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

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken) $40
It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet — it watches and listens. It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men's eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake. Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater. [Hardback]
”Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she does.” —Samantha Harvey
”I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.” —Max Porter
”Addictive and unsettling.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”An instant classic that feels passed down from centuries ago and yet utterly unique, fresh, and modern. Another stunning, surreal journey from an author who seems to never disappoint.” —Jeff VanderMeer
”The Wax Child has emerged from an imagination that is wild, visionary, and absolutely original. It is beautiful, eerie, sublime, and, like a fingerprint or a snowflake, only one of its kind. Olga Ravn is a roof-raisingly brilliant writer.” —Neel Mukherjee
>>Fragmenting the novel.
>>Witch trials and wax narrators.
>>Everyone asks.
>>Where is the first person?
>>Books by Olga Ravn.

French Cooking for Two: Seasons of Friendship by Michèle Roberts $48
Friendship has its own distinctive seasons, constantly changing and evolving, just as the years revolve. Cooking for a friend, you can show your affection in a direct, practical way. Composing a menu to suit or intrigue a particular beloved person, you are demonstrating how well you understand and appreciate them. This book is divided into three overlapping seasons, following the 1929 classic La bonne cuisine by Madame Saint-Ange. In each section you will find dishes and suggestions appropriate to the season as well as ideas for particular seasonal moments, such as sardine sandwiches à la Colette, designed to be packed into bicycle baskets for picnics. These recipes are designed to be straightforward to follow so you can concentrate on your guest rather than dashing between stove and table. As with Roberts’s first cookbook, French Cooking for One, the book bursts with personal observations and anecdotes and is in itself a good friend to spend time with. [Paperback with French flaps]
Reviews of French Cooking for One:
”An enduring delight for readers and cooks alike.” —Nigella Lawson
”Mussel salad with ravigote sauce. Rabbit with mustard. Steak with bordelaise sauce. So many micro feasts, and every one of them nourishment for body and soul. Most of the recipes, short and uncomplicated, aim to deliver the perfect effort-to-taste ratio; if she has an Elizabeth David-like briskness on the page, she's also a sensualist, a part-time sybarite. But even if you're not in the mood for cooking, simply to read them is to encourage rumination. She is such a noticing writer, and in her hands you find yourself doing the same, a dowdy cauliflower suddenly beautiful, a slab of marbled meat a world unto itself.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
”This slender volume insists that food for one should be simple yet delicious. Drawing on memories of her French grandmother's cookery, Roberts' recipes are elegant and — mostly — quick to prepare: celeriac croquettes, trout with almonds, or sausages with apples and cider. A delightful little book.” —Constance Craig Smith
>>French Cooking for One.

Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi) $45
”I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.”
The title section of Kim Hyesoon's visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea's violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in”. Autobiography of Death at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death — how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural 'you' speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with 'Face of Rhythm', a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems — one for each day the dead must await reincarnation — to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi's extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Hyesoon's art — a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism — yield 'a low note no one has ever sung before.' That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, ‘for even death can't enter this deep inside me’.” —Griffin Prize Judges
>>Knives and carcasses.
>>A will left in the scribbles.
>>The female grotesque.

Garrison World: Redcoat soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire by Charlotte Macdonald $70
The pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire. In fewer than forty years, less than a lifetime, Aotearoa had gone from being a Māori world in which rangatira dominated, to a colony in which the settler state was in control of the economy, politics and people’s social destiny. Garrison World explores the lives of soldiers, sailors and their families stationed in Aotearoa New Zealand and across the British empire in the nineteenth century. Spanning the decades from 1840 to 1870, this major new history from Charlotte Macdonald places the New Zealand Wars within the wider framework of imperial power. It shows how conflict and resistance throughout the empire, from rebellion in India to the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, were connected to the colonial project in New Zealand. At the centre of this history are the thousands who served in the British military — from rank-and-file soldiers and bluejackets drawn from working-class Britain and Ireland, to officers from elite backgrounds who purchased their commissions. Their presence in New Zealand was vital to the imposition of imperial control, both during times of war and in the intervening years when the garrison underpinned a fragile settler economy and society. Through rich archival detail and personal accounts, Garrison World traces the structures, experiences and legacies of military occupation. Acknowledging the impact on Māori communities and whenua, the book offers a critical and unflinching account of how imperial authority was imposed — and often violently asserted. This is a compelling and significant contribution to understanding the reordering of power that shaped Aotearoa in the nineteenth century. Nicely presented and fully illustrated. [Hardback]
”Garrison World brings together the histories of soldiers, wars and physical violence with the appropriation of land and attacks on Indigenous culture so vital to settlement and colonisation. A story of the exercise of power, vividly told in part through the lives of the ‘redcoats’, those foot soldiers who provided the binding threads of imperial power.” —Catherine Hall, Emerita Professor of History, Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, University College London
”Charlotte Macdonald deploys formidable scholarship, lucid writing and pertinent images to create a spell-binding exploration of the intersecting lives of soldiers and civilians during the New Zealand wars. The result is a magnificently well-informed, readable and enthralling book.” —Atholl Anderson, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University; Adjunct Professor, Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha— University of Canterbury
”A large number of imperial soldiers and sailors were stationed in New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, but beyond their involvement in fighting, their wider impact has remained little understood — until now. Garrison World brings this history to light through impeccable scholarship and dazzling insight. An essential work for anyone interested in understanding our past.” —Vincent O’Malley, historian and author of The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000
”Richly illustrated and elegantly written, Garrison World is a pleasure to read. It offers a social history of the British army that looks beyond battles, focusing on the everyday lives and worldviews of soldiers and sailors. By tracing their role in New Zealand, India and Jamaica, the book reveals the deep interconnectedness of conquest, settlement and imperial power.” —Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Emeritus Professor of History, Te Herenga Waka— Victoria University of Wellington
”A compelling account of the soldiers and sailors who were the cutting edge of British colonialism. This richly peopled history immerses the reader in the lives of these military men and illuminates how they reshaped New Zealand, with enduring consequences. It offers a critical new vantage point on our colonial past.” —Tony Ballantyne, Professor of History, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka—University of Otago
>>Look inside.

Giving Birth to My Father by Tusiata Avia $30
”My father has been chipping himself down since he arrived here, he is half man and half vessel, readying for the journey to Hawaiki.” Giving Birth to My Father is about learning to live with a loss that seems simply too heavy to bear. First, Tusiata Avia tells the imagined story — the one of how things should go — followed by the story of what really happens. As her father travels through his last days and into the arms of his tupu'aga, transformed, the family gathers around him with their love and raw need, and their suffering turns to storm clouds. For Avia, his death is a beginning. Parent and child have switched places as the river carries them downstream, and she sees her father with new eyes. But this is also a time of not knowing to whom she belongs and where she will be welcome now. This is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone. [Paperback]

Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar $39
We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority? Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it? 'Minority rule' is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they'll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren't actually silencing the 'forgotten' working class, immigrants aren't eating your pets, trans-activists aren't corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn't crushing free speech. In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it's facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction — and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here. [Paperback]
”One of the boldest and most exciting thinkers of her generation.” —Naomi Klein
”Delivers its message with punch and panache. A joy to read.” —Guardian
”An exegesis of the playbook of the right. Sarkar is one of the most refreshing, salient voices on the left. For many progressives, the last decade has felt like something akin to a slow descent into madness, or falling victim to a collective, large-scale gaslighting campaign. With spectacular clarity and genuine wit, Sarkar puts her arm around their shoulders, offers a little tough love, and invites them to step out of the mist. If leftists feel they have been stumbling around in the darkness, Minority Rule flicks on the light.” —Standard
>>The future of politics.

Out of the Blue: Essays on artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, 1985—2021 by Christina Barton $50
In a collection spanning her career, highly regarded art historian and curator Christina Barton reminds readers of the art writer’s essential quandary: how to put the visual, material, sensory and temporal into words. “The project of art writing is at once argumentative and invested,” she writes, “self-doubting and ambitious, flawed yet with its own beauty (at its best).” Published in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Out of the Blue gathers 37 essays devoted to artists from Aotearoa New Zealand. These are artists whom Barton — entering the art-writing fray in the 1980s, a time of widespread intellectual upheaval — has thought about, worked with and written for, from her first piece on artist and filmmaker Claudia Pond Eyley, published in 1985, to a foreword written in 2021 about sculptor Paul Cullen. They form a small but telling subset of her work, and provide readings that not only anatomise the nature of each artist’s work but also demonstrate the ideas that have been in play as art has unfolded here in Aotearoa. Artists discussed include Jim Allen, Edith Amituanai, Billy Apple, Bruce Barber, Shane Cotton, Bill Culbert, Pip Culbert, Julian Dashper, Bill Hammond, Louise Henderson, Frances Hodgkins, Zac Langdon-Pole, Maddie Leach, Vivian Lynn, Julia Morison, Kate Newby, Pauline Rhodes, Marie Shannon, Shannon Te Ao and Ans Westra. [Paperback]
”Out of the Blue offers readers generous insight into the evolution of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most respected art writers. What comes through for me – with unequivocal consistency – across the arc of time we travel in these essays, is Barton’s sheer love of art. This book stands as a testament to her enduring commitment to thinking and writing about art, and the complex nature of its entanglement with the world.” —Kirsty Baker

New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 years of photography in Aotearoa by Athol McCredie $90
xpertly curated, and showcasing images taken between 1850 and 2025, this book is an essential reference that honours artistic legacies and explores our identity as a nation. Together these photographs tell stories about life in this country from almost the earliest days of European colonisation and about how the practice of photography has evolved here. When it was first published in 2015, New Zealand Photography Collected was a landmark book, captivating audiences. In this fully revised and enriched edition, of the more than 400 images, almost half are new, reflecting the dynamic and increasingly diverse nature of the collection, allowing for previously unseen treasures, and enabling familiar works to be recontextualised with fresh insights. [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!

Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent $35
Rita considered the dead. Shut her eyes. Rolled their names around her brain. Stacked each person in order like folded laundry, warm and crisp from the sun. She wondered how her name would sound amongst them. In the rural reaches of Auckland, the women of the eclectic Gordon family gather for Christmas. They may push each other’s buttons, but know precisely when to offer tea (or a tipple). Rita, the 50-year-old baby of the family, is planning to tell them she has cancer. Drifting between past and present, she considers the lives of women in their community and reckons with what it all means for her future and her family. Featuring elderly lesbians, twins who aren’t twins, and several dogs named Roger, Hoods Landing is about shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together. [Paperback]
“This is a deeply affecting book. Vincent seamlessly and skilfully weaves the aesthetics of film, musical, opera, food and the occult to create a work about love and death like no other I can remember. This compelling work breaks new ground in the literary landscape of Aotearoa.” —Pip Adam
>>The best place to read, &c.

The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over life in a seventeenth-century West African port by Toby Green $65
In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers — the djabaks. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today's Guinea-Bissau? In The Heretic of Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped — and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness. Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres's case, we can see what this world was really like. The Heretic of Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived — its beliefs, values and people. [Hardback]
”A stunning global history of West Africa, The Heretic of Cacheu weaves together the tragic histories of the Inquisition and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on archival research in three continents and presenting transformative new arguments in a profoundly moving narrative, with this new tour de force, Green confirms himself as the most innovative historian, writer, and thinker of his generation.” —Ana Lucia Araujo

Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $40
The Nobel laureate’s breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and Johann Sebastian Bach. The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area. Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai's novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face. [Paperback]
"Krasznahorkai's work offers, to a degree rare in contemporary life, one of the central pleasures of fiction: an encounter with the otherness of other people. He's a universalist cut loose from the shibboleths of humanism." —Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times
"The best new novel I have read this year is written in a single sentence that sprawls over 400 pages. Herscht 07769 by the Hungarian genius Laszlo Krasznahorkai is an urgent depiction of our global social and political crises, rendering our impotent slide into authoritarianism with compassionate clarity. It is also a book whose timeliness derives precisely from the way its unusual style disrupts the ordinary literary mechanics of time. A masterful study in what it means to keep trudging through a world that is always ending but will not end." —Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post
>>Find out more about the Nobel Laureate in Literature.

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

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter $45
He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living. Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions.  Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field.  When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry's flat:  1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today — but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.  As Johnny's mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry's youth- of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next — and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever. Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era.  It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. [Hardback]
”Nova Scotia House is one of the best things I've read in many many years; it is an extraordinary work of the imagination, and there is so much heart and longing in it that it filled my soul. It is a completely imagined work — a kind of gay dystopian story that isn't, a search for family that ends up being a multiple love story about creation. And I want to point out something as powerful as the narrative: the sheer writing force of it. Sentences that reordered my reading DNA from the first, colloquial sentences that are highly literary, a kind of queering of Beckett, a new way of seeing and writing that is not anyone else's but Porter's own. I am really knocked out by this book. It is a profound work.” —Hilton Als
”Beautifully provocative, Nova Scotia House is the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I've read for a very long time.” —Eimear McBride
”This book occupies the spaces, the lives in between, the connections we make, the memories still happening in our heads, our bodies' responsibility to the state we put them in, growing, lusting, dying, reviving, sold on, the ruins of our lives, the communities of our past, another kind of economy, of sex and loss and weeds and words, this work of genius, Nova Scotia House.” —Philip Hoare
”I truly think Charlie Porter is doing something new: forging a radically direct language for describing a whole new way of inhabiting the world. Nova Scotia House is about loss and grief, sex and love, but it's also a super-powerful account of change and growth, about metabolising trauma and refusing to relinquish dreams.” —Olivia Laing
>>Catharsis.
>>Loss.
>>Bring No Clothes.

Moderation by Elaine Castillo $38
Girlie, a thirty-something Filipinx-American, works a day job at a social-media moderation centre, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's good at it, too — dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to cauterise all her emotions when she was still a kid — so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big pay rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, stunning simulations of civilisations long-since dead. Girlie takes the job, and it almost seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the ambient racism and misogyny of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just awaken in her something long-forgotten. [Paperback]
”Moderation is a novel that refuses to do things by halves. It is a piercing, laser-precise exploration of big tech. Breathtakingly funny, and a highly charged, passionate and tender love story. A wonderful book. —Kaliane Bradley
”Tender and cutting, engrossing and immediate — Elaine Castillo's Moderation is a moving meditation on connection, growth, and how, in a world that's constantly on the verge of ending, one way we move forward is cultivating our own. Castillo's prose is luminous and lucid, balancing humor and emotion with wicked aplomb. Castillo expertly stretches the possibilities of language; Moderation is infinite.” —Bryan Washington
”With its unyielding density of sharply observed detail, high-resolution psychological drama, and driving narrative momentum, Moderation reminded me that the novel is still the best form of virtual reality we have.” —Jenny Odell
>>Labour and trauma.

A Short History of Photography by Walter Benjamin (translated from German by Ben Fergusson) $20
Perhaps more than any other text, A Short History of Photography by the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin has shaped the way in which we understand early photography and the photographic act. One of the first theoretical studies of visual culture, this essay laid the foundation for modern cultural criticism. Instead of regarding the artwork as a unique object, Benjamin emphasized the political and artistic potential of a new technology based on endless reproduction. A Short History of Photography was originally published in the German literary journal Die Literarische Welt in 1931 as three short essays reviewing several books dedicated to early photography. In this text, Benjamin introduced concepts that remain central to critical theory of the medium: the aura, optical unconscious, reproducibility, among other topics. It constitutes a remarkably prescient description of the limits and potentials of photography which remains thought-provoking today. [Paperback]

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith $39
”God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales.  We enter the child's world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith's memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold.  Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as ‘Horses’ and ‘Easter’, 'Dancing Barefoot' and 'Because the Night'.  She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees.  She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen.  The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family. As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again — the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live. [Paperback]
>>Art rats in New York City.
>>’Dancing Barefoot.’

