect it can have on the mind, body and soul. This is a story of unimaginable loss, but also of survival.” —Sally Hayden
”Nasser Abu Srour doesn't allow his long incarceration in an Israeli prison to break his spirit. He turns to the wall of his cell that is intended to confine him into his path to freedom, and in the process, out of the darkness of his cell produces a luminous memoir.” —Raja Shehadeh
”A unique, lyrical exploration of what his inhumane confinement has taught him about resistance, love, lies, forgiveness, and the complicated struggle for liberation of his fractured, occupied land. Rather than allow the many walls surrounding him from childhood to break him down, he has turned them into darkly luminous companions on a journey into the heart of cruelty and redemption.” —Ariel Dorfman

Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu $38

Erun can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom. Star is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide. It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began. A tragicomedy set in the confines of a 1994 Daihatsu Mira, Poorhara is a journey of epic proportions — a poignant, expansive and darkly funny first novel written by a true poorhara.
”Poorhara is a hilarious and heartbreaking debut with characters so stunningly well-realised they will walk into your dreams at night. It’s a hero's journey with no easy answers – just harsh, furious life with all the pain, the anger and the beauty we can barely hold in or hold together. Rahurahu is a genius.” —essa may ranapiri

Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France by Dinah Hawken (with paintings by Patricia France) $40

Poet Dinah Hawken responds to the works of Dunedin artist Patricia France, who began painting in her fifties while living at Ashburn Hall, a psychiatric institution in Dunedin. Patricia's psychiatrist encouraged her to 'paint out the past' through her art, and she began in watercolour and gouache before moving on to oils. Her early abstracts evolved into vibrant compositions that often feature women, children, landscapes and flowers. Towards the end of her career her eyesight began to deteriorate, but she continued to paint. Patricia France's works have now been shown in more than 30 exhibitions throughout New Zealand - including, in 2024, at Toi Mahara in Waikanae. In her intimate, unrhymed sonnets, each presented with the work by France to which it responds, Dinah Hawken addresses a friend she never met, seeking to make a connection across time with the artist and her world.

• Look inside.

Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave $65

In the first major national history of Aotearoa New Zealand to be published for 20 years, Professor Michael Belgrave advances the notion that New Zealand’s two peoples — tangata whenua and subsequent migrants — have together built an open, liberal society based on a series of social contracts. Frayed though they may sometimes be, these contracts have created a country that is distinct. This engaging new look at our history examines how.
”Becoming Aotearoa couldn’t be more timely. While Belgrave references scholarly debates and weighs a multitude of sources, this isn’t an academic text. With its concision and interest in linking past and present, it’s more accessible than its most recent predecessor, Michael King’s The Penguin History of New Zealand. Anyone who hasn’t had the chance to go beyond the basics of our history may find a lot here that surprises them.” —Rachel Morris, NZ Geographic

• Read an extract.

• Futures and pasts.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi Relationships: People, politics and law edited by Metiria Stanton Turei, Nicola R Wheen and Janine Hayward $50

The writers address topics such as Treaty principles, sovereignty, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and mana whenua relationships to te Tiriti and settlements. The book emphasises the roles of tikanga and rangatiratanga in fostering genuine progress, and envisions a future guided by these principles in advancing Māori-Crown relationships. This is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of te Tiriti's role in shaping Aotearoa New Zealand's social, political and cultural landscape.

Ngā Hapa Reo: Common Māori Language Errors by Hona Black and Te Aorangi Murphy-Fell $37

With the surge in interest in te reo Māori in recent years, a range of errors have become common in classrooms and the wider world, many caused by language interference (following the patterns of English rather than te reo). This book hopes to fill that gap with easy-to-follow, fun examples of language errors, providing readers with the correct usages, and explanations in both te reo and English.

• Other useful books by Hona Black.

How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the politics of the body by Matthew Beaumont $40

You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body. How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of 'walking while black'. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom. Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new interpretation of the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raising important questions about the politics of the body.
"In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Beaumont reminds us that walking is far from a neutral activity. With the help of Frantz Fanon, Beaumont locates freedom at the level of the body; free from the systems of oppression, exploitation, and harassment." —Lauren Elkin

Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees: Native Bees of Aotearoa New Zealand by Rachel Weston $30

It’s hard to be noticed when you’re the size of an apple seed! New Zealand’s 28 species of native bees are teeny-tiny and super speedy! Kiwi bees pollinate Aotearoa’s native plants and trees — and they truly are the bee’s knees! Most people are not aware that New Zealand has native bees, but once you meet them, you are sure to fall in love with them! Rachel Weston introduces Aotearoa’s gentle little bees. With 36 photographic images, fun illustrations, diagrams and QR video clips of native bees zipping and zooming, Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees is an informative, interactive visual feast. Native bees have been flying under the radar for far too long, until now. Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees connects children to the world around them, where native bees (ngaro huruhuru) have had a long evolutionary history.

• Look inside.

The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world by William Dalrymple $45

 Major religions that rose to dominate Earth's largest continent. Trade networks that stretched from Japan to Hadrian's Wall. Innovations such as the numeral system and the very concept of zero, laying cornerstones for all of mathematics and science to come. Music, dance, and visual arts of stunning sophistication. —Premodern India gifted all these and more to the world. Yet today, obscured by other powers, the subcontinent's extraordinary part in global history as the economic, spiritual, and cultural hub of Asia is too often overlooked.  In The Golden Road, revered historian William Dalrymple corrects the record, telling the captivating story of ancient India's ascent through a swift and breathtaking tour of the ideas and places Indians created. Treks into the sunless depths of cave monasteries illuminate the origins and spread of Buddhism. Far-flung archaeological expeditions — from the sand-blown Red Sea coast of Egypt, to Afghan mountain refuges, to verdant Cambodian jungles — reveal the impact of Indian commerce. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship and acclaimed narrative skill, Dalrymple paints a vast canvas populated by merchants and monks, surgeons and sculptors, astronomers, kings, queens, missionaries, and more.

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
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The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame $40

Janet Frame’s third novel, long out of print, is republished by the esteemed Fitzcarraldo Editions to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. The Edge of the Alphabet is a piercing, startlingly strange work about identity, the post-colonial experience and the search for connection in a lonely world. Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world. This edition includes a new foreword by Catherine Lacey.
”Her writing is engaging and idiosyncratic – full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard. That is the joy of books like this, out of print for 60 years, but now roaring into view, stronger and brighter than ever. It’s good to have it back.” —JJohn Self, The Times
”Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob…. Frame’s fiction … made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.” —Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement
”‘It is the most Woolfian of Frame’s work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking The Waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.” —Catherine Taylor, Guardian
”Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.” —Hilary Mantel
”It is a revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.” —Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
”Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels almost as if it were not written.” —Jane Campion, Guardian

• Voyage into delusion.

• Everything is walking through you.

• Why Frame didn’t want the book reprinted (and why it is being reprinted now).

• Red currants.

I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews) $34

Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short — sometimes very short — stories. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.
”Pure genius.” — Max Porter
”Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.” — Publishers Weekly
”Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.” — Kirkus Reviews
”Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form. The brevity of The Illiterate alone tells you that this is not her whole story. It is simply the one she tells.” — Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
”For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.” — Missouri Williams, The Nation

• We can never express precisely what we mean.

• Deprivation exercises.

• The uses of illiteracy.

• The Illiterate.

• Read Thomas’s review of The Notebook.

This Mouth Is Mine by Yásnaya Elena A. Gil (Yásnaya Aguilar) (translated by Ellen Jones) $40

"This Mouth is Mine is an important reminder that the linguistic is political and that linguistic discrimination tends to intersect with racism. The book shows that indigenous languages are modern languages too, as suitable for writing rock lyrics, tweeting jokes, or explaining quantum physics as Spanish and English." —The Times Literary Supplement
A passionate cry for living, vital, indigenous languages and the people who speak them., this book should be required reading for our current government. Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Yásnaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico's relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best. What does it mean to have a prize for Indigenous literature when different Indigenous languages are as far from each other as they are from Japanese? What impact does considering Tzotzil "cultural heritage" have on our idea of it, when it is still being used, and refreshed, and changed (like every other language) today? How does the idea of Indigeneity stand up, when you consider Indigenous peoples outside of the frame of colonialism? Personal, anecdotal, and full of vivid examples, Aguilar does more than advocate for the importance of resistance by native peoples: she offers everyone the opportunity to value and enjoy a world in which culture, language, and community is delighted in, not flattened. "We have sacrificed Mexico in favour of creating the idea of Mexico" she says. This Mouth Is Mine is an invitation to take it back.
"This volume is a collection of denunciations against linguistic discrimination, contempt for speakers of languages other than Spanish, the constant violation of their linguistic rights, and the lack of access to self-determination over their territories. This is evidence that, although it proclaims otherwise, the Mexican state has failed to build a true intercultural relationship. This is a dialogical text that weaves an individual voice with that of the community to reflect on the struggle for linguistic diversity and vitality, in a context of systematic violence against peoples and communities who defend their language and territory." —ONAHCYT
"Thanks to the accessible and unpretentious language used by the author, this book is an undemanding and even fun read without losing the rigour and seriousness that such an important subject deserves. It is difficult to find a book to compare with This Mouth is Mine, since the struggle of Indigenous peoples to bring their own perspectives to the table has been hard and many obstacles are still placed in their way of achieving autonomy. Still, the fact that the foundations are only just being laid to amplify historically marginalised voices in the academy makes this work all the greater an achievement for those whose viewpoints have been ignored because they have been expressed in languages other than Spanish. The publication of This Mouth is Mine is not only a tool for questioning the role that the state has played in the elimination of the native cultures of the national territory, but also constitutes significant progress toward the creation of a socio-cultural policy focused on linguistic diversity." —Idiomatica, revista universitaria de lenguas

• We were not always Indigenous.

• Defending the tongue.

• The necessity of linguistic diversity.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey $26

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity? {Now in paperback}
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize (and a customer favourite).

• Liking Alien — Having Insomnia

• Try orbiting

• A Melville of the Skies

• Viewing from Space

• Live with the Astronauts

• The Shapeless Unease.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden $38

It's fifteen years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be — led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep — as a guest, there to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis — she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house — a spoon, a knife, a bowl - Isabel's suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation — leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva — nor the house — are what they seem. 
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
”We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.” —Booker judges
”Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’, which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, Van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.” —Lauren Bufferd, BookPage
”This is a beautifully realised book, nearly perfect, as van der Wouden quietly explores the intricate nuances of resentment-hued sibling dynamics, the discovery of desire (and the simultaneous discovery of self), queer relationships at a time when they went unspoken, and the legacy of war and what it might mean to have been complicit in its horrors.'“ —Kirkus

• Read an extract.

• On (Not) Reading Anne Frank.

• What the author reads.

⿻ 數位 Plurality : The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl et al $68

A superb handbook for wresting digital technology from the hands of those who seek to use it to exploit and control us, and instead for using it to make a better, freer, more inclusive life for all. Digital technology threatens to tear free and open societies apart through polarisation, inequality, and loneliness. But in the decade since the weeks-long occupation of the Taiwan parliament, a diverse island of resilience has shown another way is possible. Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, withstood the pandemic without lockdowns, and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalising on a culture of innovation to "hack the government." Here, the architects of Taiwan's internationally acclaimed digital democracy share the secret of their success. Plurality (symbolized ⿻) harnesses digital tools not to replace humans or trust, but to channel the potential energy in social diversity that can erupt in conflict instead for progress, growth and beauty. From intimate digitally empowered telepathy to global trade running on social networks rather than money, ⿻ offers tools to radically enrich relationships while leaving no one behind. ⿻ thus promises to transform every sector from healthcare to media, as illustrated by the way it has been written: as a chorus of open, self-governing collaboration of voices from around the globe. Their work in public on this openly available text shows — as well as tells — how everyone from a devout African farmer to a Hollywood celebrity can help build a more dynamic, harmonious and inclusive world.

• From civic hacker to cabinet minister.

Tree of Nourishment (‘Kāwai’ #2) by Monty Soutar $40

It’s 1818 on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui, New Zealand. Hine-aute, granddaughter of the legendary warrior Kaitanga, is fleeing through the bush, a precious yet gruesome memento contained in her fishing net. What follows is a gripping tale of a people on the cusp of profound change that is destined to reverberate through many generations to come. The Europeans have arrived, and they’ve brought guns and foreign diseases, ushering in a whole new world of terror and trouble. They’ve also brought a new religion, which will cause Māori to question everything they had believed to be true. Hine and her sons Ipumare and Uha are caught in the crossfire of change, creating fractures in their close familial bonds and undermining everything they hold dear. From raids by musket-wielding war parties to heightened internecine warfare; from the influx of whalers, traders and Christian missionaries to the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi, Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment strikes hard and deep into the heart of the initial impact of colonisation on Māori.

• For Such a Time as This (‘Kāwai’ #1)

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie $28

For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.

Juice by Tim Winton $55

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.

• New ground.

• Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists.

Self-Esteem and the End of the World by Luke Healy $45

Who is Luke Healy?' For over ten years, a graphic novelist called Luke Healy has invested all of his self-esteem into his career. Then, almost overnight, just as his brother is getting married, both seem to vanish. Spiralling and lacking purpose, he searches for identity — in self-help books, replacement jobs and human connection — and visits cheesy British hotels and abandoned Greek islands. Set against the backdrop of a dangerously changing global climate, with melting ice-caps and flooding cities, Self-Esteem and the End of the World spans two decades of tragicomic self-discovery until the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood revival of Luke's work comes into view — but what might be the cost?Quietly funny, smartly introspective, and grounded in deeply-felt familial highs and lows, Self-Esteem and the End of the World ponders what happens when the person you are isn’t who you need to be, who you are when nobody’s watching, and ultimately, who can you possibly be at the end of the world?

• Look inside!

• Self-obsession and environmental disaster.

Cypria: A journey to the heat of the Mediterranean, A new history of Cyprus by Alex Christofi $40

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 traveller and returner, as Odysseus was.

• Takeaways.

• He took a camera, too.

Ideology: An introduction by Terry Eagleton $37

Ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. Eagleton unravels its many definitions, exploring its tortuous history from the Enlightenment to the present. The book provides lucid accounts of the thought of key Marxist thinkers, as well as that of philosophers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Freud and the post-structuralists, and a political reformulation of a vital set of ideas.
”Witty, lucid, and powered by that stinging, militant, ironising intelligence which distinguishes Eagleton's work.” —Guardian

Odyssey by Stephen Fry $40

Troy has fallen. After 10 years of war, the Greeks make their way back to their own lands - but what homes now await them? Agamemnon must return to his wife Clytemnestra, who has been nursing her rage since he sacrificed their daughter to the gods for a favourable wind. Her revenge will know no bounds. Meanwhile, Odysseus has angered the god Poseidon and he is cursed to wander the seas. Follow Odysseus after he leaves the fallen city of Troy and takes ten long dramatic years — battling monsters, resisting goddesses, and suffering the curse of Poseidon — to voyage home to his wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca. The fourth and final volume of Fry’s epic undertaking of retelling Greek myths and legends.

• Mythos.

• Heroes.

• Troy.

• Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

• Circumspect Penelope.

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Click through for your copies:

Kataraina by Becky Manawatu $37

Becky Manawatu's new novel is the much-awaited sequel to award-winning bestseller Āue and is unflinching in its portrayal of the destructive ways people love one another and the ancestral whenua on which they stand. In Āue, eight-year-old Arama was taken by his brother, Taukiri, to live with Kat and Stu at the farm in Kaikoura, setting in train the tragedy that unfolded. Arama's aunty Kat was at the centre of events, but, silenced by abuse, her voice was absent from the story. In this new novel, Kat and her whanau take over the telling. As one, they return to her childhood and the time when she first began to feel the greenness of the swamp in her veins — the swamp that holds her tears and the tears of her tīpuna, the swamp on the land owned by Stu that has been growing since the girl shot the man.