How to Live an Artful Life: 366 inspirations from artists on how to bring creativity to your everyday by Katy Hessel $45
Find daily inspiration for every day of the year in a collection of quotes and ideas from artists, brought together by the founder of The Great Women Artists. The year ahead is a gift that has been given to you. What might you do with it? Dive into the year with the wisdom of artists and writers. Gathered from interviews, personal conversations, books and talks, How to Live an Artful Life moves through the months of the year offering you thoughts, reflections and encouragements from artists and writers such as Marina Abramovic, Anne Carson, Siri Hustvedt, Nan Goldin, Lubaina Himid, Louise Bourgeois and many more. With a thought for every day of the year, whether looking for beginnings in January, freedom in summer, or transformation as the nights draw in, this is a book of words to cherish. The year is full of the promise of work that has yet to be written, paintings that are yet to be painted, people who have yet to meet, talk, or fall in love. With this book in hand, pay attention, and see the world anew. Go out and find it, taste it, seize it, and live it — artfully. [Hardback]

Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right by Quinn Slobodian $65
A exploration of how today's rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it. After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated — and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek's disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote. In this book, Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of 'competition' ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right. Hayek's Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders. This book is currently entirely relevant to these shores too, unfortunately. [Hardback]
>>Crack-Up Capitalism.

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown $38
A searing novel written entirely in South Yorkshire dialect about three working-class girls whose friendship is torn apart by a devastating secret Ask anyone non-Northern, they'll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London. But Doncaster's also the home of Rach, Shaz and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to taking pregnancy tests at Family Planning when they're late. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz's bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace - their friendship is as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Written in a South Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and drags you through Doncaster's schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don't trust our friends. [Hardback]
”A lacerating, exhilarating debut novel... It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will read nothing else like it this year.”  —Catherine Taylor, Guardian
”Blistering, brilliant, savage and smart. This is a superb debut and Colwill Brown is the real thing.” —Eimear McBride
”Brilliant and original on every level. She is a writer like nobody else.” —Elizabeth McCracken

The Breath of the Gods: The history and future of the wind by Simon Winchester $43
What is going on with our atmosphere? The headlines are filled with news of devastating hurricanes, murderous tornadoes, and cataclysmic fires. Gale force advisories are issued on a regular basis by weather services around the world. Atmospheric scientists are warning that winds — the force at the centre of all these dangerous natural events — are expected to steadily increase in the years ahead, strengthening in power, speed, and frequency. While this prediction worried the insurance industry, governmental leaders, scientists, and conscientious citizens, one particular segment of society received it with unbridled enthusiasm. To the energy industry, rising wind strength and speeds as an unalloyed boon for humankind — a vital source of clean and ‘safe’ power. Between these two poles — wind as a malevolent force, and wind as saviour of our planet — lies a world of fascination, history, literature, science, poetry, and engineering which Simon Winchester explores with the curiosity and Vigor that are the hallmarks of his bestselling works. In The Breath of the Gods, he explains how wind plays a part in our everyday lives, from airplane or car travel to the ‘natural disasters’ that are becoming more frequent and regular. The Breath of the Gods is an urgently-needed portrait across time of that unseen force — unseen but not unfelt — that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure in its path. [Paperback]

I Am Dyslexic: An interactive and informative guide by Chanelle Moriah $37
An essential guide to understanding dyslexia - for dyslexic people and their families, friends and workmates. Dyslexia is a common condition that affects approximately one in ten people — both adults and children — but information on how to manage it is not as accessible as you might think. Chanelle Moriah has already published bestselling books on autism and ADHD, helping countless people to feel less alone in their experiences. At the age of 25, Chanelle was diagnosed with dyslexia and decided to take another deep dive. Chanelle shines the spotlight on dyslexia in their unique style, creating a simple resource that explains what dyslexia is and how it can impact the different areas of someone's life. I Am Dyslexic is a tool for both diagnosed and undiagnosed dyslexic people to explain or make sense of their experiences. It also offers non-dyslexic people the chance to learn more from someone who is dyslexic. With clear sections explaining the many aspects of dyslexia, accompanied by Chanelle's beautiful illustrations, and with space for readers to write down their thoughts, this book is designed to be personalised to the individual's experience. [Hardback]
>>This Is ADHD (read Stella’s review).
>>I Am Autistic.

Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to find joy in 100 recipes by Helen Goh $60
No one knows the 'why' or 'how' of baking better than Helen Goh, recipe developer with Yotam Ottolenghi for more than a decade, co-author of bestselling books Sweet and Comfort, and practising psychologist. In this, her first solo cookbook, Goh draws on her upbringing in Malaysia and Australia, her acclaimed work with Ottolenghi and her psychology training to share her distinctive approach to baking with 100 delicious sweet and savoury bakes. With recipes like Chocolate Tahini Cake with Sesame Brittle, Plum and Pistachio Bars, Pandan and Coconut Chiffon Cake, and many other shareable treats that offer both tried-and-true and creative flavours, this book is a celebration of community, connection and pleasure through baking. Helen's Champagne and Blackcurrant Celebration Cake will become your new go-to for a special occasion, while a batch of Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes for a picnic or charity bake sale is a small but powerful building block of community and solidarity. All of her desserts are impressively sweet ways to celebrate milestones and connect with family and friends. And after your sweet tooth has been satisfied, there are more than 15 savoury baking dishes, from a Puttanesca Galette with Lemon Ricotta to a Potato, Garlic and Rosemary Focaccia. With inventive flavour combinations that showcase Helen's creativity, a wealth of thoroughly road-tested bakes and her reflections on living and baking well, Baking and the Meaning of Life is a one-of-a-kind companion bakers will return to again and again to spread joy, one cookie, cake, or cheese puff at a time. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The ABCs of Socialism edited by Bhaskar Sunkara, illustrated by Phil Wrigglesworth $15
Almost suddenly, socialism has re-entered our political discourse, but it is probably not best left up to the mudslingers and disparagers to shape our understanding of it (though their very opposition to it gives it rather an appeal!). This book steps into this moment to offer a clear, accessible, informative, and irreverent guide to socialism for the uninitiated. Written by young writers from the magazine Jacobin, alongside several scholars, The ABCs of Socialism answers basic questions, including ones that many want to know but might be afraid to ask ("Doesn't socialism always end up in dictatorship?", “Don’t the rich deserve to keep their money?", “Is socialism a Western concept?”, “Socialism sounds good in theory but doesn’t human nature make it impossible to realise?”). Disarming and pitched to a general readership without sacrificing intellectual depth. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.

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

Omnibird: An avian investigator’s handbook by Giselle Clarkson $45
This highly illustrated, playful field-guide to common international birds brings the art of observology to the science of ornithology, showing the many ways these familiar creatures are remarkable if you take time to look. Have you seen a bird today? Probably, unless you’re reading this in bed in the morning. Did you truly look at the bird? To open your ornithological eyes and ears, meet the Omnibird. An Omnibird contains the essential birdiness of every bird—it was born from an egg, has feathers, two legs, a beak and gizzard, perhaps some premium features like spurs or a curuncle. Once you recognise the Omnibird, you’ll see the remarkable in any bird. You’ll be expert at finding extraordinary things around you, just by looking. Omnibird describes 12 common birds from habitats around the world—eagles, owls and seabirds, starlings, ducks and swans. You will explore the incredible internal structure of bird bones, learn what a gizzard stone is for, meet the tiny creatures that live on birds, and find the fascinating in eggs, bird poop, feathers, and flight patterns. Now you’re an Omnibird expert, you’ll look at every bird in new ways every day. [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>A big, funny book all about ornithology.
>>The Observologist.

How to Rebuild Trust in Journalism by Tim Watkin $20
”There is little more important to the success of the human species than the trust that allows information networks to form and thrive, communities to share and trade, and people to see the world as it really is.” Award-winning journalist Tim Watkin confronts the breakdown in trust between journalism and the public. Drawing on the latest international and local research, he explores the social, economic and political shifts that have eroded public confidence in journalism. From financial pressures and ideological divides, to a perceived lack of transparency and the rise of misinformation, How to Rebuild Trust in Journalism examines how journalism’s role has been questioned — and what can be done to restore its standing. [Paperback]
>>Other BWB Texts.

Chapter on Love by Miklós Szentkuthy (translated from Hungarian by Erika Mihálycsa) $55
Written between Szentkuthy's first major work, Prae (1934), and the first book of the St. Orpheus Breviary (1939), Chapter on Love (publ. 1936) exemplifies well Szentkuthy's writing of excess. An attempt at polyphonic writing, it brings together the perspectives of an unlikely set of characters including the mayor of a doomed Italian city, given to debilitating ‘impressionism’ — a penchant for observing and analysing —apart the minutest shades of reality — a nihilistic pope, a hanged brigand, a courtesan and her decadent pubertal adorer. They pass through the pages of this quixotic and compelling book under the threat of imminent catastrophe, filling chapter after chapter with passionate, self-generating theorising and (mock-)philosophising on the margins of Empedocles, life and death, stockings, endingness and changeability, ethics and aesthetics, vitality and law, chaos and social order grounded in horror vacui, the forever elusive other person — all enmeshed with well-nigh self-parodic, idiosyncratic feats of ratiocination and theorising driven ad absurdum, which proliferate on the analogy of (free) association. The common denominator of their analytical furore and the yarns they spin is love, which touches not only on the human being, but the whole of nature, from the realm of plants to that of minerals. Szentkuthy's book may don the costume of a historical novel, but it stands under the sign of the pseudo: its deliberately vague setting, somewhere in Italy toward the end of the Renaissance, is in fact but a mask which allows for anachronism (of realia, ideas, data, and even terminology) to ooze through, as the characters and their observations are our contemporaries in every respect. Baroque and exuberant, of a sweeping melancholia and at times savage humor, a (mock-)treatise written with an abundance of striking, distant associations that evoke Surrealist practices, this strange novel tantalisingly shows a path not taken by experimental modernism, of the contrapuntal use of point-of-view converted into a contrapuntal use of analytic, essayistic observations of reality. [Paperback]
>>Pressing.
>>Working towards an impossible novel.

The Rose Field (‘The Book of Dust’, Volume 3) by Philip Pullman $38
The long-awaited and highly anticipated conclusion to Philip Pullman’s bestselling ‘The Book of Dust’ sequence. “Lyra: what will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses?” ’‘Defend it,” Lyra said. ‘“ie defending it.” When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her — part of himself — in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra. In The Rose Field, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways. They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new, learning all the while the depth and surprising truths of the alethiometer. All around them, the world is aflame — made terrifying by fear, power and greed. As they move East, towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers — on Dust, on the special roses, on imagination — so too does the Magisterium, at war against all that Lyra holds dear. Marking thirty years since the world was first introduced to Pullman’s remarkable heroine Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights, The Rose Field is the culmination of the cultural phenomenon of The Book of Dust and His Dark Materials. [Paperback]
’Powerful, profound and utterly unforgettable: a stunning trilogy conclusion.’ —The Telegraph
”Pullman's uncanny ability to conjure place is once again in full evidence . . . And when we reach it, the novel's final showdown is a fantastically nail-biting ride.” —The Guardian
”But for all its intricate interweavings of alchemy and folk tales, ballads and poetry, the book has the pacing of a thriller.” —The Times
>>The world is falling apart.
>>Read an extract!
>>Also by Philip Pullman.

Silence Is My Habitat: Ecobiographical essays by Jessica White $37
Jessica White has been deaf since she was four years old. Where an autobiography or biography narrates the story of a person's life, an ecobiography dwells on a person's interaction with their ecosystem, and how this shapes their sense of self. The essays that follow detail how deafness encouraged and shaped her relationship with the natural world. "Deafness made me observant and quiet. Because I could not hear enough to join in on conversations, my attention often wandered or was absorbed by sensations other than sound — morning sun on my forearms, the thick, sweet scent of flowering oleanders, the triangular shadow of a flock of galahs flying overhead. On the long bus trips between school and home, I watched the sorghum burnishing as it ripened, and kangaroos bounding through wheat stubble in the late afternoons, into trees that cast long shadows. I felt the bus shake as it rattled over cattle grids or veered into the corrugations on the gravel roads." These essays consider how deafness shapes the interfaces between the writer and particular environments, given how she can only hear particular sounds, as she navigates the world through the tactile and olfactory. In these poetic essays, she describes her responses to bodies of water, the university, the archive, the bush, and the quietened realm of the pandemic. She writes of burnt trees amidst the devastating loss of her mother. She finds a flock of deaf women writers who help her fly. White reveals that deafness, although it brings fatigue and isolation, is also a portal to a rich, contemplative, and creative life. [Paperback]

Olivetti by Allie Millington $20
Being a typewriter is not as easy as it looks. Surrounded by books (notorious attention hogs) and recently replaced by a computer, Olivetti has been forgotten by the Brindle family—the family he’s lived with for years. The Brindles are busy humans, apart from 12-year-old Ernest, who would rather be left alone with his collection of Oxford English Dictionaries. The least they could do was remember Olivetti once in a while, since he remembers every word they’ve typed on him. It’s a thankless job, keeping memories alive. Olivetti gets a rare glimpse of action from Ernest’s mother, Beatrice—his used-to-be most frequent visitor—only for her to drop him off at Heartland Pawn Shop and leave him helplessly behind. When Olivetti learns Beatrice has mysteriously gone missing afterward, he believes he can help find her. He breaks the only rule of the "typewriterly code" and types back to Ernest, divulging Beatrice’s memories stored inside him. Their search takes them across San Francisco—chasing clues, maybe committing a few misdemeanors. As Olivetti spills out the past, Ernest is forced to face what he and his family have been running from, The Everything That Happened. Only by working together will they find Beatrice, belonging, and the parts of themselves they’ve lost. [Paperback]
"Millington's writing does us a great favor. Her Olivetti is neither an automaton nor a pushover — there is a painful and problematic crisis in the house he has called home and his voice drives the action with compassion. Ernest speaks with a confusion and simmering panic recognisable to anyone who was once 12, loved their mother deeply and feared for her life. The Brindles will go on confronting "Everything," with hope, gusto and all the unity they can muster. They will set the family table for seven, with a place for Olivetti; put paper in his carriage, and wait." —Tom Hanks in the New York Times Book Review

Literature for the People: How the pioneering Macmillan brothers built a publishing powerhouse by Sarah Harkness $35
From an impoverished childhood in the Scottish highlands to Victorian London, this is the story of two brothers – Daniel and Alexander Macmillan — who built a publishing empire — and brought Alice in Wonderland to the world. Their remarkable achievements are revealed in this entertaining, superbly researched biography. Daniel and Alexander arrived in London in the 1830s at a crucial moment of social change. These two idealistic brothers, working-class sons of a Scottish crofter, went on to set up a publishing house that spread radical ideas on equality, science and education across the world. They also brought authors like Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy and Charles Kingsley, and poets like Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti, to a mass audience. No longer would books be just for the upper classes. Daniel was driven by the knowledge that he was living on borrowed time, his body ravaged by tuberculosis. Alexander took on responsibility for the company as well as Daniel’s family and turned a small business into an international powerhouse. He cultivated the literary greats of the time, weathered controversy and tragedy, and fostered a dynasty that would include future prime minister Harold Macmillan. Includes fascinating insights about the great, the good and the sometimes wayward writers of the Victorian era, with feuds, friendships and passionate debate. [Paperback]