The Empusium: A health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40

In September 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?  Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone — or something — seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.  A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling in this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon.
”The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.” —Michael Cronin, Irish Times
”A magnificent writer. —Svetlana Alexievich
”A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” —Annie Proulx
”One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.” —The Economist
”Tokarczuk’s latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious – and spooky – web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus
”Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is a richly entertaining, captivating and thought-provoking novel. Despite its acute engagement with The Magic Mountain it’s more Hoffmann than Mann, which works in its favour.”
—David Hayden

• Stella reviews the book on RNZ.

• The translator reads from the book.

• Reinterpreting the classics.

• We’ll be discussing the book at our online book group on 12 November — please join us!

Seeing Further by Esther Kinski (translated from German by Caroline Schmidt) $40

While travelling through the Great Alfold, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens upon a dilapidated cinema. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years. Entranced by the mozi, as cinema is known in Hungarian, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by what she calls "a dream in a glass coffin," the preservation of the cinematic experience, "beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people's thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of it reawaking." What follows is a history of place, told by the town's few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema's former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to the cinema in words and pictures.
”Seeing Further is an elegy for the shared space of the cinema and the promise of a collective waking dream, a profound and melancholy meditation on the shift from public to private viewing that is itself a visionary feat. Esther Kinsky’s narrator is both camera and projector, capturing and transmitting haunting images of daily life in the endless expanse of the Hungarian lowlands, where past and present dissolve into one another as people wait for a future that never arrives. It is a novel saturated with loss and mystery, and a profound reckoning with the historical forces and material conditions that have forever altered the terms of how we see.” —Christine Smallwood
"This fixation with ‘the how of seeing’ allows Kinsky to show off her fine-tuned skills as a cultural theorist, with flashes of essayistic brilliance running through the narrative as she tries to tease out the essential, elusive charm of the cinema.” —Lou Selfridge, FRIEZE
”Kinsky delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema.” —Publisher's Weekly
”Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss.” —Kirkus Reviews
”Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality. Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.” —2022 Kleist Prize jury

• Out of the darkness.

• Other books by Esther Kinsky.

An Inconvenient Place by Jonathan Little (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell), with photographs by Antoine d’Agata $45

What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these 'inconvenient places' which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality.  With the photographer Antoine d'Agata, before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small sub-urban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph when, there is literally nothing to see — or almost nothing? 
”Of the three ways of observing – as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come – Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn’t flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia’s visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it’s not because Littell’s visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d’Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.” —James Meek
”In An Inconvenient Place, Jonathan Littell takes us on a journey into the most disturbing of modern human landscapes, from the jumble of horrors that were the ravines of Babyn Yar, into the cellars of Bucha. In chiselled, uncompromising prose, accompanied by haunting photographs by Antoine d’Agata, Littell’s unforgettable account is nothing less than a moral triumph over the willful amnesia imposed on history’s savageries by its perpetrators.” —Jon Lee Anderson

• Look inside.

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder $40

Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. Timothy Snyder has been called "the leading interpreter of our dark times." As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism throughout the world. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we're fighting for. Freedom is the great Western commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn't so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes — the habits of mind — that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish.
”Timothy Snyder is one of our most original and perceptive thinkers, on the history of Europe, on American politics, and now, on freedom. Everyone who cares about freedom — what it means and what it takes to preserve it — should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum
”There's nothing else like On Freedom. This time the acclaimed historian draws not just from global history but his own. The result is a wonderfully provocative and profoundly persuasive book. Snyder leads us away from our misconception that freedom is just the removal of what stands in our way and toward a project of liberty that, through active engagement and commitment to the common good, we can achieve together.” —J. J. Abrams
”A must-read. Timothy Snyder is one of the leading minds of our times. This new book draws from his work as an historian of central Europe, his travelling and moving encounters in Ukraine at war, and his thinking on how democracy, pluralism and wealth inequality will look like in 2076 United States and the world at large.” — Thomas Piketty
”Much like life itself, freedom needs to defined and redefined. On Freedom offers fresh insight into essential aspects of human existence — the values and obligations inherent in every individual's life.” —Ai Weiwei

• The ways we think about freedom often make us less free.

Great Women Sculptors edited by Lisa Le Feuvre $110

Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day. Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today's rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today's most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.

• See a full list of artists.

• Look inside!

Playground by Richard Powers $38

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, author of The Overstory. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three thousand- year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure — a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to green light the project or turn the seasteaders away.
”Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive.” —Percival Everett
”An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways — gripping, alarming and uplifting.” —Emma Donoghue

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss $40

A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Sarah Moss, author of The Fell and Summerwater, confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life. Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents' post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, interrogating what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did - and still does - with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind.
”Devastating, funny and full of brilliant insights. This is a brave book, but more than that it is generous. It has made me think about how incredibly porous we all are: to our families, to society, to culture, to each other. That's why this book is important: it asks us to take responsibility for our impact on each other.” —Melissa Harrison
”Defiant in its anger and humour, My Good Bright Wolf is a compulsive and compelling story of how hard it is to break free of the punishing narratives around women's bodies and how easy it is to nearly lose yourself to them. And it is also a story of how words — painful and beautiful, wolf-sharp words — can be a way back.” —Emilie Pine

• A voice in the back of her head.

Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders $37

The Burke and Hare 'anatomy murders' of 1828 terrify Edinburgh, until Burke is hanged and Hare disappears. Over a decade later, in the early days of New Zealand colonial settlement, a whaler washes up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. He calls himself Ōkiwi Brown, sets up a pub with a nasty reputation and finds himself a woman who had been abandoned on his beach. Nearby, children sing dark nursery rhymes of murder. One afternoon Ōkiwi is visited by a pair of ex-soldiers, a bo'sun looking for a fight, and itinerant worker William Leckie with his young daughter Mary. When a body is discovered on the beach, it could be that a drunken man has drowned. But it could be that the gathered witnesses know something more. From the author of Jerningham and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant.

Nature’s Ghosts: The world we lost and how to get it back by Sophie Yeo $62

For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world. Our activities have permanently altered the environment — for good and for bad. In Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries. Uncovering the stories of the people who have helped to shape the landscape, she seeks out their footprints even where it seems there are none to be found. And she explores the timeworn knowledge that can help to fix our broken relationship with the earth. Along the way, Sophie encounters the environmental detectives — archaeological, cultural and ecological — reconstructing, in stunning detail, the landscapes we have lost. Today, the natural world is more vulnerable than ever; the footprints of humanity heavier than they have ever been. But, as this urgent book argues, from the ghosts of the past, we may learn how to build a more wild and ancient future.

Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies by Lyell Cresswell $50

During lockdown, Lyell Cresswell wrote this far from conventional autobiography. Each chapter begins with an increasingly fanciful — and very colourful — account of an exciting life. Under the cover of this playful narrative, he smuggles in deeply considered ideas about music, and about what it means to be a composer - a person who is both philosopher and storyteller. These ideas are accompanied by beautiful and exuberant pen and ink drawings — some for graphic scores, others for his own pleasure. He says, ‘When we look at art, we look for something deep and private. If we find what we're looking for we realise that no attempt to put it into words is adequate.” His music was like the man himself: emotional, uncompromising, richly textured, often quite noisy - and wonderful.

• Music by Lyell Cresswell.

• Look inside.

Kahurangi: The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson by Dave Hansford $80

Kahurangi is a celebration of the biodiversity of Kahurangi National Park, Northwest Nelson and Golden Bay. Energised by ancient, complex geology and a multitude of habitats, from vast beech stands to lush coastal rainforest, from sprawling ramparts of karst and marble to extensive wetlands and estuaries, this region holds the greatest variety of plants and animals in the country. Hansford argues for the urgent protection of these precious areas

• Look inside!

Geckos and Skinks: The remarkable lizards of Aotearoa by Anna Yeoman $60

One of the least known, and subsequently least celebrated parts of Aotearoa's native wildlife surely are our lizards. The reason is simple - our geckos and skinks are shy, secretive creatures, rarely seen except by seasoned observers. They are remarkable creatures found in a huge range of habitats, from rocky islets on the Fiordland coast, through all our forests and shrublands and up to the high mountains. While identification guides have been written Geckos and Skinks is the first book to tell stories about these creatures, how and where they live, and how they breed. But crucially, this book is a fascinating insight into the myriad conservation efforts that are ongoing in New Zealand, for our geckos and skinks are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and predation from pests. Heavily illustrated with beautiful photographs, this book shines a light on our remarkable lizards, and exposes a world that deserves to be far better known.

• Look inside.

Marina Abramović Turned Herself into Art and Wasn’t Sorry. by Fausto Gilberti $30

Marina Abramovic is an artist who uses her body to perform in unexpected and unusual ways that make an audiences think. She once sat back-to-back with her partner and had their hair tied together for over 17 hours. Another time, museum visitors watch her scrub 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day. This innovative book tells an inspiring story about the pioneering performance artist who is also the first female artist to hold a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This celebration for young readers of one of the most important contemporary woman artists of our time features striking black-and-white and red illustrations printed in Pantones throughout, together with a reproduction of the artist's work and a brief biography at the back of the book. In this innovative volume, Marina Abramovic and her cutting-edge work are brought to life for young readers like never before.

• Look inside!

A wave of books is rolling towards your shelves. Take your pick!

With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang $40

Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.
With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract modern artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
”In Agnes Martin's grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights ("My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience"), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence.” —Elisa Gabbert
”Victoria Chang's lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines-stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness.” —Tao Lin

• The meaning of a word can exist without the word.

Lublin by Manya Wilkinson $35

On the road to Lublin, plagued by birds that whistle like a Cossack's sword, three young lads from Mezritsh brave drought, visions, bad shoes, Russian soldiers, cohorts of abandoned women, burnt porridge, dead dogs, haemorrhoids, incessant sneezing, constipation, and bad jokes in order to seek their fortune. Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren’t so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches.
”A true boy's own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.” —Preti Taneja

• Read an excerpt.

• A story for the ages.

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett $38

As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time drug-dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll — Cillian's teenage brother — in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins and goaded by his dead mother's dog, Dev is drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.
”Strange and beautiful. A book to live inside.” —Sally Rooney
”A gift of true storytelling. Barrett's talent burns up the page.” —Anne Enright
”So consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison.” —Guardian

Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg (translated from Italian by Beryl Stockman) $28

Two novellas chronicling domestic life, isolation and the passing of time. Architect Carmine and translator Ivana were once lovers. Their child died and their relationship ended but now, decades on, both with marriages and children of their own, they are friends. During a bout of pneumonia, Carmine – uneasy in his life of aspiration and materialism – begins to look back over opportunities missed and choices made. Set against postwar social breakdown, the melancholic, quietly dazzling Family elegantly examines the human condition and what brings happiness to a life. Borghesia is a delicate evocation of one life and the relationships that constrain and define it. In both novellas, underneath a subtle, stripped-down prose and a rich cast of characters, runs a seam of unhappiness and isolation, as Natalia Ginzburg explores the allure of memories and the complexity of family and relationships.
 “Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.” —Rachel Cusk
”Ginzburg's beautiful words have such solidarity. I read her with joy and amazement.” —Tessa Hadley
”I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style — her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.” —Maggie Nelson

• Books by Natalia Ginzburg.

X-Ray (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Nicole Lobdell $23

X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity. In X-ray, Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors we make out of them, and why, despite our fears, we're still fascinated with them. In doing so, she draws from a variety of fields, including the history of medicine, science and technology studies, literature, art, material culture, film, comics, gender studies, architecture, and industrial design.

• Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Mediterra: Recipes from the islands and shores of the Mediterranean by Ben Tish $60

More than a hundred mouth-watering Mediterranean dishes from Spain to Syria and everywhere in between — one delicious cuisine gives way to the next. From Spain and Italy, through Greece and Turkey and down to North Africa, the region is rich with deeply delicious food. With seven-spice falafel from Lebanon, gyros from Greece, classic tiramisu from Italy, and grilled smoky sardines from Crete, the full flavors of the region are on glorious display for recipes that work across diets and seasons. But while each country has its own unique dishes and distinct cultures, there is a distinct Mediterranean signature that brings them all together: hot summers, dry winters, coastal briny winds, alfresco eating, street markets, sacrosanct meal times, and bringing the best out of as many local seasonal ingredients as possible.
”Ben takes us across the Mediterranean and then back to his table. From Italy to Tunisia, Croatia to Morocco, capturing the heart of Mediterranean cooking. Simple, seasonal, and heartfelt. Count me in, Ben. “ —Yotam Ottolenghi
”Not only is Ben's Mediterra a beautiful book, but it is so well researched, with mouth-watering, accessible recipes.” —Georgina Hayden
”You probably think you don't need another book about Mediterranean food, but you need this one. I leaf through Ben's books thinking 'I want to make that, and that, and that!'. His food is rich, intense and alive.” — Diana Henry

• Look inside!

Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning by Eli Burnstein, illustrated by Liana Fink $40

What's the difference between mazes and labyrinths? Proverbs and adages? Clementines and tangerines? Join author Eli Burnstein on a hairsplitter's odyssey into the world of the ultra-subtle with Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, this humorous dictionary takes a neurotic, brain-tickling plunge into the infinite (and infinitesimal) nuances that make up our world. There is no distinction between precision and pedantry, after all.

• Look inside.

The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the politics of work by Jason Read $40

In a world of declining wages, working conditions, and instability, the response for many has been to work harder, increasing hours and finding various ways to hustle in a gig economy. What drives our attachment to work? To paraphrase a question from Spinoza, "Why do people fight for their exploitation as if it was liberation?" The Double Shift turns towards the intersection of Marx and Spinoza in order to examine the nature of our affective, ideological, and strategic attachment to work. Through an examination of contemporary capitalism and popular culture it argues that the current moment can be defined as one of "negative solidarity." The hardship and difficulty of work is seen not as the basis for alienation and calls for its transformation but rather an identification with the difficulties and hardships of work. This distortion of the work ethic leads to a celebration of capitalists as job creators and suspicion towards anyone who is not seen as a "real worker." The Double Shift argues for a transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.
”Drawing on Marx, Spinoza, and popular film, Jason Read builds an illuminating analysis that not only astutely captures, but also helps to make sense of, our double experience of wage work as a locus of freedom and compulsion, hope and fear, self-actualization and self-impoverishment, love and hate. This book is a must read for students of contemporary capitalism.” —Kathi Weeks

Te Pukapuka ka Kore e Pānuihia by Tim Tipene, illustrated by Nicoletta Sarri, translated by Kanapu Rangitauira $23

The boy at the centre of Tim Tipene's striking new story doesn't like reading, until one day he picks up The Book that Wouldn't Read. Suddenly the book takes on a life of its own, with sentences moving up and down, words changing colour and disappearing, and strange characters that get the reader jumping around, even burping — and before he knows it, he's finished the book. “What should I read next?” 

• Look inside.

Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison $40

Harlan Ellison's work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as those discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time. Includes: '“Repent Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman’ (Hugo Award winner); ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ (Bram Stoker Award winner); ‘Mefisto in Onyx’ (Bram Stoker Award winner); ‘Jeffty Is Five’ (British Fantasy Award winner); ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’ (Edgar Allan Poe Award winner).
”In his stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison has always been a sociological writer and an affirmed liberal and freethinker. Most of all, we sense outrage and anger — as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.” —Stephen King

• He had a rough time as a kid.

Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene by Lauren Fuge $45

From the beginning, humans have been wanderers. Our feet carried us out of Africa and propelled us to far-flung corners of the world, often through incredible feats of innovation and imagination. These explorations yielded great rewards: land and resources, food and knowledge. But in every landscape we have explored, we have become a force of change. Our appetites have pushed planetary systems to breaking point — yet still we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new forests to fell. Fuge takes the reader on a journey from the dramatic fjords of the Pacific Northwest to the shifting coastlines of Norway, from the ancient geology of outback Australia to the outer reaches of the known universe, and asks: what drives our urge to explore? How has it changed our relationship with the planet? And, in the face of imminent environmental collapse, can we find in our voyaging history the tools to reimagine our future?

Will You Care If I Die? by Nicolas Lunabba $40

In a world where children murder children, and where Swedish gun violence is the worst in Europe, Nicolas Lunabba’s job as a social organiser with Malmö’s underclass requires firm boundaries and emotional detachment. But all that changes when he meets Elijah — an unruly teenage boy of mixed heritage whose perilous future reminds Nicolas of his own troubled past amongst the marginalised people who live on the fringes of every society. Allowing Elijah into his home and then into his heart, Nicolas crosses one of his own red lines. With the odds stacked against them, and completely unprepared for the journey he and Elijah now set off on together, can Nicolas keep Elijah safe from harm and steer him towards a better future? Written as a letter to Elijah, Will You Care If I Die? is a disarmingly direct memoir about social class, race, friendship and unexpected love in the context of social polarisation and the rise of the far right.

Poetry Play Kit: Games to get your poems started by Joseph Coelho $25

Make poetry fun with Joseph Coelho: This activity kit is packed with games and activities - discover all kinds of ways to start writing poems. A compendium of literacy games and activities: Create endless poetic combinations with over 300 word cards! Spin the spinner for linguistic techniques and use the game and activity cards to start your poems off. Edutainment for children aged 6-9: Inspire your child's love of language and give them the tools they need to express themselves and succeed in school - and in life! Learning through play: Developed with the help of kids, parents and teachers, this kit contains 320 word cards, 15 double-sided game and activity cards, 28 rhyming dominoes, a poetry spinner and a rules and inspiration booklet.

• Look inside the box!

• Notebooks and poetry.

The books you buy today will bloom in Spring.
Click through for your copies:

Titiro / Look by Gavin Bishop $25

A completely delightful ‘first words’ board book, with details of the appealing bold pictures labelled both in te reo Māori and English.

• Look inside!

• Other wonderful books by Gavin Bishop.

Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist by Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor, and Greg Donson $70

A century on, her remarkable body of work remains fresh and contemporary. Featuring over 150 artworks, this book examines the continuing impact of Whanganui-born and British-trained Edith Collier and her artistic legacy. Collier was a dynamic Modernist, and the story of her years in Europe and then her return to New Zealand and the near abandonment of her practice are compelling as both art history and an affecting human story.

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Leslie Adkin: farmer photographer by Athol McCredie $70

Leslie Adkin (1888-1964) was a Levin farmer, photographer, geologist, ethnologist and explorer, a gifted amateur and renaissance man, of sorts, who used photography to document his scholarly interests, farming activities and family life. His much loved and exceptionally beautiful photographs taken between 1900 and the 1930s are one of the highlights of Te Papa's historical photography collection. This book of over 150 images, selected by Athol McCredie, Curator Photography at Te Papa, establishes his reputation more clearly within the development of photography in New Zealand and showcases a remarkable body of work. McCredie's substantial text gives rich insights into the varied elements of Adkin's very busy life, including his love for his wife Maud, captured over the years in a range of intimate and engaging images which feel as fresh as when they were first taken.

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Resetting the Co-ordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Chris Braddock, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Layne Waerea, and Victoria Wynne-Jones $70

The first anthology/reader of performance art of Aotearoa New Zealand, Resetting the Coordinates offers a lively, 50-year critical survey of Aotearoa New Zealand's globally unique performance art scene. From the post-object and performance art of the late 1960s to the rich vein of Maori and Pacific performance art from the early 1990s, its 18 chapters by researchers and practitioners is a major reference for art and performance communities of New Zealand, Australia and further afield. It discusses the influential work of Jim Allen, Phil Dadson, Peter Roche and Linda Buis, performance art initiatives in post-earthquake Christchurch and queer performance art, among many other topics.

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After a Dance: Selected stories by Bridget O’Connor $38

Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday. In After a Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here — at its best and at its delightful worst.
”These are some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I've read in a long time.” —Roddy Doyle
”Every O'Connor story is a performance, a live fight with time and decay, disgust and the human body. She wrote intensely from her time and place; to read her now is to be catapulted back to 1990s London. Yet the voice, the themes are more relevant than ever. No wonder she was so preoccupied with temporality: she was before her time.” —Martina Evans, The Irish Times

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang $25

Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang's unique imagination invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
“United by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion.” —China Miéville
”A science fiction genius. Ted Chiang is a superstar.” —The Guardian

We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida (translated from Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda) $36

On the top floor of an old building at the end of a cobbled alley in Kyoto lies the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. Only a select few — those who feel genuine emotional pain — can find it. The mysterious centre offers a unique treatment for its troubled patients: it prescribes cats as medication. Get ready to fall in love:-—Bee, an eight-year-old female, mixed breed helps a disheartened businessman as he finds unexpected joy in physical labour; —Margot, muscly like a lightweight boxer, helps a middle-aged callcentre worker stay relevant; —Koyuki, an exquisite white cat brings closure to a mother troubled by the memory of the rescue kitten she was forced to abandon; —Tank and Tangerine bring peace to a hardened fashion designer, as she learns to be kinder to herself; —Mimita, the Scottish Fold kitten helps a broken-hearted Geisha to stop blaming herself for the cat she once lost. As the clinic's patients seek inner peace, their feline friends lead them towards healing, self-discovery and newfound hope. [Hardback]

Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon $38

Haddon weaves ancient myths and fables into fresh and unexpected forms, and forges new legends to sit alongside them. The myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth is turned into a wrenching parable of maternal love — and of the monstrosities of patriarchy. The lover of a goddess, Tithonus, is gifted eternal life but without eternal youth. Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals. From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks. Whether describing Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit, or St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert, his powers of observation are at their height when illuminating the thin line between human and animal.
”A marvel of a collection — suffused with curiosity, humanity and mystery, bold in its scope and virtuoso in its telling. Mark Haddon makes stories matter.” —Kaliane Bradley
”In sentences as precisely cut as paper sculptures, Mark Haddon fits ancient myth to the cruelties and wonders of the present.” —Francis Spufford

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff $26

A servant girl escapes from a settlement. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief of everything that her own civilisation has taught her. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how — and if — we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves. [New paperback edition]
”I could not stop reading. A haunting, thrilling, gripping and rich. An unputdownable adventure, a mystery and a strange beautiful redemption.” —Naomi Alderman
”Groff is a mastermind, a masterpiece creator, an intoxicating magician. I wait with impatience for every book and I am always surprised and delighted. The Vaster Wilds feels like her bravest yet, hallucinatory, divine, beyond belief but also entirely human.” —Daisy Johnson

• Read Stella’s review.

The Year of Sitting Dangerously by Simon Barnes $29

In the autumn of 2020, Simon Barnes should have been leading a safari in Zambia, but Covid restrictions meant his plans had to be put on hold. Instead, he embarked on the only voyage of discovery that was still open to him. He walked to a folding chair at the bottom of his garden, and sat down. His itinerary: to sit in that very same spot every day for a year and to see — and hear — what happened all around him. It would be a stationary garden safari; his year of sitting dangerously had begun. For the next twelve months, he would watch as the world around him changed day by day. Gradually, he began to see his surroundings in a new way; by restricting himself, he opened up new horizons, growing even closer to a world he thought he already knew so well. The Year of Sitting Dangerously inspires the reader to pay closer attention to the marvels that surround us all, and is packed with handy tips to help bring nature even closer to us. [Now in paperback]

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout $38

It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known — "unrecorded lives," Olive calls them — reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
”The shrewd-eyed observer of love, loss and the ties that bind - life, basically - is back. Strout weaves a gossamer light web of a community's hopes and setbacks.” —Observer

Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to A.I. by Noah Yuval Harari $45

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI - a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity.