Caring for Kahurangi: The inspiring story of Friends of Flora by Sandy and Robin Toy, with photographs by Ruedi Mosimann $60
Caring for Kahurangi is the story of one of the most successful community-led conservation projects in New Zealand. For the last 25 years, the volunteer group Friends of Flora has been trapping predators, translocating birds, surveying and monitoring, determined to restore the biodiversity of the rugged country of Flora, situated on the eastern edge of Kahurangi National Park. This book describes the journey of Friends of Flora, weaving tales of volunteer adventures, rigorous science and magical encounters into an inspiring story and what can be achieved with great commitment, drive and friendship. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

The Amendments by Naimh Mulvey $30
Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby. For Adrienne, parenthood is the start of a new life. For Nell, it's the reason the two of them are sitting in a therapist's office. Because she can't go into this without facing the painful truth: that she has been a mother before. For Dolores, Nell's mother, the news also brings a reckoning: with the way her daughter's life unfolded fifteen years ago, with its inextricable ties to her own past, and with the tragedy that neither of them have spoken about since. Set in Ireland against the backdrop of a series of abortion referendums. [Paperback]
”Niamh Mulvey's wonderfully compelling characters and deft, clear prose offer great pleasure. Her sense of political and cultural change is sharp, and the beauty she finds in days of struggle is haunting.” —Joseph O'Connor
”A smart, subtle, engrossing and moving novel that gives voice to so much that's unspoken about Ireland and about youth.” —Emma Donoghue

Clearing the Air: A helpful guide to solving climate change — In 50 questions and answers by Hannah Ritchie $40
With so many conflicting headlines out there, it's tough to sort fact from fiction when it comes to climate change and the solutions we need for a cleaner future. The first piece of good news is that data scientist Hannah Ritchie is here with answers, and the steps we need to take now. Using simple, clear data, she tackles questions such as, 'Is it too late?', 'Won't we run out of minerals?' and 'Are we too polarised?'. The second piece of good news — the truth is way more hopeful than you might think. We're at a critical moment for our planet, and getting the facts straight is step one. But even more crucial is feeling hopeful about what we can do next. The third piece of good news? We already have many of the solutions we need to create a more sustainable planet for future generations. [Paperback]
”An essential myth-busting primer on climate actions for everyone navigating the blizzard of confusing opinions and misinformation around the defining issue of our time.” —Gaia Vince
”If there were a Nobel Prize for clear thinking, Hannah Ritchie would have my vote. She doesn't just cut through the noise — she vaporises it. With a scientist's rigor and a storyteller's grace, she shows us what the data actually says about the biggest challenges of our time. Her work is essential reading for anyone who still believes facts can change minds and optimism can change the world.” —Rutger Bregman

A Short History of Almost Everything 2.0 by Bill Bryson $40
The 21st century's bestselling popular science book has now been fully revised and updated in Bill Bryson's inimitable style to reflect the many advances in science since this book was first published in 2003. This journey through time and space will inform a new generation of readers as well as those who read this book on first publication with a new perspective based on what we know now. A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 is the result of Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation — how we got from being nothing at all to what we are today. Now fully updated to include all the latest advances in science, it is more ground-breaking than ever before(!). Bryson makes complex subjects fascinating and accessible to everyone with an interest in the world around them. [Paperback]
”Possibly the best scientific primer ever published.” —Economist
”Truly impressive. It's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science.” —Guardian

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

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from German by Kurt Beals) $36
A collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there some kind of perpetrator who makes things that I know cherish and disappear?" These things disappear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist? [Paperback]
"The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times." —Neel Mukherjee
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating-ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books
"Her restrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss
"Meditative, moving, and profoundly beautiful." —Edmund de Waal
"In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate." —Mary Costello
>>Junk.
>>They disappeared when the wall came down.

Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin $43
Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia — this city of hospitals — who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison. Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari's studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron's bedroom — polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don't know what to say, I'm saying I have a cracked appearance. It's not a pity party, it's a character sketch. Insofar as you'll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison." Caren Beilin's hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo's terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints. [Paperback]
“An absurdist masterpiece. Nothing, just nothing, is as wild, outrageous, and free as Sea, Poison.” —Amina Cain
"Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation." —Catherine Lacey
"I was instantly won over by Beilin's writing — so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves." —Sheila Heti, The Paris Review
"It's not often I read a work and want to know, simply, how. How did the writer write this?" —Patrick Cottrell, LA Review of Books
>>An enormous amount of ground.
>>Revenge of the Scapegoat.
>>Now and next.

Swallows by Natsuo Kirino (translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) $38
Twenty-nine-year-old Riki is sick of her dead-end job, of struggling to get by ever since she moved to Tokyo from the country. So when someone offers her the chance to become a surrogate in return for a life-changing amount of money, it's hard to turn down. But how much of herself will she be forced to give away? Retired ballet star Motoi and his wife, Yuko, have spent years trying to conceive. As Yuko begins to make peace with her childlessness, Motoi grows increasingly desperate for a child to whom he can pass on his elite genes. Their last resort is surrogacy; a business transaction, plain and simple. But as they try to exert ever more control over Riki, their contract with her starts to slip through their fingers… Vibrating with the injustices of class and gender, tradition and power, Swallows is an acerbic, witty vision of contemporary Japan, and of a young woman's fight to preserve her dignity — at any cost. [Paperback]
”Natsuo Kirino's novels bring us into direct contact with human life. Her fearless pen forces us to confront the ugliness, intensity and depth of our own desires, to the point that we cannot look away. But just as those desires reach a fever-pitch, she restores our faith in humanity, in a way that only Kirino can. The relentless beauty of her stories leaves me breathless every time.” —Meiko Kawakami
”A timely and engrossing drama about desire, precarity, and the uses of a woman's body. Kirino's psychologically compelling and sharp-witted storytelling draws us into her characters' lives, leaving us to answer: do our bodies have a price and who gets to decide?” —Ruth Ozeki
”A masterful feat of storytelling as well as a biting critique of gender, patrimony and class. . . A writer in effortless command of her craft, Kirino brilliantly upends our expectations at every twist and turn. Just when you thought things could not get any more complicated, she deftly ups the ante. The resulting tension builds to a startling ending that both disturbs and delights.” —Julie Otsuka

The Story of the Stone: Tales, entreaties and incantations by James Kelman $35
James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create.This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman's mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian dialect or the dull menace of bureaucratic babble. Everyday tragedy and bleak humour colour these marvels of narrative efficiency, yet at their core they are tender and full of human truth. Kelman’s uncompromising literary approach and radical politics caused some controversy when he was awarded the 1994 Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late. [Paperback]
"The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren't supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead. Dead, and wrapped up in a Penguin Classic: that's when it's safe to regret that their work was underappreciated or misunderstood (or how little they were paid) in their lifetimes. You can write what you like about Beckett or Kafka and know they're not going to come round and tell you you're talking nonsense, or confound your expectations with a new work. Kelman is still alive, still writing great books, climbing." —James Meek, London Review of Books
>>Your stories are your own.

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin), illustrated by Suzanne Dean $38
Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five foot three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog's imposing bulk.  “Call me \’Frog,’\" said the frog in a clear, strong voice. Katagiri stood rooted in the doorway, unable to speak. 'Don't be afraid. I'm not here to hurt you. Just come and close the door. Please.' Briefcase in his right hand, grocery bag with fresh vegetables and canned salmon cradled in his left arm, Katagiri didn't dare move. “Please, Mr. Katagiri, hurry and close the door, and take off your shoes.” Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this special edition of Murakami's celebrated short story sees the bewildered Katagiri find meaning in his humdrum life through joining forces with Frog in an effort to save Tokyo from an existential threat. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Honeyeater by Kathleen Jennings $38
Sub-tropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire — and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy. But peeling back the rumours and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbours and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be. [Paperback]
”Gorgeously written. I was so busy admiring the writing that I didn't notice how deep the water had gotten or what was growing underneath.” —T. Kingfisher
”Eerie and mesmeric, silted with a deep sense of foreboding, Honeyeater reads like a memory-old myth, like something dangerous and true.” —Cassandra Khaw
>>From under the houses.

Anima: A wild pastoral by Kapka Kassabova $28
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the Pirin mountains in Bulgaria. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human-animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living — one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. [Paperback]
”A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative nonfiction at its best.” —Guardian
”A haunting, beautiful book from what feels a darkly enchanted land. Kassabova is an extraordinary writer who slips into the skin of a place. Fiercely intelligent, scalpel-sharp, at once romantic and toughly pragmatic: Anima will live with me for a long time.” —Cal Flyn

In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in living with Marion Milner by Akshi Singh $40
The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life. Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own. In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question — how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach — from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea — she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. [Paperback]
”This poetic, graceful and original book not only demonstrates the richness and relevance of Marion Milner's work today but also offers many insights into the choices we make - or fail to - in love, leisure and work. Singh helps us to understand how we inhabit our lives, and how we can start thinking about inhabiting them differently. An illuminating and thought-provoking book that will appeal to a very wide audience.” —Darian Leader
”In Defence of Leisure lilts beautifully between whispering diaries and the chant of a manifesto. Akshi Singh has crafted an exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived. Yet she never shies from questions of risk, of where to put our anger, or of what we concede in exchange for love. Untangling security - so often pernicious and compromising - from care, Singh insists on a wide horizon, full of freedom, for everyone.” —Marianne Brooker
>>Wrapped in foil.
>>The joys of reading in bed.
>>X.
>>Books by Marion Milner.

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art: Reframing the narrative through art and life by Drusilla Modjeska $65
When a woman makes art, what does she see? When she picks up her brush and looks in the mirror? When she takes off her clothes and paints herself naked? Or when she raises her camera and turns it towards another woman, a model naked there in front of her? And how is she seen when she turns to face the men, the artists, her colleagues, her friends, her lovers? A Woman's Eye, Her Art looks back to the lives and art of European modernist women who recast the ways in which women's bodies could be seen — from the self-portraits of Paula Modersohn-Becker, to the Surrealist Claude Cahun who exposed the masquerades of femininity, to the radical nudes of photo-artists Lee Miller and Dora Maar. Alongside them in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century were many artist-women, their friends and colleagues, including Clara Westhoff-Rilke and Gabriele Münter, Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim. In this book, Drusilla Modjeska examines why these women still matter and connects their past to our present. This book is about the spirit it took for these artist-women to step out on that path, and the courage it took to stay there. It is the story of what they saw, and how they were seen as they crashed against the hypocrisies that are embedded deep in the structures of society. And it is about hard-fought freedoms as in their different ways they changed the landscape of the art world and reframed the narrative. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Not seeing the shadow.

The Nuclear Age: An epic race for arms, power, and survival by Serhii Plokhy $45
On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer — “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. While the threat of mutually assured destruction may have kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry. In The Nuclear Age, Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is as pertinent as ever. As he examines the motivations of key players, Plokhy confronts the crucial question of our age — what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one? [Paperback]
”Few historians write with Serhii Plokhy's authority, clarity or global vision. The Nuclear Age is not only the definitive account of how nuclear power and peril have shaped the modern world, but a profound warning about the risks we still face. This is essential reading, and a marvellous book.” —Peter Frankopan
”Panoramic in scope and fastidious in detail. Plokhy's perfectly timed, compelling and essential book reminds us that the spectre of nuclear extinction is not a cold war nightmare but a permanent condition of modern life.” —Financial Times
>>Other books by Serhii Plokhy.

Feathers of Aotearoa: An illustrated journal by Niels Meyer-Westfeld $60
Meyer-Westfeld explores the feathers of Aotearoa’s native birds, from the long wing feathers of an albatross that enable it to soar endlessly over the oceans, to the tiny, insulating feathers of a penguin. Feathers are one of nature’s most remarkable evolutionary developments, an ingenious solution to the countless environmental challenges that birds face. This exquisitely illustrated book, that combines artwork with compelling insights, will reveal a largely unknown aspect of the avian world, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in our unique bird life. [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!

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

Lili Is Crying by Hélène Bessette (translated from French by Kate Briggs) $30
Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette's debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love — of desire run cold — and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style,  Lili is Crying marked the beginning of a singular writing career. Bessette's work is here translated into English for the first time. [Paperback with French flaps]
”In Hélène Bessette’s novel Lili is Crying, the tears are unavoidable. They’re in the title, and ten pages in, I was emailing everyone I could about the book. It felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux. Lili shares the cartoon’s casual violence, which is not to say the novel is comic, though at times it is, yes, darkly funny. It is beautiful, brutal.” —Jennifer Kabat, 4 Columns
”Kate Briggs’s deft translation brings Hélène Bessette’s novel into English for the first time. Bessette plays with line breaks and typography, exercising what Eimear McBride refers to in her beautiful introduction as ‘formal indiscipline’. Lili is Crying is the loudest book I have ever read. From Lili’s ‘desperate sobs’ to the ‘trumpeting love’ of Lili and the shepherd, the writing rattles like a set of cutlery in a tumble dryer. Miraculously, all the noise coheres into an elegant symphony.” —Oonagh Devitt-Tremblay, Literary Review 
”I’m grateful to Kate Briggs for her translation of Lili is Crying – a tragic, comic, invigorating book with an eccentric staccato style that blurs speech and thought.” —Kathryn Scanlan

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey $40
A genre-bending story about breaking — both of the heart and literary form itself. The sudden, devastating breakup of a relationship in the winter of 2021 left Catherine Lacey depressed and adrift. She began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a process that led to the writing of fiction that was both entirely imagined and strangely, utterly true. She soon realised that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that followed the ending of her belief in God. Bending form, both she and her fictional characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself. A hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an open-hearted defence of faith's inherent danger. [Hardback]
 ''A deliciously weird mix of theology, allegory and dark humour; The Moebius Book is every bit as brilliant and electrifying as everything Lacey has ever written.'' —Sara Baume
''A page-turner in both directions, The Moebius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy. I was absolutely spellbound.'' —Leslie Jamison
>>Read from either end!
>>Infinite regress.
>>Now and next.

Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman (translated from French by Ros Schwartz) $26
There's a voice in Aline's head — a voice that wants out. Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last. That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free. Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda — Aline's second self — slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered. From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men. [Paperback]
>>Chaos ensues.

Whenua $70
At nearly 400 pages, this beautifully designed book from the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is rich with large images of paintings, prints, sculptures, weaving, carving, ceramics, photographs and moving image artworks. The landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand have long been a powerful source of inspiration for artists. This major new book explores the importance of whenua in our art history through the work of more than 100 of this country’s most celebrated artists. Beginning in Te Waipounamu and reaching outwards, across Aotearoa and beyond to Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific, Whenua thoughtfully explores ideas of identity and belonging, kaitiakitaka, land use, migration, environmentalism and activism through a selection of important historical and contemporary artworks. A vibrant and very readable range of texts, interviews and perspectives by leading writers—including Su Ballard, Emalani Case, Huhana Smith, Cosmo Kentish-Barnes, Lily Lee, Hana O’Regan, Rebecca Rice, Matariki Williams and many more—provides insight into the many ways that whenua is fundamental to the visual language and identity of the arts in Aotearoa. Artists include: Mark Adams, Rita Angus, John Gibb, Bill Hammond, Louise Henderson, Ralph Hotere, Lonnie Hutchinson, Robyn Kahukiwa, Emily Karaka, Doris Lusk, Riki Manuel, Colin McCahon, John Miller, Buck Nin, John Pule, Bridget Reweti, Baye Pewhairangi Riddel, Olivia Spencer Bower, Margaret Stoddart, Bill Sutton, Wi Taepa, Areta Wilkinson and many more. Beautifully presented and full of both iconic and surprising images. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovitz $38
What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home? When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned 18. Twelve years later, while driving her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact. He is also on the run from his own health issues, and the fact that he’s been put on leave at work after students complained about the politics of his law class — something he hasn’t yet told his wife. So, after dropping Miriam off, he keeps driving, with the vague plan of visiting various people from his past — an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son — on route, maybe, to his father’s grave in California. Pitch perfect, quietly exhilarating and moving, The Rest of Our Lives is a novel about family, marriage and those moments which may come to define us. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
”It’s clear author Ben Markovits has spent time teaching. This novel speaks like a much-loved professor, one whose classes have a terribly long waitlist. It’s matter of fact, effortlessly warm, and it uses the smallest parts of human behaviour to uphold bigger themes, like mortality, sickness, and love. The Rest of Our Lives is a novel of sincerity and precision. We found it difficult to put it down.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
”The Rest of Our Lives is another quiet triumph, an elegant, devastating book that lays bare the way time calcifies our failures, how we find ourselves trapped not by circumstance but by the slow erosion of the will to escape. Markovits has long been one of our most under-appreciated novelists; this is yet more proof that he deserves far greater recognition.” —Alex Preston, Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>Watch a bit.  
>>On writing about middle age.

How To Art: Bringing a fancy subject down to earth so we can all enjoy it by Kate Bryan, illustrated by David Shrigley $40
A funny, inviting and full-colour book about art for people who don't know about 'art'. Featuring original artworks by David Shrigley What is art, where do I find it, and once I'm in front of it, what am I supposed to think about it? Kate Bryan is a self-confessed art addict who has worked with art for over twenty years. But before she studied art history at university, she'd been into a gallery just twice in her life and had no idea she was entering an elitist world. Now, she's on a mission to help everybody come to art. Like playing or listening to music, or cooking and eating great food, reading or watching films, making art or looking at other people's deserves to be an enriching part of all our lives. So here, in How to Art, is a nifty way to take art on your own terms. From where it is to what it is, to tips on how to actually enjoy really famous artworks like the Mona Lisa, to how to own art and make art at home, through to vital advice for making a career as an artist and even how to make your dog more cultural, How to Art gives art to everyone, and makes it fun. Laced throughout with original artworks by the very down-to-earth artist David Shrigley. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
”Finally! Art without terror!” —Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood $38
Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together — of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She's afraid of her own floorboards, and ‘What is love? Baby don’t hurt me’ plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn't know who they are. Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she'll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people? The very weave of herself seems to have loosened: time and memories pass straight through her body. "I'm sorry not to respond to your email," she writes, "but I live completely in the present now.” Will There Ever Be Another You is the phosphorescent story of one woman's dissolution and her attempt to create a new way of thinking, as well as an investigation into what keeps us alive in times of unprecedented disorientation and loss.” [Paperback]
”This novel offers moments of hilarity, scenes of rich drama, and a dazzling number of references. It is determined to be less than the sum of its parts. It is deliberately perverse, refusing to hang together. Lockwood is not arguing that the centre cannot hold: she is showing that it does not hold.” —Claire Monagle, Australian Book Review
>>Long Covid from the inside.
>>Unclear moral standing.

The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung (translated from Korean by Anton Hur) $37"
A novel-in-ghost-stories, set in a mysterious research centre that houses cursed objects, where those who open the wrong door might find it's disappeared behind them, or that the echoing footsteps they're running from are their own. An employee on the night shift at the Institute learns why some employees don't last long at the centre. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels those around it. The cursed sneaker down the hall is stolen by a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee, who later finds he can't escape its tread. A cat in Room 206 reveals the crimes of its former family, trying to understand its own path to the Institute's halls. But Chung's haunted institute isn't just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, these violent allegories take on the horrors of animal testing, conversion therapy, domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political. [Paperback]
”Timetable will absorb you in the shadows of its imagination, marvellous oddness, humour and heart. It's a wild midnight tour of a uniquely brilliant and exquisitely demented world, terrifying and enchanting — a world I did not want to leave!” —Gerardo Samano Cordova
>>Waiting for the bus.
>>From the graveyard shift.

Israel on the Brink: Eight steps for a better future by Ilan Pappe $39
Israel can’t go on like this. 7 October and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza laid bare the cracks in its foundations. It was unveiled as a country unable to protect its citizens, divided between messianic theocrats and selective liberals, resented by its neighbours and losing the support of Jews worldwide. While its leaders justify bombing campaigns, atrocities and manmade famine in the Gaza Strip, Israel is becoming a pariah state. Its worst enemy is not Hamas, but itself. Ilan Pappe paves a path out of the Jewish state, rooted in restorative justice and decolonisation, including the release of all Palestinian prisoners, the end of illegal settlements, and building bridges with the Arab world. The future can be one of peace, not endless war. [Paperback]
”When you think that everything that could be said has been, Ilan Pappe provides this eye-opening, original and, most importantly, hopeful book.” —Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation
”Ilan Pappe supplants slogans for a single democratic state with a detailed program comprising eight mini-revolutions. This is a bold undertaking and offers abundant ground upon which to debate a vision and transform it into a program. Even, and especially, for those in disagreement, Israel on the Brink offers a point of departure to take seriously the work of decolonization.” —Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
”Ilan Pappe's Israel on the Brink is a tour de force, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the disintegration of the Zionist project and its consequences. Pappe, one of the foremost scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has authored a series of ground-breaking and important books. This one is no exception.” —Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times
>>Other books by Ilan Pappe.
>>In conversation with Avi Shlaim.

Broken Republik: The inside story of Germany’s descent into crisis by Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes $39
For many years, the post-war recovery of Germany was an inspirational story. All of Europe looked on with admiration and envy as the nation rebuilt and set standards for the rest to follow. Companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Siemens and Bayer rose to become global titans, while the country's political leaders earned respect around the world — even their football teams were the best. Such was its success that when the Berlin Wall fell, it appeared to reunify almost seamlessly. Where Germany led, the rest followed. But, even at its zenith, there were signs of trouble. So, when events started to turn against Germany, the whole edifice began to crumble. As political and business leaders benefited from the status quo, they couldn't see the problems heading their way. Volkswagen's emissions fraud tainted its industrial reputation; abandoning nuclear power left the country at the mercy of Russia for its energy needs; and a growing divide between rich and poor stoked international tensions that opened the door to the rise of the far-right AfD party. Journalists Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes have been reporting for years on the problems the country faces. Germany is not alone in this, but it is singularly ill-equipped to deal with them. [Paperback]
”A splendid book by authors who long ago detected Germany's fragility — and aimed at readers who take no pleasure in the sight of its precipitous decline.” —Yanis Varoufakis

The Floral Dream: A guide to growing cut flowers in New Zealand by Olivia McCord $50
A practical and inspiring guide for New Zealand home gardeners who dream of growing their own cut flowers. Whether the reader is new to gardening or already has dirt under their nails, this book offers down-to-earth advice on how to grow beautiful blooms in the back yard. It begins with preliminary advice on garden layout, soil preparation, a planting calendar and crucially, sowing seeds. At the heart of the book, though, is detailed advice on growing the specific flowers that flourish in New Zealand conditions, with the author's recommendations on favourite varieties. These include focal flowers that serve as the main attraction in arrangements, filler flowers that add volume and texture, and foliage varieties that provide greenery and structure. The book finishes with advice on how to pick and arrange flowers, as well as instructions for creating spectacular bouquets. Nicely done and full of good information and photographs. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

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

Mr Outside by Caleb Klaces $40
During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he’s been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to listen. Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’s distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, intimacy in crisis, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go. [Paperback]
”I can’t remember the last time a book moved me to tears, but Mr Outside did so more than once. With each page awash in bittersweet detail, Klaces evokes the raw and distant intimacy between fathers and sons with tenderness and insight and captures the inevitable yet cataclysmic rupture of the loss of a parent as honestly and effectively as anything I’ve ever read. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and comforting all at once. I could not recommend it more highly.” —Kevin Powers
”I was utterly absorbed by this riveting, wonderful book, and thought about little else during the days I read it. The prose is unsparing — clear yet enigmatic, clipped yet voluminous. Every page carries a startling moment or detail. By the end of it, you’re left with a sense of the turbulence and bewildering beauty of a whole life. Mr Outside is a major achievement.” —Martin MacInnes
”A novel of extraordinary clarity. What Klaces has achieved here is remarkable. His precise, compelling language miraculously shapes a truth you’d think no language could do justice to: that the price for incredible love is incredible loss.” —Lisa McInerney

a grammar of the world by Jeanne Benameur (translated from French by Bill Johnston) $45
For Benameur in these poems, the Egyptian goddess Isis advances with her along the seashore, unifying the past and the present, inside and outside, memory and imagination, trauma and hope, the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea. She is unity rediscovered. Drawing on subjects as diverse as the author's childhood traumatic flight from the Algerian War of Independence in the late 1950s, the modern migrant crisis, the transformative power of writing and the long history of the Mediterranean, a grammar of the world is brought into harmony by the central mythological figure, who personifies a careful reknitting of the world and repairing of ancient wounds through the act of writing. [Paperback with French flaps]
”In Jeanne Benameur's language all is fluttering, gentle and stirring. Places are foremost, they precede us, then history settles in and the writing unfurls.” —Cécile Coulon
”For Benameur, the backwash of Algerian history flows back into the sea of inner feelings.” —Yasmine Chouaki
>>See more!
>>The Child Who.

Taniwha by Gavin Bishop $40
Monster-sized and monster-filled, this beautifully illustrated book, retells a variety of tales about the taniwha of Aotearoa, from the guardians who accompanied waka voyages to present-day inhabitants of the whenua and moana. Taniwha are all around us. They are good at hiding or changing their shape. They can be very tricky. If you want to meet one, you have to know what to look for and where to look. Describing how the landscape was shaped, and exploring relations between Māori and the sometimes friendly, but more often terrifying, supernatural creatures, these traditional stories are brought to life with Bishop’s lively and inventive illustrations. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other superb books from Gavin Bishop.

Vaim by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searls) $38
Jatgeir travels from the fishing village of Vaim to the city in search of a needle and thread. Cheated twice, he returns to his boat, where he falls asleep as waves rock the hull. Soon he is awakened by a voice: a woman is calling his name from the quay. There stands Eline, the secret love of his youth — and the namesake of his boat — with a packed suitcase. Eline pleads to come aboard. In what follows, this single encounter reverberates across three stories: three narrators, three deaths. The first new work from Jon Fosse since he was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, Vaim is a spectral novel that wanders and watches, imbued with things half-seen, perhaps not of this world yet still caught in its rhythms. The first in a trilogy of novels, it continues his investigation into the human condition: the subtle encounters that come to define our lives and our deaths, and what lies in the threshold between what is and what is longed for. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience. Vaim is no exception: it ferries the reader along the stream of the ‘ordinary’ mind, from which suddenly shines forth a luminous beyond.” —Xiaolu Guo

Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelman (translated from French by Clem Clement) $40
Spring 2020. In lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, art critic and curator Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the wordless and stoic ghost of his father. He takes this time of withdrawal from the rhythms of everyday life and work to meditate on silence in our lives, silence in art, in literature, music and in philosophy. In a series of short fragments, he circles the void at the heart of modern society, brought into sharp focus by the spectre of disease and death hanging over a stilled world.
”It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness.“ —Yann Chateigné Tytelman. [Hardback]
 “A moving account of a son's search for his father's ghost, as well as a riveting enquiry into the notions of silence and absence in music, literature and visual art. Extraordinary.” —Jude Cook
”A haunting, delicately woven elegy; a luminous act of love written into the void. Let it draw you in. Let it speak to your own silences.” —Suzanne Joinson
”Silence is etymologically rooted in the idea of being quiet and still, of attending. The defining 'absence of sound' came much later. There are reasons why retreats are often predicated on silence. They seek to face directly the fear we have — identified so keenly by Jung — of the journey to the interior that 'silence' prompts. There is no such thing as absolute silence, of course. In an anechoic chamber, you become the sound you hear: your lungs, your heart, your eyelids. Tytelman's remarkable meditation on the presences made vivid by absence understands this instinctively, emotionally, intellectually and even metaphysically. He listens beyond listening. We carry our own silence and that of others like organs. We make our own silences and harvest them. In his haunted and haunting text, even ghosts are breathing.” —Gareth Evans
”Blackout offers an extended reflection on living within silence and emptiness, but through the accumulation of seemingly disconnected stories something else emerges: the pangs of absence enfolded one after another — but absence is always presence, silence is a teeming noise. Was the collective amnesia that followed our recent, yet somehow erased, enforced isolation necessary to forgetting a deeper revelation? For a moment, another kind of society presented itself, a society of gorgeous nothings given eyes to see in the dark.” —David Toop

We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose $45
DeLillo meets Kafka in a wickedly smart novel that explores the boundaries between art and life, vision and reality, beauty and commerce. When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal. Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. It spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize.
"C.D. Rose's genius novel is a book that shows it is possible for a novel to be at once highly original and to fit within an established tradition. We Live Here Now is both accessible and challenging, entertaining the reader with its ridiculous and sinister figures, even as it prompts more intellectual questions about the reality of appearances." —John Self
"In this deeply rewarding novel considering many under-discussed aspects of contemporary commerce, Rose has produced another breathtakingly imaginative work." —Booklist
>>To go with the flow, or not.
>>”I still dream about those places.”

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett $40
The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she's left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she's loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage — a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss — make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.” —Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement
”If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.” —Doug Battersby, Financial Times
”Big Kiss, Bye-Bye delivers an exhilarating approximation of what memory feels like. Certain specifics appear fixed — the colour of a shirt, say, or an ex-lover’s hurtful words — but the rest swirls about, shifting depending on circumstance. Bennett’s writing is unpretentious and unselfconscious, with an often startling immediacy. Her vocabulary is precise — she finds a message ‘discomposing’; her empty flat is ‘languidly transporting’ — and sometimes unexpected. Pages of spare, simple sentences are offset by meandering digressions full of possibilities. Bennett is always conscious that every moment might one day be remembered, reshuffled, retold. Memory never fully settles.” —Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review
”Bennett draws on ‘polyvocal, and apparently experimental’ (note the tonal eye roll) techniques not to obfuscate, but to elucidate the real conditions of living, and writing, from the perspective of the underclass. Far from the stylistic abstractions of modernist masculinist totality or the avant-garde elite, this is the prose, we could say, of precarity. Bennett’s heroines might seek shelter in rooms of their own, but the walls always feel treacherously porous.” —Jane Hu, Bookforum
>>Flux given.

Case Studies: A story of plant travel by Felicity Jones and Mark Smith $85
In 1829, London physician Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward sealed a plant inside a glass container — a simple experiment that helped change the way plants were transported across the world, transforming gardens, ecosystems and lives in the process. This book traces that story through photographs and essays, pairing striking contemporary images of cased plants — shot in New Zealand and in the United Kingdom — with reflections on the implications of plant transfer/movement. Across six essays by Gregory O’Brien, Dame Anne Salmond, Luke Keogh, Mark Carine, Markman Ellis and Huhana Smith, the book considers not only the scientific and colonial ambitions that drove botanical exchange, but also its consequences: ecological disruption, the spread of invasive species, and the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge systems. Case Studies also gives space to other voices — those speaking to mātauranga Māori, to tino rangatiratanga over native species, and to the ongoing work of conservation and reclamation. It is not only a record of historical movement, but also a reminder of the values and choices that continue to shape the land beneath our feet. [A beautifully presented large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Growing conditions.