• Never summon a power you can’t control.

The Name She Gave Me by Betty Culley $25

A thoughtful and moving YA novel in verse. Rynn was born with a hole in her heart — literally. Although it was fixed long ago, she still feels an emptiness there when she wonders about her birth family. As her relationship with her adoptive mother fractures, Rynn finally decides she needs to know more about the rest of her family. Her search starts with a name, the only thing she has from her birth mother, and she quickly learns that she has a younger sister living in foster care in a nearby town. But if Rynn reconnects with her biological sister, it may drive her adoptive family apart for good.

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers $25

An experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage their dreams, desires, connections and communities. [New paperback edition.]
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, 2023.
”A polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of these isles as it's rarely taught.” —Observer
”It's been a while since I've reacted as emotionally to a novel. An epic the north has long deserved: ambitious, dreamy, earthy, dark, welcoming and not. There are readers like me who will not just enjoy this book but feel deeply grateful for its existence.” —Financial Times

New books for a new month and a new season.
Click through for your copies:

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner $38

Sharp, brainy, and hugely enjoyable — Rachel Kusner’s new novel exceeds even our anticipatory dreams. A thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of a mysterious elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation tout court. Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno's idealism laughable — he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Beneath this parodic spy novel about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
”Creation Lake reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture. Only Rachel Kushner could weave environmental activism, paranoia, and nihilism into a gripping philosophical thriller. Enthralling and sleekly devious, this book is also a lyrical reflection on both the origin and the fate of our species. A novel this brilliant and profound shouldn't be this much fun.” —Hernan Diaz
”I honestly don't know how Rachel Kushner is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerising way.” —George Saunders

• A philosophical spy novel for an age of environmental anxiety.

• A secret being deposited.

• Read an extract.

• Getting older.

• To help her cause.

• Kindred.

• Other books on the 2024 Booker long list.

COMFORT by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh

Ottolenghi's first brand-new major cookbook since the era-defining SIMPLE and FLAVOUR. With over 100 irresistible recipes alongside stories of childhood and home, this is comfort food, Ottolenghi-style. Ottolenghi brings his inspiring, flavour-forward approach to comfort cooking, delivering new classics that taste of home. A bowl of pasta becomes Caramelised Onion Orecchiette with Hazelnuts & Crispy Sage, a warming soup is Cheesy Bread Soup with Savoy Cabbage & Cavolo Nero, and a plate of mash is transformed into Garlicky Aligot Potato with Leeks & Thyme. Weaving memories of childhood and travel with over 100 recipes, COMFORT is a celebration of food and home — of the connections we make as we cook, and pass on from generation to generation.

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Mina’s Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa (translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder) $38

After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life. The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin Mina draws her into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. As the two girls share confidences their eyes are opened to the complications of the adult world. Tomoko's understanding of her uncle's mysterious absences, her grandmother's wartime experiences and her aunt's unhappiness will all come into clearer focus as she and Mina build an enduring bond.
”Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina's Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.” —Ruth Ozeki

• Quite surprised.

• This book has chosen me.

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (translated from Italian by Leah Janeczko) $28

Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero's need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations: she tries (and fails) to run away to Paris at the age of fifteen; she moves into an unwitting older boyfriend's house after they have been together for less than a week; and she sets up a fraudulent (and wildly successful) street clothing stall to raise funds to go to Mexico. Most of all, she falls in love — repeatedly, dramatically, and often with the most unlikely and inappropriate of candidates. As she continues to plot escapades and her mother's relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn, it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer — and a liar — inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity. Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, Lost on Me seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity (beginning with Vero's first artistic achievement: a painting she steals from a school classmate and successfully claims as her own). New paperback edition.
”I fell head over heels in love with Lost on Me. What a thrillingly original voice! Raimo writes with a tender brutality that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking.” —Monica Ali
”A uproariously funny portrait of an unconventional family from a writer who knows the sliver of ice in the heart as well as she knows love. This deliciously enjoyable novel is a true original and one to savour.” —Katherine Heiny

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize

The Empty Grandstand by Lloyd Jones $30

Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered — a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world. The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice. Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood — riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped. As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference — places, people, politics and importantly, language. The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned — it's a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery, dream spaces where language is forever in play.

Dinner: 120 vegan and vegetarian dishes for the most important meal of the day by Meera Sodha

“The ability to put a good dinner on the table has become my superpower and I want it to be yours too.,” says Meera Sodha, who has previously brought us the loved cookbooks East and Fresh India. Dinner is a fresh and joyful celebration of the power of a good meal all created to answer the question: What's for dinner? in an exciting and delicious way. Discover 120 vibrant, easy-to-make vegetarian and vegan main dishes bursting with flavour, including baked butter paneer, kimchi and tomato spaghetti, and aubergines roasted in satay sauce. There are also mouthwatering desserts, such as coconut and cardamom dream cake and bubble tea ice cream, and exciting side dishes, such as salt and vinegar potato salad and asparagus and cashew thoran. From quick-cook recipes to one-pan wonders and delectable dishes you can just bung in the oven and leave to look after themselves, Dinner is an essential companion for the most important meal of the day.

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Translation State by Ann Leckie $28

Qven was created to be a Presger Translator. The pride of their clade, they always had a clear path before them: Learn human ways and, eventually, make a match and serve as an intermediary between the dangerous alien Presger and the human worlds. But Qven rebels against that future, a choice that brings them into the orbit of two others: Enae, a reluctant diplomat attempting to hunt down a fugitive who has been missing for over two hundred years; and Reet, an adopted mechanic who is increasingly desperate to learn about his biological past — or anything that might explain why he operates so differently from those around him. As the conclave of the various species approaches and the long-standing treaty between the humans and the Presger is on the line, the decision of all three will have ripple effects across the stars. 
"A rich exploration of self-identification and personhood serve as a fantastic introduction to Leckie's world." —Polygon
"In this book that's part space opera, part coming-of-age tale, part body horror delight, Ann Leckie explores themes of power, gender identity, family, destiny and AI through charming characters, dramatic diplomacy and nail-biting action." —NPR Books
"Leckie's humane probe into power, identity, and communication is muscular and thought-provoking. This is an author at the height of her powers." —Publishers Weekly
"Puts the question of an individual's right to self-identification — both in terms of gender and species — at the heart of the narrative. Daring, thoughtful novels like Translation State perform vital cultural work to open up new spaces so that we can all remove our disguises and shine like the princexes we were always meant to be." —Los Angeles Review of Books

One Man in His Time by N.M. Borodin $55

From humble origins, the eminent Russian scientist Nicholas Borodin forged a career in microbiology in the era of Stalin. Pragmatic and dedicated to his work, he accepted the Soviet regime, even working on several occasions with the Secret Police. But in 1948, while on a state-sponsored trip to the UK to report on the bulk manufacture of antibiotics, he could no longer ignore his rising consciousness of the suppression of independent thought in his country. It was then that he committed high treason by writing to the Soviet ambassador to renounce his citizenship. One Man in his Time is the story of a man trying to live an ordinary life in extraordinary times. Rich in incident and astonishing details, it charts Borodin's childhood during the revolution and famine through to his scientific career amidst the suspicion and violence of the purges. Unsparing and frank in its depiction of the author's collaboration with Soviet authorities, it offers unparalleled insight into the daily reality of life under totalitarian rule. First published in 1955, and recently ‘rediscovered’. [Hardback]
”An astonishing testimony that has never seemed more timely or more pertinent.” —Nicholas Shakespeare

• Unspeakable times.