A Long Winter by Colm Tóibín $33
One snowy morning, after an argument with her husband, Miquel's mother departs from their village high up in the Pyrenees and disappears. With his younger brother stationed far away on military service and his father a social pariah detested by the locals, Miquel is caught between, on one hand, the slow disintegration of his family, and on the other, a bitter feud which prevents the townspeople from showing him any more than the slightest acts of kindness. With Miquel's mother still unaccounted for, the two men are forced to fend for themselves throughout a harsh winter, made harsher still by the emergence of family secrets that have festered in the long silence between father and son. Published as a standalone novella for the first time. [Hardback]
”A superbly powerful tale of betrayal and desertion.” —Spectator

Indignity: A life reimagined by Lea Ypi $40
When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother's youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi — glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged. What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941? By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history — and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi's memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination. Ultimately, she asks, with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us? [Paperback]
>>Love, war, and betrayal.

Mana by Tāme Iti $50
Mana. It's a big word. But what is it? Are you born with it, can you earn it, can it be taken away? For more than five decades, Tāme Iti has stood at the heart of Aotearoa's struggle for indigenous rights. From land marches to performance art, police raids to prison cells, his voice has challenged New Zealand to reckon with its colonial legacy. Once branded as a dangerous and extreme activist, now hailed as a national treasure, Tāme has lived the contradictions and realities of standing with mana motuhake in a modern world. After being silenced from speaking te reo Māori as a child, Tāme went on to champion its revitalisation. He discovered the power of protest and what it means to live with mana in a world that often tries to strip it away. This is his kōrero of the road he walked and the people who joined him. The comrades, the supporters, and the ones who tried to take him out. Mana is the story of a man who has never stopped challenging the status quo. [Hardback]
>>Art, activism, and the fight for Māori rights.
>>The power in knowing who you are.

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

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer (translated from German by Amanda Prantera) $38
An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. The loft is a retreat where she can work undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery. Then one day, a package arrives containing extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. Back then she had been sent away to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages containing old diary entries arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest? [Hardback]
”A thrilling novel. What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout. But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can.” —John Self, Guardian
”It is the skilful juxtaposition of internal loneliness and isolation with a mysterious, chilling past that brings such emotional power to this unusual book.” —Daily Mail
”Her prose is a model of simplicity and concision; but the pictures which her sentences paint are enigmatic, overdetermined, elusive. We can claim her books for feminism, for eco-politics, for existentialism or psychoanalysis, or we can take them as thrillers or dreams.” —London Review of Books
>>Read an extract.
>>Human life everywhere.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Wall.

All Her Lives: Nine stories by Ingrid Horrocks $35
All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son's climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures — and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women — all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward — and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms. [Paperback]
”A wonderful collection that swims in and out of women's lives across time, exploring the struggle for freedom and love. I'll be thinking about it for a long time — a book of quiet force.” —Emily Perkins

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $35
The strange and explosive new collection from the incomparable imagination of Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short story. A gripping blend of the raw, the astonishing and the tragic, every story is as perfectly unexpected as a snare: tightly, exquisitely wound, ready to snap at a touch. Here, a young father is haunted by the consequences of a moment of distraction; tragedy is complicated by the inexplicable appearance of an injured horse; an attempted poisoning leads two writers to startling conclusions; a lonely woman’s charity is rewarded with home-invasion. And in the shocking opening story, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring. Guilt, grief and relationships severed permeate this mesmerizing collection — but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love and longing, each sinister and beautiful. Step by step these unnerving stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life — ourselves. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside.” —Colum McCann
”No one writes like Samanta Schweblin. Her narratives are sui generis — wonderfully unpredictable and invitingly strange.” —Lorrie Moore
”Samanta Schweblin combines the urgent propulsion that characterizes all great storytelling with precise, if uncanny, descriptions of human feelings that often go unnamed, those ambiguous zones of human reality where awe, dread, and desire mingle.” —Siri Hustvedt
>>Paying attention to what others ignore.

He Puāwai: A natural history of New Zealand flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones $80
One hundred native flowers of Aotearoa revealed in extraordinary 3D photography. Aotearoa has at least 2,200 native species of flowering plants that have evolved in our unique conditions, and the vast majority of them grow nowhere else on earth. This has made New Zealand a natural laboratory for studies of flower biology. He Puāwai is a natural history of New Zealand flowers, focusing on 100 native species to represent the full range of flower phenomena of Aotearoa — from familiar iconic flowers of kōwhai, mānuka and pōhutukawa to oddities like the water-pollinated flowers of eelgrass, bat-pollinated blossoms of kiekie, and the world’s smallest flowers, Wolffia. Each flower’s text describes and explains its structure and functions, alongside over 500 remarkable photographs that enable the reader (with the viewer included in the book) to view the flowers miraculously in 3D. [Large-format hardback]
”Remember when you were small, and the minute details of everything — shapes, colours patterns — were so absorbing. I suspect Phil Garnock-Jones never lost that wonder at all, and here he shares it generously. It's impossible to pore through the pages of He Puawai without feeling amazement rekindled — and realising there are infinitely more ways than you imagined to greet, observe and learn from these tiny taonga, the flowers of Aotearoa.” —Johanna Knox, author of The Forager's Treasury
”This book, like no other, opens a microscopic window to appreciate native plants. The luscious detail, both in the crisp stereo imagery and in the carefully descriptive text, captures and holds the attention of anyone who has enjoyed the attraction provided by flowers. I predict this book will inspire another generation of botanists and nature lovers in Aotearoa. Not many books deserve their place as a textbook (which deepens our understanding of native plants) and equally as a (stunningly captivating) coffee table book.” —Tim Park, Manager, Otari Wilton's Bush
>>Look inside!

The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā encounters, 1642—1840 by Vincent O’Malley $50
Vincent O’Malley’s account of the first meeting between Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri and Abel Tasman’s crew sets the scene for how two peoples navigated fraught beginnings to find a ‘meeting place’ in pre-Treaty Aotearoa. O’Malley’s important book tells the story of encounters between Māori and Pākehā in a turbulent landscape still shaped by Māori authority and evolving relationships. Early misunderstandings and violence gradually gave way to mutual accommodation and adaptation. In this middle ground, people traded, intermarried, forged alliances and shaped each other’s ways of life — until this fragile balance was undone in the decades after 1840. Through people’s stories, O’Malley brings to life a time of extraordinary change. This new edition expands on the original with new research, including material on Te Waipounamu and an enriched visual narrative. [Paperback]
”Vincent O’Malley’s new edition of The Meeting Place is a timely and important work. His reflections on the whakataukī ‘I ngā rā o mua — the past in front of us’ resonate deeply with current realities, reminding us of the optimism and resilience embedded in our histories. This book powerfully illustrates how early Māori and Pākehā overcame conflict to create middle grounds of respect, sharing and mutual tolerance — a history we need to remember today.” —Melissa Matutina Williams, author of Panguru and the City: Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua
>>Read the Introduction.

Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly, A biography by Craig Robertson $60
‘I’ve got things I can’t recall Like the colours of my bedroom wall Oh, I can’t decide if I Want to know these things or why They bother me and tantalise me so’ — from ‘I’ve Left Memories Behind’
In the mid-1990s, the Village Voice described Chris Knox as ‘indie rock’s premier oddball singer songwriter’ and, when Knox suffered a stroke a decade later, music icons such as Yo La Tengo, Bill Callahan, Neil Finn and Shayne Carter all showed up for concerts and a tribute album. Who is this epileptic, opinionated, shorts-and-jandals-wearing, endlessly creative musician and artist from New Zealand? This is his story — from a childhood in ‘flat, rectangular and boring’ Invercargill to years of creative experimentation in Dunedin to family life in Auckland; from The Enemy’s first gig at Dunedin’s Beneficiaries Hall to Toy Love’s tour of Australia and on to Tall Dwarfs’ escapades around the globe; from tape loops and crashing cutlery recorded on a TEAC 4-track to the biting satire of Jesus on a Stick comics and Listener opinion pieces; and from home-recorded LPs delivered by hand to the ubiquitous voice on ads for Vogels and Heineken. Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly tells the story of one extraordinarily creative man’s journey from the obscurity of punk rock to the heart of New Zealand culture. No-one has dome more to raise doing-things-badly to an effective artform. Fully illustrated. Includes discography. [Flexibound]
>>Trailer.
>>Pull Down the Shades.
>>Squeeze.
>>Nothing’s Going to Happen.
>>Not Given Lightly.

Understanding Hauora: A handbook of basic facts about te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Health System by Rooimata Smail $25
Understanding Hauora is the second book in the #1 bestselling ‘Understanding Te Tiriti’ series by human rights lawyer and educator Roimata Smail. This short, accessible guide explains what hauora really means — not just healthcare, but the wellbeing of body, mind, spirit, and whānau, grounded in the whenua — and how Te Tiriti o Waitangi guaranteed Māori authority over it. It covers the history, the harm caused when those promises were broken, and the hope we see when Māori lead solutions to improve health outcomes for everyone. Whether you’re a student, educator, health professional, policymaker, or simply want to understand the facts, Understanding Hauora gives you a confident grounding in Te Tiriti and health equity. [Booklet]
>>See also Understanding Te Tiriti.

Feeding Ghosts: A graphic memoir by Tessa Hulls $55
An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. Tessa Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival — then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa's homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
>>A compulsive genre-hopper.
>>A DJ in Antarctica.

No Friend to this House by Natalie Haynes $38
An extraordinary reimagining of the myth of Medea. This is what no one tells you, in the songs sung about Jason and the Argo. This part of his quest has been forgotten, by everyone but me . . . Jason and his Argonauts set sail to find the Golden Fleece. The journey is filled with danger, for him and everyone he meets. But if he ever reaches the distant land he seeks, he faces almost certain death. Medea — priestess, witch, and daughter of a brutal king — has the power to save the life of a stranger. Will she betray her family and her home, and what will she demand in return? Medea and Jason seize their one chance of a life together, as the gods intend. But their love is steeped in vengeance from the beginning, and no one — not even those closest to them — will be safe. [Paperback]
”Natalie Haynes is a once-in-a-generation storyteller, and No Friend to This House is her masterpiece. Haynes does not so much retell the myth of Medea as excavate it, layer by devastating layer, for truths both timeless and timely. This is a stunning novel that cuts to the bone.” —Dr. Amanda Foreman
>>The mystery of Medea.

Domination: The fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity by Alice Roberts $40
This is the story of the fall of an Empire — and the rise of another. Who spread Christianity, how, and why? In her quest to find the answer, Roberts takes us on a gripping investigative journey. From a secluded valley in south Wales to the shores of Brittany; from the heart of the Roman Empire in a time of political turmoil to the ancient city of Corinth in the footsteps of the apostle Paul; from Alexandria in the fourth century to Constantinople. As the Roman Empire crumbled in Western Europe, a shadow of power remained, almost perfectly mapping onto its disappearing territories. And then, it continued to spread. Unearthing the archaeological clues and challenging long-established histories, Roberts tells a remarkable story about the relationship between the Roman Empire and Christianity. Lifting the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight, this story is nothing short of astonishing. Domination is a page-turning exploration of power and its survival. [Paperback]

Start With a Teapot: An unexpected guide to the art of drawing by Enric Lax $35
Drawing is not very different from riding a bicycle, whistling, or cooking a tortilla: learning any of these things just takes a little practice and a sense of humour. For example, to draw an elephant, you start with a teapot. Next add eyes and tusks, finish with a tail and four legs . . . ta-da, you've got your elephant! And how do you draw a horse? First, draw an elephant. Start with a Teapot is utmost nonsense and unarguable logic. How do you draw a snail, a stapler, a butterfly, a eukaryotic cell? Enric Lax inspires his readers to observe, transform, tell stories and make mistakes--that's how to draw. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Draw along!

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

Moral Abdication: How the world failed to stop the destruction of Gaza by Didier Fassin $25
Consent to the obliteration of Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order. History will record how Western governments and large sections of their elites have supported the war waged by Israel against Palestinians after Hamas s attack on 7 October 2023 and silenced voices calling for a ceasefire, a just peace and a respect of international law. Not only buildings have been devastated and civilians massacred, but also language and thought have been damaged. Providing an archive of the first six months of the war nourished by multiple sources, the book examines how the past of occupation and oppression of Palestine has been negated, how a vocabulary and a grammar of facts have been imposed, how accusations of antisemitism have produced censorship and self-censorship, how mainstream media have been restrained and biased. It addresses the acceptance of the unequal worth of lives and the differential treatment of deaths. It questions the invocation of the existential threat for Israel and the debt contracted because of the Holocaust. It analyses how the geopolitical and economic stakes in the Middle East and the growing rejection of Muslims and Arabs have contributed to the abdication of values and principles claimed as foundational. [Paperback]
"One of the outcomes of the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been a total collapse of any semblance of moral authority on the part of the West. Didier Fassin's book surveys this moral abdication, focusing on how many western states and institutions have actively consented to the destruction of Gaza, particularly by obstructing and criminalising Palestinian solidarity. By foregrounding students and other activists who have defended the basic rights of Palestinians, the book also seeks to 'attest to the existence of a refusal, shared by many, of consent to the obliteration of Gaza'." —Irish Times
"A powerful book. How is it possible, Fassin asks, that with rare exceptions, 'for political leaders and intellectual personalities of the principal Western countries the lives of Palestinian civilians are worth several hundred times less than the lives of Israeli civilians'? How do we explain why 'demonstrations and meetings demanding a just peace are banned'? Why is it that 'without independent confirmation, most of the mainstream Western media quasi-automatically reproduce the version of events relayed by the camp of the occupiers, while incessantly casting doubt on that recounted by the occupied'? Why do 'so many of those who could have spoken, not to say stood up in opposition, avert their eyes from the annihilation of a territory, its history, its monuments, its hospitals, its schools, its housing, its infrastructure, its roads, and its inhabitants-in many cases, even encouraging its continuation'?" —Omer Bartov, The New York Review of Books

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai $38
In this long-awaited, exquisitely written novel from the author of The Inheritance of Loss, two young people navigate the many forces that shape their lives — country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. [Paperback]
“This novel about Indians in America becomes one about westernised Indians rediscovering their country, and in some ways a novel about the Indian novel’s place in the world. Vast and immersive, the book enfolds a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story. We loved the way in which no detail, large or small, seems to escape Desai’s attention, every character (in a huge cast) feels fully realised, and the writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.” —2025 Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Find out more!

Fusão: Untraditional recipes inspired by Brasil by Ixta Belfrage $70
Belfrage takes her Brazilian heritage and experiences as bases from which to build fusion recipes that expand the cuisine into new realms of flavour. Interesting writing, intelligent recipes, and photographs of food ‘happening’ in Brazil make this a stimulating and enjoyable book for any kitchen shelves. [Hardback]
”Ixta Belfrage's focus on the Brazilian food of her heritage bears the bold stamp of her characteristic, rambunctious creativity, espousing a jubilant fusion that's both coherent and convincing, but above all delicious.” —Nigella Lawson
”I love how Ixta's food takes you on a journey of discovery into the uncharted universe of fusion flavours — an experience we should all, and absolutely must, embrace.” —Sami Tamimi
”There is this thing — a style, a flavour, a hue — which is so unmistakably Ixta and so downright delicious. Her kind of creativity is both a one-off and, at the same time, deeply grounded in the cultures that produced her. Not many cooks can come up with this kind of magic with such incredible flair.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”I was lucky enough to work alongside Ixta for some years - her cooking style always did and continues to strike me as compelling, innovative and unapologetically unique. Fusao is the book Ixta has always wanted to write, and she does it beautifully - straddling all the truest parts of herself, the diversity of her culture and of course, the bold flavours that make Ixta's food so special. I want to learn and devour it all.” —Noor Murad
>>Look inside!
>>All food is fusion.
>>A taste of Brazil.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan $38
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. [Paperback]
”What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine A.S. Byatt's Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan's trim, beautifully ordered sentences.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times

People With No Charisma by Jente Posthuma (translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey) $35
A darkly humorous novel about multigenerational family dynamics and individuality in Dutch suburbia. An unnamed narrator grows up overshadowed by her unconventional mother, an ex-Jehovah's witness and former television star with an inferiority complex. Her father is the head of a psychiatric institution, whose only form of parenting is to offer his daughter the same life advice he dispenses to his patients. Reserved and somewhat aloof, he chooses not to intervene when his wife obsesses about charisma, calorie counting, and turning their daughter into a child prodigy. Their daughter strives to meet her mother's expectations and bond with her father while secretly worrying she lacks the drive or charisma to do anything significant with her life. When her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she begins to address their generational trauma, forge a new relationship with her father, and discover life on her terms. In twelve chapters — each reflecting a different phase of life — Posthuma expertly dissects a fraught family history, exposing the absurdity that often lies at the heart of life's most poignant and challenging moments. From the author of What I’d Rather Not Think About. [Paperback]
”Posthuma examines life with an anthropologist's sense of the absurd. She sets her sights on mundane family life, finding it both nightmarishly farcical and full of human warmth.” —Declan Fry

Embers of the Hands: Hidden histories of the Viking age by Eleanor Barraclough $30
A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child. From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world. Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate. [Now in paperback]
”Eleanor Barraclough's splendid new book offers an introduction to the ordinary people of a time best known for its kings and warlords, getting up close and personal with the things that mattered to them. In lively prose she ranges from Greenland to Baghdad, showing us bar-rooms and bedrooms, daydreaming children at their lessons, gossiping neighbours, the scars of war, and much more besides. An intimate portrait of the Viking Age that is thoughtful, vivid and warm, while ignoring none of its hardships — highly recommended.” —Neil Price, author of  The Children of Ash and Elm

Fierceland by Omar Musa $38
After many years abroad, Roz and Harun return to Malaysian Borneo for the funeral of their father Yusuf — and to reckon with their inheritance. A renowned palm-oil baron during Malaysia's economic rise, Yusuf built the family's immense wealth by destroying huge tracts of rainforest. What his children know is that he was also responsible for the violent disappearance of a man who stood in his way. Harun has become a successful tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, Roz is an artist struggling to stay afloat in Sydney. Now they want to return something their father stole from the forests of their homeland. In their quest for redemption they grapple with the legacy of power and corruption, dreamers and exiles, thugs and zealots. Most dangerous of all, they are haunted — by the ghosts of colonialism, the ghosts of family, the ghosts of language, and the ghosts of the forest itself. [Paperback]
”An impressive, urgent novel by a talented and courageous writer.” —Mohsin Hamid
”Exhilarating, melodious, smart, resonant about the fragility of our times. A revolutionary novel of consciousness with Borneo at its core. This is the novel I've been waiting for.” —Ellen Van Neerven
”Potent and powerful, Fierceland is a shapeshifting novel of great reckoning; a brutal, beautiful study of wilderness within and without, of the ghosts that afflict and follow in the wake of family, legacy and complicity.” —Hannah Kent

Freedom: A disease without a cure by Slavoj Žižek $22
We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms, so what deserves attention is precisely the notion of freedom. The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them. Today, with the latest advances in digital control, our social activity can be controlled and regulated to such a degree that the liberal notion of a free individual becomes obsolete and even meaningless. How will we be obliged to reinvent (or limit) the contours of our freedom? Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, i ek takes us on an illuminating and entertaining journey that shows how a deeper understanding of freedom can offer hope in dark times. [Paperback]

Stone & Sky (A ‘Rivers of London’ novel) by Ben Aaronovitch $38
”This isn't London. The rules are different up here, and so are the allegiances.” Detective Sergeant Peter Grant takes a much-needed holiday in Scotland. And he'll need one when this is over. If more's the merrier, then it's ecstatic as his partner Beverley, their young twins, his mum, dad, his dad's band and their dodgy manager all tag along. Even his boss, DCI Thomas Nightingale, takes in the coastal airs as he trains Peter's cousin Abigail in the arcane arts. And they'll need them too, because Scotland's Granite City has more than its fair share of history and mystery, myth... and murder. When a body is found in a bus stop, fresh from the sea, the case smells fishy from the off. Something may be stirring beyond the bay — but there's something far stranger in the sky. [Paperback]

The Arguers by Corinna Luyken $37
A preposterous original fairy tale about a community that forgets how to get along. The first argument was over a brush and a comb, and which would be better for taking a tangle out of the king's beard. Next came the argument over letters, and then over spoons . . . and soon they argued all the time, and no one could remember when the arguing had started or over what or by whom. They only knew that they had always argued, and that they did it well. Very, very well. And so it was that the king and queen decided to hold a contest to choose the very best arguer in the land. But what will happen when everyone is so busy arguing that they can't even hear the queen announce the start of the contest? [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Mutual Aid: Building solidarity during this crisis (and the next) by Dean Spade $22
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to or actively engineer each crisis, ordinary people are finding innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid — why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity — it's a form of organising where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive. [Paperback]
”Peter Kropotkin called mutual aid a ‘factor in evolution’. The Black Panther Party called it ‘survival pending revolution’. Dean Spade tells us that mutual aid is fundamental to making revolution. It is about building solidarity, preparing for battle, and creating a culture of collective care to displace the atomising culture of individualism and the market. An indispensable guide for our moment, this book teaches us that effective social movements are impossible without mutual aid. Read every page. Carry it everywhere. Share it with everyone. Change everything.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

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

The Threshold and the Ledger by Tom McCarthy $32
Since her death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit — or boundary — state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann's centenary year, McCarthy's book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself. [Paperback]
”A dizzying invitation to explore the poetry and prose of German author Ingeborg Bachmann. McCarthy’s work is an invigorating and inspiring incantation: Readers will not only marvel at how the author reads but also at his ability to articulate that experience into something both erudite and accessible.” —Kirkus
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Style is also substance.

So in the Spruce Forest by Ali Smith $45
Then the voice from nowhere carried on talking about Munch, like my mother of all people knew about Munch, like she knew I was looking at a picture right now, like she knew about the power crisis and the international unrest and the climate ruination in a world she'd left thirty years ago. Like she knew it all.
In Ali Smith's So in the Spruce Forest, the author's deceased mother returns as a persistent voice, intent on sharing with her daughter insights into Edvard Munch's intense renderings of trees and stones charged with life. Through an imaginative essayistic format, Smith weaves together probing visual analyses, personal stories and reflections on ecology and politics, linking Munch's art to both the present moment and other realities. With 20 colour artworks by Edvard Munch. [Cloth-bound hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>So much more than ‘The Scream’.

Kings of this World by Elizabeth Knox $30
When Vex and her friends are kidnapped and held to ransom it sets off a terrifying chain of twists and turns as they struggle to survive and try to find a way to escape. Vex is used to people being afraid of her power, the ability to persuade others to do what she wants. But when she arrives at a new school, it is packed with people who have the same power, and who might even like her. There is her roommate Ronnie, a coolheaded high achiever; and Ronnie's friend Taye, who is recovering from a brain injury. There is witty, lordly Hannu, whose father happens to be a billionaire. And then there's Ari: troubled, blessed, honourable, terrifying Ari. Vex is enchanted by her new friends when, five weeks into term one, they are kidnapped. They find themselves chained in the basement of an abandoned factory, trying to figure out how to escape, all the while tormented by questions like: Why were they taken? Why do the kidnappers seem to hate Vex, and at the same time want to recruit her? Can Vex and her friends save themselves? And if they do, will they ever feel safe again? What kind of reckoning will they face afterwards? And will Vex once again feel responsible for all the bad things that happened? Knox’s gripping new YA novel is full of ideas, speculations and pivotal experiences. [Paperback]
”Elizabeth Knox's Kings of This World is at once a boarding school story, a crime thriller, and a complex fantasy, all shaped by the star-busting imagination of a singular mind. It's a brilliant return to the Southland of Dreamhunter and Mortal Fire, with both a new era and an expanded world, sure to attract a new generation of fans.” —Rachael King
”The world is lucky to have Elizabeth Knox. Once again she's given us an entirely unique, thrilling, deeply thoughtful book that is alive with P for precision. Kings of this World is a thrilling return to the world of Southland where questions of power are entangled with questions of volition, and questions of seclusion, and questions of fear. Knox's young adult characters are alive, electrifying and as nuanced and complex as their readers are. A punchy addition to the genre of dark academia: sleek, unwavering and unputdownable.” —Claire Mabey
”Any new Elizabeth Knox novel feels like breaking into the house of a great enchanter, only to hear the front door lock behind you, as you realise you have stumbled upon something much deeper and more dangerous than you bargained for. Kings of This World is magic at its deepest. A psychologically forensic campus thriller, which keeps you guessing until the very last page. P for perfection.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
>>Both dangerous and dreamy.

The Deserters by Mathias Énard (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell) $37
A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness — he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald.The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and — pulled together in Mathias Énard's enchanting, brilliant, erudite prose — time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the immense stakes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival. [Paperback with French flaps]
”All of Énard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age.” —Joshua Cohen
>>Walking on two legs.
>>The time of return.

Gertrude Stein: An afterlife by Francesca Wade $45
”Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,” wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding — and contested — writers of the twentieth century. In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography — a veritable celebrity. Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories — especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible. This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human. [Hardback]
"Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life." —Sheila Heti
"Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope." —Tom McCarthy
>>Devotion to the cut.
>>Charlatan or genius?
>>Not everyone got the joke.

That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi (translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney) $28
Nineteen-year-old Lea is from a village that is out of time, out of jobs and out of hope. She and her friends, however, are vivid and electric with life. They yearn, they dance, they fuck, they fight. And around them, a world that isn't quite our own vibrates with strangeness and threat. Now Lea is here, sitting on a bench, telling a silent stranger her life story. Because yesterday, change was finally unavoidable. A novel of rural entrapment and coming of age, Elisa Levi's That's All I Know bears the traces of Beckett and Lorca, rings with the echo of folktales and has a fierce, unapologetic vitality at its heart. Startlingly odd and deeply moving, it is the work of a profound and singular talent. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Funny and strange, quirky and heartbreaking, voice-driven and philosophical, magical and very real. As Little Lea tells her tale of family, home, and the end of the world, she casts a quiet spell over me.” —Rebekah Bergman
”A brilliant feat of authorial control; Elisa Levi has created a devastating delight.” —Maya Binyam
”A book about the inability to leave the place where you were born. It reminded me of Miguel Delibes's The Way and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. it is very beautiful.” —Miqui Otero

The Possession by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Anna Moschovakis) $25
”The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city — the whole world — with a person you may never have met.” These first words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of her need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved's life. Ernaux's writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive. Being numb is worse than being in agony.” —Genevieve Gaunt, The Spectator
”The most intimate human experiences — grief, greed, fear, sickness and lust, along with other kinds of private ‘primordial savagery’ — are laid bare throughout the prolific French author's works, sometimes in shudderingly explicit detail, and The Possession is no exception. Far from seeming dated, this tiny tome is even more pertinent in our digital age, capturing the exact feeling brought on by a social media algorithm producing the precise thing you want to ignore.” —Ceci Browning, The Times
”Raw and resonant, Annie Ernaux's newly translated novella The Possession offers up a stream of fixations and divulgences that the narrator treats with utmost openness. Ernaux creates a voyeuristic world that briefly but totally immerses readers and shares a piece of herself through the primary emotion that drives this book: jealousy. Through a stream of confessions and recollections, Ernaux weaves experiences of obsession, addiction and insecurity into the human fabric of being.” —Maria Farsoon, The Skinny
>>Other remarkable books by Ernaux.

Mad World: The politics of mental health by Micha Frazer-Carroll $31
Mental health affects us all, and yet it remains elusive as a concept. Does getting a diagnosis help or hinder? How is mental wellbeing, which is often incredibly personal, driven by widespread societal suffering? Can it be a social construct and real at the same time? These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be a political issue that needs deeper understanding beyond today's 'awareness raising' campaigns. Exploring the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability and broader liberation movements; alternative models of care; the relationship between art and mental health; law and the decarceration of mental health, Mad World is a radical and hopeful antidote to pathologisation, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination. [Paperback]
”Wow! An honest, urgent and lovingly researched invitation to rethink our assumptions about madness. Mad World is an invaluable toolkit, not just for dismantling oppressive health structures, but for building the systems of care we desperately need. This book is a gift and that gift is hope.” — Aisha Mirza
”An urgent introduction to a new radical politics of mental health which embraces the messy, unruly nature of our collective vulnerability and interdependence. Frazer-Carroll exposes the underlying truth that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with our wellbeing. Mad World teaches us how to transform the ways we understand madness, illness, and disability to build a better world.” —Beatrice Adler-Bolton
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A lot of baggage.

The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to dismantle systems of oppression to protect people + planet by Leah Thomas $28
We cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard. Leah Thomas coined the term 'intersectional environmentalism' to describe the inextricable link between climate change, activism, racism and privilege. The fight for the planet should go hand in hand with the fight for civil rights. In fact, one cannot exist without the other. This book is a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all and a pledge to work toward the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet — an indispensable primer for activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive and sustainable change. Driven by Leah Thomas's expert voice and complemented by the words of young activists from around the globe, it is essential reading on the issue — and the movement — that will define a generation.
[New paperback edition]

Mohua Gold: The history of the Golden Bay goldfields, 1864—1880 by Mike Johnston $100
Mohua Gold is the second of the planned three volumes providing a comprehensive account of the history of the western Nelson goldfields. This volume documents the small-scale diggings in both the Aorere and Takaka valleys. It also covers the advent of reef mining, a largely speculative boom with several promising leads but ultimately mostly proved to yield disappointing returns. The on-going exploration of the rugged hinterland is well outlined, with much of this being the search for a new goldfield. The better fortunes of gold seekers in the Maori-owned Te Tai Tapu, particularly at the Golden Ridge Mine, are documented. This enterprise was developed by the miners themselves rather than by companies based in Nelson or further afield. Other chapters detail the efforts to find a payable coalfield in the western bay, which culminated in the formation of the Parapara Iron and Coal Company and their ambitious plans to create a major industrial complex. This work is the product of over 25 years research and writing, and is generously illustrated with both old black and white and contemporary colour photographs, along with colour paintings, drawings and a wide range of maps. [Paperback with French flaps]

The Kerfuffle by Clotilde Perrin $33
A picture book in which flaps and die-cuts tell a story about getting on together. Kitty and Pup were happy living next door until a misunderstanding caused a real kerfuffle! Now they can't stand each other any longer so start to build a wall between their gardens. The wall goes up and up and up. One day a funny rabbit pops its head over. But whose garden will this new friend play in? Here’s another cause for chaos between neighbors! Finally a better idea for how to use the bricks finds three happy friends sharing the garden after all — until some pigs move in next door… [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other fun books by Clotilde Perrin.

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

Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades $35
Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby. Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a “book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays”, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. “It’s not what she says,” writes Edmeades, “but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.” Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap. [Paperback]

No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for uneven terrain by Rebecca Solnit $40
This book's title is an evocation and a declaration.  Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away — logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through — but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change.  In her latest essay collection, she explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women's rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible. [Hardback]
”A book of fierce and poetic thinking — and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world.” —Merlin Sheldrake
”With her deep sense of the movement of history, her agile intellect, hope in the possibilities of action and nimble prose, Solnit continues to surprise and delight. This new collection of essays is a tonic in dark times.” —Lisa Appignanesi
>>Flair and capacity.
>>Indirect consequences.
>>Other books by Rebecca Solnit.