THAT GREEN OLIVE by Olivia Moore

Everyone has a food story — the recipes and ingredients they've grown up with and grown used to. In That Green Olive, recipe creator and Aotearoa foodie Olivia Moore shares her story, and shares how to find joy in the kitchen by mixing things up a little. Drawing inspiration from kiwi classics, restaurants and Olivia's lakeside hometown — with recipes for venison sausages and candied trout — That Green Olive gives you the choice to be a little bit fancy, whether it's beer and gruyere scones or a tasty nduja moussaka.
These are cosy snacks, dinners and desserts designed to inspire and devour, whether you are cooking for yourself, your family or friends.

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Emperor of Rome: Ruling in the Ancient world by Mary Beard $30

What was it really like to rule and be ruled in the Ancient Roman world? In her international best-seller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome. Now, she shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, one after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Beard asks bigger questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman (and our own) fantasies about what it was to be Roman, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before. Now in paperback.
”Britain's most famous classicist at the peak of her powers. Even more interesting than the insight into the imperial elite is the light the book sheds on the modern world.” —Sathnam Sanghera
”A beautifully written product of a lifetime of deep scholarly learning.” —Martin Wolf
”Lavishly illustrated, erudite and entertaining. Beard is so appealing and approachable that even the recalcitrant reader who previously gave not a single thought to the Roman Empire will warm to her subject.” —Jennifer Szalai

All That We Own Know by Shilo Kino $38

Meet Māreikura Pohe: she's in love with her best friend Eru, who is leaving to go on a church mission, and she's an accidental activist — becoming an online sensation after her speech goes viral. But does she really want the spotlight? Navigating self-diagnosed ADHD, a new romantic relationship, forging friendships and reclaiming her language all at once is no easy feat. And as her platform grows, Māreikura is unwittingly placed on a pedestal as a voice for change against the historical wrongs of colonisation. The question remains: at what personal cost? Set against the vibrant backdrop of Tāmaki Makaurau, All That We Know is a modern take on family and friendship and how, even in a divided and often polarising world, the resilience of friendship, love, and connection can defy the most challenges of our times.
”Magnificent. A well-observed mirror of our current time.” —Pip Adam
”Shilo Kino is an extraordinary writer — a growing, potent voice in Aotearoa/NZ literature. All That We Own Know is a clever, knowing insight into language trauma and reclamation and how we each navigate our experiences of colonisation and healing through te ao Maori me te ao Pakeha.” —Miriama Kamo

The Echoes by Evie Wylde $38

Max didn't believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max's death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max. Both a celebration and autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations and set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, stories and who has the right to tell them.

• Resound and rebound.

Wilding: How to bring Nature back, An illustrated guide by Isabella Tree, illustrated by Angela Harding $50

The latest iteration of Isabella Tree’s remarkable record of how she rewilded an English estate is a beautiful large-format book featuring stunning lino-cuts by Angela Harding. It is intended of children, but will be loved by anyone. Knepp is now home to some of the rarest and most beautiful creatures in the UK, including nightingales, kingfishers, turtle doves and peregrine falcons, hazel dormice and harvest mice, scarce chaser dragonflies and purple emperor butterflies. The sheer abundance of life is staggering too. When you walk out into the scrubland on an early spring morning the sound of birdsong is so loud it feels like it's vibrating in your lungs. This is the story of Knepp, and a guide telling you how to bring wildlife back where you live. Includes timelines, an in-depth look at rewilding, spotlight features about native animals including species that have returned and thrive — butterflies, bats, owls and beetles. There are accessible in-garden activities to 're-wild' your own spaces and the book encourages you to slow down and observe the natural world around you, understand the connections between species and habitats, and the huge potential for life right on your doorstep.

• Look inside!

The books you buy today will bloom in Spring.
Click through for your copies:

Nine Girls by Stacy Gregg $22

They dug a hole and they put the box filled with gold inside it. To keep it safe until they could return, one of them placed a tapu on it. A tapu so that anyone who tried to touch the gold would die. Titch is determined to find the gold buried somewhere on her family's land. It might be cursed but that won't put her off. Then an unexpected encounter with a creature from the river reveals secrets lying beneath its surface. As Titch uncovers the truth about the hidden treasure, she learns about her own heritage — and what it's like to feel like an outsider in your own world. A story about growing up in a time of social unrest in early 1980s New Zealand, Nine Girls is a page-turning adventure.
Winner of the  2024 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award, and winner of the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Junior Fiction Award — NZ Book Awards for Children & Young Adults 2024.
”In Nine Girls Stacy Gregg masterfully weaves comedy, fantasy and history together in a profound exploration of the complexity of identity in Aotearoa New Zealand through the experiences of a young Māori girl finding her place in the world. Historical events are woven into the fabric of the story, grounding her personal journey in a broader socio-political context. Vivid characters animate a fast-paced, eventful narrative with plot twists and emotional highs and lows. This book celebrates Māori identity, pays tribute to Aotearoa’s rich history, and testifies to the power of storytelling. Nine Girls is a taonga for readers of all ages, resonating long after the final page is turned.” — NZBACYA judges’ citation 

• The author on the book.

The Invasion of Waikato — Te Riri ki Tainui by Vincent O’Malley $40

The 1863 crossing of the Mangatāwhiri River by colonial forces was a pivotal moment, igniting a war between the Crown and the Waikato tribes that profoundly influenced New Zealand’s future. In The Invasion of Waikato: Te Riri ki Tainui, Vincent O’Malley introduces this critical period, presenting a conflict driven by opposing visions: European dominance versus Māori autonomy (as promised by the Treaty of Waitangi). The ensuing war was devastating, resulting in the loss of many lives, the displacement of communities and extensive land confiscations. Building on the detailed examination found in The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000 (2016), this concise new volume broadens the reach of the Waikato War narrative. Enriched with new research, maps and images, O’Malley’s latest work invites readers to contemplate the profound effects of this era on the nation’s identity and its enduring legacy.

• Look inside.

• 160 years on from the fighting.

Modern Women: Flight of Time edited by Julia Waite $65

Profiling 44 innovative artists, this book places women in the front and centre of New Zealand Modernism and explores their varied responses to the transformational changes occurring across five decades of the 20th Century. While presenting key works by such iconic figures as Rita Angus, Frances Hodgkins, and A Lois White, the book also aims to celebrate the significant contributions of lesser-known artists, including June Black, Flora Scales and Pauline Yearbury, one of the first Māori graduates of the Elam School of Fine Arts. Through their works, the book uncovers how these women navigated and transformed the cultural and political landscape of their time, offering new insights into themes of storytelling, identity and belonging. The artists featured in the book are: Rita Angus, Mina Arndt, Tanya Ashken, June Black, Jenny Campbell, Alison Duff, Elizabeth Ellis, Jacqueline Fahey, Ivy Fife, Anne Hamblett, Rhona Haszard, Barbara Hepworth, Avis Higgs, Frances Hodgkins, Julia Holderness (Florence Weir), Laura Knight, Mere Harrison Lodge, Doris Lusk, Molly Macalister, Ngaio Marsh, Kāterina Mataira, Eileen Mayo, Juliet Peter, Margot Philips, Ilse von Randow, Anne Estelle Rice, Kittie Roberts, Flora Scales, Maud Sherwood, May Smith, Olivia Spencer Bower, Helen Stewart, Teuane Tibbo, A Lois White, Pauline Yearbury, Adele Younghusband, and Beth Zanders.Nicely presented, with over 120 illustrations. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Our Island Stories: Country walks through colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler $65

As well as affecting the lands appropriated and people subsumed into Empire around the world, the British colonial enterprise had an indelible effect even on the countryside and rural life within Britain’s own shores. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. Empire transformed rural lives, whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines — it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to link the lives of their descendants around the world now. [Hardback]
”This is real, difficult, essential history delivered in the most eloquent and accessible way. Her case, that rural Britain has been shaped by imperialism, is unanswerable, and she makes her arguments beautifully. An important book.” —Sathnam Sanghera
”A detailed and thoughtful exploration of historical connections that for too long have been obscured. A powerful book that brings the history of the Empire home — literally.” —David Olusoga
”This is an essential and fascinating book because it brings to light, through conversations and nature walks, some of the buried connections between Britain's landscape and historic buildings and its complicated hidden histories.” —Bernardine Evaristo

• A lightning rod.