The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride $38
”So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.” It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love. Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud? Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face. [Paperback]
"An immersive battle between the faultlines dividing us and the bonds which unite us. McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure." —Claire Kilroy
"The natural heir to Joyce and Beckett: she is one of the finest writers at work today." —Anne Enright
"Supple, unexpected, funny, libidinous. A work of fierce intimacy, fearless in its descriptions of the inner lives of its characters, racked as they are by desire and hurt." —Naomi Booth
"McBride is a writer with the courage to reinvent the sentence as she pleases, and the virtuosity required to pull it off." —Literary Review
"[This is] McBride at the pinnacle of her craft. McBride is at her most virtuosic in this novel when excavating forbidden emotional depths too dark to be confronted outside the pages of fiction. With its vividly realised characters, lurid plot and lyrically compacted prose, The City Changes Its Face is a typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher." —Financial Times
"It's a rare feat to encounter a writer whose work feels both entirely original and timeless, but Eimear McBride is just that." —AnOther
>>Space. thought, and sanity.
>>Each book has its own requirements.
>>Radical empathy.
>>Other books by Eimear McBride.

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga $28
In New York City, an Albanian interpreter cannot help but become entangled in her clients' struggles, despite her husband's cautions. When she reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions, his nightmares stir up her own buried memories; while an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator's marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not. Ruminative and propulsive, Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely gorgeous. Taut as a thriller, lovely as a watercolour.” —Jennifer Croft
”Deft and insightful. Exceptional.” —Idra Novey
”Xhoga interprets our brave, new multicultural world with a sly, benign wit. Read her novel. You'll be glad you did.” —Tom Grimes
”A heart-stopping, emotional thriller. Violence hovers in the book's borders. I loved it.” —Rita Bullwinkel
”Compelling, startling, original.” —Priscilla Morris
>>There is nothing you can see that is not a flower.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Homeland: The War on Terror in American life by Richard Beck $69
To see America through the lens of this important book is to understand the United States like never before. For years after 9/11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time, with all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home. Richard Beck grippingly explores how life took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people s sense of themselves, their neighbours and the strangers they sat next to on planes. He describes the NFL games fortified like military bases in enemy territory. The surging sales of guns, SUVs and pickup trucks. The racism and xenophobia, erosion of free speech and normalisation of mass surveillance. A war launched to avenge an attack committed by two dozen people quickly came to span much of the globe. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused or endorsed the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time under standing themselves as patriots. It is a drastic oversimplification to say that the war on terror betrayed US values. In many respects, it embodied them. This is a fascinating and defining account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America. [Hardback]
”Homeland is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. It is impossible not to admire the nerve and scope pf Beck’s treatise.” —Washington Post
”Describes, with a beguiling mix of intellectual precision and passion, and from a novel perspective, the sinister mutations in American life induced by the war on terror. Everyone interested in the fate of democracy, or simple how violence abroad comes home, should read it.” —Pankaj Mishra
>>The righteous community.

Love Forms by Claire Adams $38
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Dawn tries to carry on with her life - a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce - but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been. Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn's long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer? [Paperback]
”The story, heartbreaking in its own right, comes second to its narration. Dawn’s voice haunts us still, with its beautiful and quiet urgency. Love Forms is a rare and low-pitched achievement. It reads like a hushed conversation overheard in the next room.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Reads like a Claire Keegan short story expanded by Elizabeth Strout.” —The Times
”From very first page, I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. An utterly arresting tale of love and grief, of the wounding and healing powers of family, of the many guises of a mother's love. It's an absolute triumph.” —Sara Collins
”Exquisitely written. A compelling and tender story of what-and who-is hidden in almost every family that feels as old as the hills and yet acutely contemporary.” —Monique Roffey
”An arresting voice that made me think of silk: its delicate beauty belies its intrinsic strength.” —Claire Kilroy
>>Missing pieces.
>>A deeply mysterious bond.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked toward Darkness by Irene Solà (translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)
Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women's stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Joana who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Sol explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory. [Hardback]
”A heady, exhilarating, compact tale that seems as old as the Catalan mountains and as fresh as a newly plucked chicken. Solà beautifully aligns past and present. Exuding a kind of alt-magical realism, the novel refuses to distinguish between bewitcher and bewitched: this is its triumph.” —Financial Times
”The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Solà's serious attention to the nonhuman makes most contemporary realist literary fiction feel narrow and timid, wilfully deaf to the other forms of life with which all human drama is interdependent.” —Guardian
”Forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book.” —Catherine Lacey
”Irene Sola is unlike any other writer — she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book.” —Daisy Johnson
”Solà's imagery is beyond arresting — it burns itself into your retina as you read.” —The Skinny
>>Memory and oblivion.
>>Rural damnation.
>>”The tide carries my books from my head.”

Good Things: Recipes to share with people you love by Samin Nosrat $70
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the transformative Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
”Once I hand them off to you, these recipes are no longer mine. They're yours, to do with as you please. And maybe, in the act of receiving, a little thread of connection will be woven between me and each of you.”
How can a recipe express the joy of sharing a meal in person? This is the feeling that Samin Nosrat sets out to capture in Good Things, offering more than 125 recipes for the things she most loves to cook. You'll find go-to recipes for ricotta custard pancakes, chicken braised with apricots and harissa, a crunchy Calabrian chili crisp, super-chewy sky-high focaccia and a decades-in-the-making, childhood-evoking yellow cake. Nosrat also shares tips and techniques, from how to buy olive oil (check the harvest date) to when to splurge on the best ingredients (salad dressing) to the one acceptable substitute for Parmigiano Reggiano (Grana Padano, if you must). Good Things captures, with Samin's trademark blend of warmth and precision, the essence of what makes cooking such an important source of comfort and delight, and invites you to join her at the table. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

A Wilder Way: How gardens grow us by Poppy Okotcha $45
A Wilder Way is a memoir of a relationship with an ever-changing garden, of setting down roots and becoming embedded in nature, and of how tending to a patch of land will not only grow us as individuals, but can also help to grow a better world. Join Poppy Okotcha in her wild little garden in Devon, where, over the course of a year, she shares the inspiring, the mundane and the magical moments that arise from tending a garden through the seasons, and what they can teach us about living more sustainably. Alongside tips for sowing and growing, wild ingredients to be found and delicious seasonal recipes to make, she shows us how the small joys of engaging with the natural world are imperative for our physical and emotional wellbeing. How the more we look at the world around us, the more we learn and the more we care. Woven throughout are folktales from her English and Nigerian heritage stories with nature at their heart that have inspired her, and will inspire us to live a little more wildly. [Hardback]
”Poppy's fresh-eyed look at her own little corner of the county gave me a renewed sense of wonder and delight at the joys and challenges of loving and (on good days) living off a small patch of land. Plus some truly brilliant ideas for getting the most from it. She had me at worm tea.” —Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
>>”Plants taught me about myself.”
>>Loving winter.

Is It Asleep? by Olivier Tallec $30
Squirrel and his best friend, Pock the mushroom, sit on the old stump, watching birds fly by. When they’re tired of this, they take the path to the yellow meadow to listen to the blackbird sing. But today, the bird’s not there. The friends look everywhere. Finally they find it on the path, all stretched out and quite still. It must be sleeping. They sit down quietly and wait for the bird to wake. This true-to-child story of a natural encounter with an animal that has died is both dryly humorous and a profound example of how to manage the comings and goings of life. The book ends with birdsong. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

My Bohemian Kitchen: A nostalgic guide to modern Czech cooking by Evie Harbury $45
My Bohemian Kitchen is a charming collection of Czech recipes with roots in nostalgia and a surprisingly modern take on seasonality and sustainability in the kitchen. Welcome to the food of Evie Harbury, whose Bohemian kitchen bridges the Czech Republic of her heritage and her home in East London. The book brings to life her long summers spent at her granny's mill in South Bohemia with her personal stories about Czech food and culture. As Evie's childhood memories simmered alongside more recent days spent with friends and family in Bohemian kitchens, Evie realised how much of the Bohemian spirit lives through hospitality and knew she had to write about the cultural ties between this unique country and its relationship with food. Alongside the snapshots of this food are her deliciously simple recipes that capture the influences of the Czech Republic's neighbouring countries. Even if you know nothing of this region, there's so much to discover and enjoy. The quaint and quirky chapters include: A Bit(e) of History Granny (Babička) Beer Snacks such as Marinated Cheese (Nakládaný Hermelín) Soups such as Chanterelle and Dill (Kulajda) The Main Event such as Beef Goulash (Hovězí guláš) Meatless Mains such as Lucky Lentils (Čočka na kyselo) Something Sweet such as Strawberry Dumplings (Jahodové knedlíky) Bohemian Baking such as Honey Cake (Medovník). [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

All your choices are good! Take your pick of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $38
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death — with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech — was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place upon which a whole universe pivots, a novel that interweaves vignettes of history, recipes, gossip, and mythology, reminding us that the stories of any place, no matter how humble, are fascinating and boundless, and await any of us with the imagination to seek it. [Paperback]
>>Also available in this edition (stock due soon!)
>>Other books by Olga Tokarczuk.

A Potent Way of Talking: Colin McCahon and the Urewera triptych edited by Hamish Coney $90
In 1974 Colin McCahon was commissioned by the National Parks Board to create a mural, which forced him to grapple with Tūhoe history, and the limits of his own understanding of Māori spiritual concepts. A Potent Way of Talking charts a course deep into the Ureweras to Maungapōhatu, the scorched earth years of the 1860s, the arrest of the prophet Rua Kēnana, the formation of the vast national park and Tūhoe’s attempts to assert their agency as mana whenua. As artist and iwi sought a resolution to McCahon’s work, all of these threads collide. Text by Hamish Coney, Laurence Simmons and Linda Tyler + an interview with Gary Langsford. Photographs by David Cook, John Miller, Max Oettli, Peter Quinn, David Straight and Ans Westra. [A beautifully presented hardback]
>>Look inside!

The South by Tash Aw $35
When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one. Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete. At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change. [Paperback]
”Tash Aw presents a world as timeless as the worlds brought to us by Turgenev and V. S. Naipaul, and yet catches the subtle and unstoppable changes each generation faces. Reflecting the human entanglements that come with home, land, and homeland, The South is a shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate novel.” —Yiyun Li
”Tash Aw's The South is a mesmerising tale of love, courage, and endurance. Like any significant novel, it's also infused with humour, longing, and other aspects of humanity too subtle and pervasive to be named by me. And, like any significant novel, it's both heartbreaking and joyful.” —Michael Cunningham
”The South is a sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present.” —Edouard Louis
”Everything about this novel is heartstoppingly vivid: its physical and emotional and social landscapes are rendered in sumptuous, shocking detail, while its meditations on desire and family are ecstatic and devastating all at once. It's exquisite.” —Oisin McKenna

Granta 171: Dead Friends edited by Thomas Meaney $37
Dead Friends brings vital figures from one's past momentarily back into focus. Eschewing dewy-eyed remembrances and dry obituaries, features include Fernanda Eberstadt on Andy Warhol, Aatish Taseer on V.S. Naipul, Tao Lin on Giancarlo DiTrapano, Michel Houellebecq on Benoit Duteurtre, William Atkins on a new method to dispose of mortal remains, an interview with Renata Adler, as well as new fiction from Marlen Haushofer, Yasmina Reza and Gary Indiana (among others). [Paperback]
>>Look inside.

The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper by Roland Allen $33
We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine. On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world. [Paperback]

Liars by Sarah Manguso $28
”A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.” When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including — a few years later — all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it's not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John's ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane's career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her. Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes. [Paperback]
”Painful and brilliant — I loved it.” —Elif Batuman
”I was spellbound, entranced by Sarah Manguso's deceptively simple but fathoms-deep storytelling. There's an incredible force that underlies this work, propulsive and wild and a little bit scary.” —Emily Gould
”A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be. Any spouse that has ever argued about money, time, work and childcare should read it.” —Nick Hornby
>>A cultural sore spot.
>>One painful revelation at a time.
>>Writing out of rage.

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid $40
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time. With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child's teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer. In Between Two Rivers, Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later. [Paperback]
”Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.” —George Monbiot
”I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves. There are beautiful descriptions of what it is to be pregnant, to give birth, to have small children, to love a dog. I love the way in which she's not just writing about priests or kings, but is giving us a clay tablet on which a little child has bitten, so you have the imprint of his teeth. It melts away the sense of time.” —Tom Holland
”A tender, moving and vivid history of ancient Mesopotamia and how it still speaks to us. This is so my jam.” —Robert Macfarlane
>>The stories we tell become the world we inhabit.
>>Cuneiform explained.

Journey from the North: A memoir by Storm Jameson $38
After a lifetime of writing a novel every year, Storm Jameson turned to memoir with the ambition 'to write without lying'. The result was an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her childhood in Whitby, shadowed by a tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and her decision to leave her young son behind while she worked in London; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always marked by the struggle to make money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany. In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, and travels across Europe as fascism was rising. Throughout, she writes with electric candour and immediacy about her own motivations and psychology. Reissued with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, Journey from the North is one of the great literary memoirs: an uncommonly vivid account of a woman making a life for herself through the great shocks of the twentieth century. [Paperback]
”Her frank voice is as relevant today as ever it was in her own time - and it may still speak to many of our own anxieties around freedom, democracy and the future of liberal thought.” —TLS

To the Moon by Jang Ryujin (translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert) $37
In Seoul, three young women meet while working mundane desk jobs at a confectionary manufacturer. They become fast friends, taking their conversations out of the group chat as they bond over their 'average' employee report cards, the incompetence of their male team leader and a mutual longing for financial freedom amid mediocre raises. Eun-sang, the eldest of the group, is always looking for ways to earn extra money, but faces trouble at work after she opens a mini mart at her desk. Jisong, the youngest, dreams of a perfect romance with her Taiwanese boyfriend and spends her low salary on trips to Taipei. Meanwhile, Dahae searches endlessly for a better apartment - albeit one she can actually afford. One day over lunch, Eun-sang announces a plan to make enough money to quit her job, by investing her life's savings in cryptocurrency. What's more, she thinks the others should join her. All they need to do, she says, is hold on tight and wait for the price to skyrocket . . . to the moon. But as the market begins to fluctuate and spiral out of their control, the fate of their friendships — and their futures — soon hangs in the balance. [Paperback]
”To the Moon is an offbeat slice-of-life novel that welds the low-key eccentricity and camaraderie, frustration and routine of office work to the much more dramatic absurdity and arbitrariness of high-risk speculation. Jang's relatable tale of workplace friendship transforms into a financial rollercoaster, shining absurd light on how much more money capital makes than workers do.” —Sydney Morning Herald
>>Not passing midnight.

Linger: Salads, sweets and stories to savour, together by Hetty Lui McKinnon $50
”My culinary life began with salad. A charred broccoli salad, to be specific. Crispy florets tossed with chickpeas and cooling mint, flecked with red chilli pepper and zested lemon peel, bathed in a garlicky caper oil. That salad inspired me to consider possibilities. It ultimately led me here.” From her salad-delivery days in Sydney to her current career as a food writer and bestselling cookbook author in New York, Hetty Lui McKinnon has long known the power of salads to connect and create community. Salads are meant to be shared; they are what you bring to a gathering of friends or family, the ultimate comfort food. With Linger, Hetty has come full circle. Rather than delivering salads to members of her community, this time, she has invited friends into her home, to share salads, sweets and stories around her dining room table. Linger documents these intimate gatherings, with vegetable-laden, loosely seasonal menus enjoyed and photographed in real time. Through her inventive recipes for meal-worthy salads, smaller bites and simple sweets, McKinnon invites you to become a part of an unforgettable shared experience of community, food and friendship. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.