• Capital and Empire.

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker $38

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle. Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks - among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine — war-wife — to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by visions of his death — and her own — while Ritsa is forced to bear witness to both Cassandra's frenzies and the horrors to come. Meanwhile, awaiting the fleet's return is Queen Clytemnestra, vengeful wife of Agamemnon. Heart-shattered by her husband's choice to sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind to Troy, she has spent this long decade plotting retribution, in a palace haunted by child-ghosts. As one wife journeys toward the other, united by the vision of Agamemnon's death, one thing is certain — this long-awaited homecoming will change everyone's fates forever.
”Brilliant, masterful, strikingly accomplished. Few come close to matching the sharp perspicacity and profound humanity of Pat Barker. This bloody tale has reverberated down the ages. With her characteristic blend of brusque wisdom and piercing compassion, Barker remakes it for our times.” —Guardian
”The Voyage Home brings forgotten female characters into sharp psychological focus. It is astonishingly fresh and modern, bristling with anger, and breezily quick to read. Pat Barker is one of the finest novelists working today.” —Alice Winn

• A fierce and chilling end.

• The Women of Troy.

• The Silence of the Girls.

• Intolerable when not writing.

The History of Ideas: Equality, justice, and freedom by David Runciman $40

What can Samuel Butler's ideas teach us about the oddity of how we choose to organise our societies? How did Frederick Douglass not only expose the horrors of slavery, but champion a new approach to abolishing it? Why should we tolerate snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy, as Judith Shklar suggested? And what does Friedrich Nietzsche predict for our future? From Rousseau to Rawls, fascism to feminism and pleasure to anarchy, this is a mind-bending tour through the history of ideas which will forever change your view of politics today.

• Talking politics.

• How the world might be remade.

• After Confronting Leviathan.

Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian literature by Dougal McNeill $45

McNeill explores how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world. In engaging prose and with impressive intellectual range, McNeill applies insights from Marxist critical theory to the works of selected Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian writers. From Harry Holland, Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore responding to the legacy of Robert Burns in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first-century novelists applying their literary imaginations to intersectional spaces and Indigenous, settler, gendered and international freedom traditions, McNeill reveals literature’s capacity to find potent forms with which to articulate concepts of, and beliefs about, freedom. McNeill’s argument for literature as an essential ‘form of freedom’ is a resonant call for our times. Authors whose work is discussed in Forms of Freedom include: Pip Adam; Emily Perkins; Alice Tawhai; Hone Tuwhare; Patricia Grace; Elsie Locke; Albert Wendt; Mary Gilmore; Dorothy Hewett; Harry Holland; Eve Langley; Ellen van Neerven; Henry Lawson; Amanda Lohrey.

• Emily Perkins as a prophet of globalised cultural and economic flows.

Granta 167: Extraction edited by Thomas Meaney $33

From mining to Bitcoin, energy politics to psychoanalysis, the spring edition examines a practice as old as human history: Extraction. In this issue James Pogue is detained in the Central African Republic, where mines and mercenaries are at the centre of governmental conflict, Nuar Alsadir analyses boredom, Bathsheba Demuth travels the Yukon River and Laleh Khalili unravels the history of energy in Israel. Elsewhere, Anjan Sundaram reports from Mexico, Thea Riofrancos discusses the green transition and William Atkins visits the Forest of Dean, with photography by Tereza Červeňová. And in fiction, we have new work by Carlos Fonseca (tr. Jessica Sequeira), Camilla Grudova, Benjamin Kunkel, Eka Kurniawan (tr. Annie Tucker) Rachel Kushner and Christian Lorentzen. Plus, photography by Danny Franzreb (introduced by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian) and Salvatore Vitale.

• Look inside.

• Culture bound up with extraction.

Tairāwhiti: Pine, profit, and the cyclone by Aaron Smale $18

An examination of the region's struggle with colonial legacies and environmental mismanagement. Through personal stories, interviews and critical analysis, Smale uncovers the multifaceted impacts of pine plantations, land confiscation and climate events of increasing severity on a landscape and its people. This book provides a nuanced understanding of the socioeconomic and ecological challenges facing the Tairāwhiti community and points toward a path that will honour and sustain the future.

• Other BWB Texts.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson $38

The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognise — a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick — except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the 'sidekick' is DC Reggie Chase. The crumbling house — Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton — suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it. Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another painting: ‘The Woman with a Weasel’, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow's carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does ‘The Woman with a Weasel’ hold? The puzzle is Jackson's to solve. And let's not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace. All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house. A brilliantly plotted, supremely entertaining, and utterly compulsive tour de force from a great writer at the height of her powers. [I’m sure that’s not a rook but perhaps a booby on the cover. {T}]

The House on Via Gemito by Dominico Starnone (translated from Italian by Oonagh Stransky)

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit.The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night.
Federi, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn't have a family to feed, he'd be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment.His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble. Narrated against the background of a Naples still marked by WWII and steeped in the city's language and imagery.

• Long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Determined: The science of life without free will by Robert Sapolski $30

Determined offers a synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works — the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's ‘fault’; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognising that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. New paperback edition.
”Robert Sapolsky explains why the latest developments in neuroscience and psychology explode our conventional idea of Free Will. The book's chock-full of complex and often counter-intuitive ideas. It's also a joy to read. That's because Sapolsky is not only one of the world's most brilliant scientists, but also an immensely gifted writer who tells this important story with wit and compassion. It's impossible to recommend this book too highly. Reading it could change your life.” —Laurence Rees

Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers $37

Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town's Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics. Dinah has an especial hero- Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can't believe her luck. Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high. But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he's never met, to come to somewhere he's never heard of. With nothing to lose and in need of the cash Bucky boards a plane. And so Bucky finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who is preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century. Over the course of the week, he finds himself striking up new and unexpected friendships; and facing his past, and its losses, for the very first time.
”Myers is the laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection. How beautiful to read something so affirming and full of light, and to have music, ephemeral as it might be, presented as precious and transformational.” —Wendy Erskine

• The beauty of the three-minute pop song.

Living With Our Dead: On loss and consolation by Delphine Horvilleur $30

Eleven stories of loss, mourning, and consolation, collected during years spent caring for the dying and their loved ones. From Charlie Hebdo columnist Elsa Cayat, to Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan, the ‘girls of Birkenau’; from Yitzhak Rabin, to Myriam, a New Yorker obsessed with planning her own funeral, to the author’s friend Ariane and her struggle with terminal illness, Horvilleur writes about death with intelligence, humour, and compassion. Rejecting the contemporary tendency to banish death from our thoughts, she encourages us to embrace its presence as a fundamental part of life. Drawing from the Jewish tradition, Living with Our Dead is a humanist, universal, and hopeful book that celebrates life, love, memory and the power of storytelling to inspire and sustain us.

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor $30

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island's shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what's to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island's harsh, salt-stung landscape. When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But, as she guides them across the island's cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.
”Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character's specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude. To different eyes, the same island might look like a prison or a romantic enclave, but to actually apprehend the truth of a place or person requires patience, nuanced attention and the painstaking accrual of details. Understanding is hard work, O'Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book's end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve.” —Maggie Shipstead, New York Times
”An astonishingly assured debut that straddles many polarities: love and loss, the familiar and the strange, trust and betrayal, land and sea, life and death. O'Connor has created a beguiling and beguiled narrator in Manod: I loved seeing the world through her eyes, and I didn't want it to end.” —Maggie O'Farrell

Ten Nosey Weka by Kate Preece and Isobel Joy Te Aho-White $22

A trilingual picture book in ta rē Moriori, te reo Māori, and English. Learn basic words and numbers in the Moriori, Māori, and English languages in this book about ten nosy weka, who peck at ngarara (ngarara / insects), squeeze under a farm gate, and tease a tchuna (tuna / eel). Let's hope these curious weka can find their way back to their flock in the end.

• Speaking ta rē Moriori.