Do Dogs Have Chins? And other questions without answers edited by Sarah Manguso, illustrated by Liana Finck $35
Does the rain know that people love to play in the rain? Why does a ghost wander? Are bubbles in drinks their thoughts? Do dogs have chins? Where does the dark go when the light comes on? How will it feel on the last day I'm a child? What's the best question a kid ever asked you? When Sarah Manguso posted this question online, she immediately received hundreds of answers. Gathering more than one hundred of the best questions from this poll and bringing them brilliantly to life with illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, Do Dogs Have Chins? ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime — encompassing birth, death, love dinosaurs, and everything in between — to show us the wit and wisdom of children in all their wondrous glory. [Hardback]
”This book is for anyone who has secret questions in their mind they are too embarrassed to ask out loud. In other words, this book is for everyone.” —Lemony Snicket
“A terrific book for anyone who has ever been around kids, or has been a kid themselves.” —Roz Chast
>>Look inside!
>>Deceptively small things.

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima (translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) $37
Mitch and Yonko haven't spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo — but ever since the sudden death of Mitch's brother, they've been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster. Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they've kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it's all around them. Like history, it repeats itself. Tsushima's sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth — a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Tsushima evades any label, her fiction focuses on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.” —Japan Times
”A brilliantly layered commentary on postwar Japan. Despite the grave subject matter, the novel's tone, preserved faithfully in Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda's expert translation, is gentle and warm, suggesting the author's abundant optimism for human adaptability.” —TLS
”Subtle and engaging, poised somewhere between a character study and a murder mystery.” —Literary Review
>>Echoes in the dome.

Paper Crown by Heather Christle $37
Paper Crown is Heather Christle's first new collection of poems in over a decade. Throughout these exuberant poems, Christle conjures moments when the world's events — a child's words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinners with friends — alight themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity. With tenderness and verse, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognise that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem. [Paperback]
”I have never before read a book like Paper Crown. In it, Heather Christle opens the doors of her mind as if it is a library where we are welcome to roam so long as we understand that ‘If pages fall from high / enough they can take down a house’. Seemingly domestic in their sly meditations, always exultant in their view of the natural world, these poems clarify the mind of one fully aware of the fear and despair that dwells in and around us in the midst of our desires whether they be erotic or artistic or the desire to be awed by a stunning book. This is a stunning book. I am stunned.” —Jericho Brown
”Heather Christle's Paper Crown renders the precise darts and folds of lyric attention, revealing poetry to be a timekeeping as intimate and exact as that of perfect friendship or the pineal gland: ‘The click of time saying yes’.” —Joyelle McSweeney
>>”My child has gone into the next moment.”
>>In the Rhododendrons.

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron $28
Harryboy Boas is a lowlife gambler. When he's not at the track, he lives in a Hackney boarding house, reading Zola, eating salt beef, pressing trousers and repressing wartime memories. But when a new family moves into the apartment downstairs, his life starts to unravel and Harryboy soon finds himself sinking into a murky East End underworld where violence, guilt and gangsters are the inevitable result for those who cannot pay their dues. A celebrated cult classic, The Lowlife brilliantly evokes post-war East London — dog tracks, sandwich shops, tenements, sex workers, newly arrived West Indians and Jews leaving for Finchley — all seen through the tragicomic eyes of Harryboy, our picaresque rogue hero suffering from 'existential burn-out in the shadow of the Holocaust' (Iain Sinclair) and driven to bet, brad and beg to survive. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The wonder of The Lowlife is that it does justice to a place of so many contradictions. One of the best fictions, the truest accounts of Hackney.” —Iain Sinclair
>>A Jewish East End childhood.

Shifting Sands: A human history of the Sahara by Judith Scheele $55
An expansive history of the Sahara from prehistory to the present that shows how Saharans have, over time, built complex and cosmopolitan lives despite scarcity, conquest, and the relentless challenges of the desert environment. What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home. Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy cliches and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region to the religions, languages, and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this landmark book tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all. [Hardback]

Naked Portrait: A memoir of my father Lucien Freud by Rose Boyt $33
In Naked Portrait Rose Boyt explores her complicated relationship with her beloved father, Lucian Freud, drawing on a diary she kept while sitting for him and which she found five years after his death. Enthralled by his genius, she remembered as uncontentious and amusing all the extraordinary stories he told her to keep her entertained in the studio, but the shock of the truth is profound when she looks back. What emerges is her compassion and love not just for herself as a vulnerable young woman but for the man himself, in all his brilliant complexity. [Paperback]
”Packed to the rafters with wisdom and insight, this immersive account of being the child of a genius is, itself, a work of art.” —Frances Wilson
”Beyond the father–daughter dynamic is an evocative tale of coming of age in London in the 1980s, one marked by grief, bad boyfriends, sexual compromises and camaraderie. So much life worth telling, out beyond the shadows of great men.” —Hettie Judah, The Times Literary Supplement
>>Identity issues.

Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco $38
Washington Territory, 1888. With contacts on the docks and in the railroad and a buyer’s market funneling product their way, ex-detective Alma Rosales and her opium-smuggling crew are making a fortune. They spend their days moving crates and their nights at the Monte Carlo, the center of Tacoma’s queer scene, where skirts and trousers don’t signify and everyone’s free to suit themselves. And Alma, who is living as a hardscrabble stevedore called Jack Camp, knows this most of all. When two local men end up dead, all signs point to the opium trade. A botched effort to disappear the bodies draws the attention of lawmen, and although Alma scrambles to keep them away from her operation, she’s distracted by the surprise appearance of Bess Spencer—an ex-Pinkerton agent and Alma’s first love—after years of silence. Then a handsome young stranger, Ben Velásquez, rolls into town and falls into an affair with one of Alma’s crewmen. When Ben starts asking questions about opium, Alma begins to suspect she has welcomed a spy into her inner circle, and she’s forced to consider how far she’ll go to protect her trade. Katrina Carrasco plunges readers into the vivid, rough-and-tumble world of the late-1800s Pacific Northwest in this genre and gender-blurring novel. [Paperback]
"At once richly atmospheric and finely paced, Rough Trade is a potent and morally complex portrait of queer life and history." —The New Yorker
>>Boxing as research.

Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of the world by Dorian Lynsky $33
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. [New paperback edition]
”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

Te Āhua o ngā Kupu Whakaari a Te Kooti by Pou Temara $60
He kōrero hirahira tēnei e wānangatia ai ngā kupu whakaari a Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi – he poropiti, he kaiārahi, he pou nō te Hāhi Ringatū. Ko Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi tētahi o ngā maunga teitei o te wā – he kōkōrangi i ngā rā pōuri, he tokotoko i te awa kōpaka. I tū ia hei toa i te whare o Tūmatauenga, engari ki te Hāhi Ringatū, he poropiti – he matakite nāna i hāpai ngā moemoeā, ngā tūmanako, me ngā wairua o te iwi i ngā tau o te ngarohanga: te whenua, te oranga, te mana motuhake. I tōna ringa matau te pū me te riri, i tōna ringa māui te whakapono, ngā kupu whakaari, me te tohu rangimārie. Nā Te Kooti i hora atu ēnei kupu ki ngā marae o te motu, hei karere poropiti, hei tohu whakatūpato, hei māramatanga mō ngā uri whakatipu. He kupu e kōrero ana ki te manawa, ki te wairua, ki te whenua. Ko tēnei pukapuka nā Tā Pou Temara – he mema o te Kaunihera Tekau mā Rua a te Kuīni, he ahorangi, he tohunga mō te kupu, mō te whakaaro Māori. Ka wānangahia e ia ngā kōrero a Te Kooti: ngā whakakitenga i tukuna ki ngā marae, ngā waiata i tuhia hei huna i te mōhiotanga, ngā kōrero i poipoia i raro i te maru o te atua. Ka pānuitia, ka wetewetehia, ka uia: kua tutuki rānei ngā kupu a Te Kooti? Kei te ora tonu rānei i ēnei rā? Ko ngā whakaaro o Tā Pou i ahu mai i ngā kōrero tuku iho o Te Whānau-a-Apanui, o Te Arawa, o Ngāi Tūhoe – ngā iwi i whakatupu i tōna ngākau kia mōhio ai ki te hā o te kupu, ki te wairua o te whakapono, ki te tapu o te kōrero tuku iho. Nā konā, ka rere mai tēnei pukapuka hei puna mātauranga mō te hunga e kimi ana i te māramatanga ki te Hāhi Ringatū, ki te poropititanga Māori, ki te reo, ki te hītori o te motu – mai i te uma o ngā marae, mai i ngā whakapono o ngā tīpuna, mai i te kore ki te ao mārama.
The prophetic sayings of Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi – analysed and explained in te reo Māori by Tā Pou Temara. Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi stands as a towering figure of his time – a storm in dark days, a staff for those adrift. A warrior in the house of Tūmatauenga, yet to the Ringatū Church, a prophet – one who carried the dreams, hopes and spirit of the iwi through years of loss: land, life and sovereignty. In his right hand, the gun of battle; in his left, the word of God. Te Kooti spread these words across the marae of the motu; a messenger, a guide, a beacon of understanding for generations to come. His words speak to the heart, to the spirit, to the land. This book, by Tā Pou Temara – a member of the Māori Queen’s Council of Twelve, a professor, and a tohunga of Māori language and thought – offers a deep exploration in te reo Māori of Te Kooti’s prophetic messages: his visions, teachings and songs. Through these pages, Tā Pou asks: have Te Kooti’s words been fulfilled? Do they still live today? Tā Pou’s insights, grounded in the ancestral knowledge of Te Whānau-a-Apanui, Te Arawa and Ngāi Tūhoe, illuminate the essence of the word, the spirit of belief and the sacredness of tradition. This book is a rich source of knowledge for those seeking understanding of the Ringatū faith, Māori prophecy, the Māori language and the history of the land – from the heart of the marae, from the wisdom of ancestors, from the shadows to the light. [Hardback]

Rites of Passage: Death and mourning in Victorian Britain by Judith Flanders $35
Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally — to modern eyes — bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain. Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving, to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying. This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. [Paperback]
”There is no aspect of Victorian death that does not make it into Judith Flanders's latest investigation into 19th-century life. Flanders's strength has always been to move deftly between micro and macro, the general and the particular, the societal and the entirely personal, to produce that kind of panoramic yet teeming view beloved of the Victorians themselves.” —Sunday Times
>>Beekeepers’ black ribbons.

Anything Could Happen: A memoir by Grant Robertson $40
A fascinating insight into the remarkable life and career of one of the most influential and adroit politicians of his generation. Grant Robertson reflects on the major events in his life, where he grew up in a loving but complex family, through to his highly successful career as a Labour politician and becoming Finance Minister in the Ardern government during one of New Zealand history's most tumultuous times. A natural storyteller and a literary thinker and reader, Robertson writes memorably about his childhood and teen years in Dunedin, from grappling with his sexuality as a teenager, to his passion for music and a fleeting career managing bands, to his emerging political beliefs, and of being told the shocking news that his father had been stealing from his employer and was facing imprisonment. Robertson paints a vivid picture of life inside parliament — including his time in opposition, where he learnt at the feet of Helen Clark, to the responsibility of being Finance Minister, none more so than when the Covid-19 pandemic threatened to decimate New Zealand's economy. In recounting the challenges he faced, Robertson writes honestly about how politics works, and why it matters, and his belief in the uniqueness of Aotearoa and his optimism for its future. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Anything could happen.

Everything but the Medicine: A doctor’s tale by Lucy O’Hagan $40
A well written memoir by a New Zealand GP, reminiscent of the warm wisdom and humanity of the American physician and writer Atul Gawande. Over her long career Dr Lucy O’Hagan has developed deep insights into the profound but often complex relationship between patients and doctors. Reading about her own struggle with what it means to be a truly useful doctor is both fascinating and absorbing. From working with people living on the margins and her own burnout to her efforts to better serve her Māori patients and the humour that’s sometimes needed to get through the day, she keeps her eye on one key question: What is it to be a good doctor in this place? [Paperback]
”Everything But the Medicine is straight out of the trenches. Read it, then call me in the morning. It is very much a medicine itself..” —Glenn Colquhoun
>>Cultures within medical care.
>>Writing the book she wanted to read.

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

How to Dave Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand by Geoffrey Palmer $30
Unfortunately we need this book now more than we ever thought that we would — and we need it more by the day. In this timely and provocative book, Sir Geoffrey Palmer draws on his experience as former Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, and Attorney-General to get people thinking about the state of New Zealand’s democracy. Palmer offers rare insights into the machinery of power and its vulnerabilities, and rather than surrendering to pessimism, he presents a roadmap for renewal. At a time when authoritarianism rises globally and the rule of law faces unprecedented threats, Palmer’s message is clear: ordinary citizens hold the key to democratic revitalisation through civic engagement and vigilance. This collection of thoughtful essays challenges readers to reclaim their role in governance. Palmer argues that regardless of which parties hold power, without public awareness and participation, democratic institutions will continue to weaken. [Paperback]
>>Why this book is necessary now.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy $40
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm."  "Heart-smashed" by her mother Mary's death in September 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her." And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today. [Paperback]
>>What to make of the mother who made you.
>>A fugitive childhood.
”Brave and absorbing. In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother. The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren't significant for giving us access to Roy's inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency.” —Guardian

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $42
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place upon which a whole universe pivots, a novel that interweaves vignettes of history, recipes, gossip, and mythology, reminding us that the stories of any place, no matter how humble, are fascinating and boundless, and await any of us with the imagination to seek it. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Also available in this edition (due very soon).
>>Other books by Olga Tokarczuk.

It’s What He Would Have Wanted by Nick Ascroft $25
What would he have wanted? As little fuss as possible. But, reading between the lines: a little help. All the latest gossip and complaints. An arse that is not wrong. Opulence. One leap from the rope ladder. The final word.
It’s What He Would’ve Wanted is the sixth book of poetry from the author of the acclaimed The Stupefying. In this hilarious and affecting new work, Nick Ascroft writes of lost friends, new frailties, new braveries, and being stuck in an organ pipe during a recital and not wanting to bother anyone about it. Yes, there are poems of cycling into dead-end utility holes but also poems of trembling resolve and arriving at work as aged as the night sky after completing the morning school drop-off. One section of the book is titled ‘Just ad nauseum’. This is possibly the best collection yet by one of the most exciting and mercurial poets writing in Aotearoa today. [Paperback]
”Nick Ascroft is good at Scrabble and indoor football. Does this make him an excellent poet? Annoyingly ... yes.” —Shayne Carter
”Ascroft's poems are unsanctimonious, witty, deeply humane comments on the compromises that comprise life, the bargains we make with ourselves, each other, and our egos and neuroses to get through the day.” —Rebecca Hawkes
”Nick Ascroft is a wonderfully adroit poet. They're not always an easy read, these poems, but they're always a rewarding one.” —Harry Ricketts

A Year with Gilbert White, The first great nature writer by Jenny Uglow $65
In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and, at that time, was halfway to completing his path-breaking The Natural History of Selborne. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and sympathy: his spellbinding book has remained in print ever since, treasured by generations of readers. Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, 'the father of ecology', by following a single year in his Naturalist's Journal. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she accompanies Gilbert from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest. Fresh, alive and original — and packed with rich colour illustrations — A Year with Gilbert White invites us to see the natural world anew, with astonishment and wonder. [A very nice hardback]
”Uglow makes us feel the life beyond the facts.” —Guardian
”Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.” —Sunday Times
”Uglow's style is supremely elegant and often amusingly bathetic, her research exhaustive but lightly worn.” —Financial Times
>>Look inside.
>>Other outstanding biographies by Jenny Uglow.

Olveston: Portrait of a home by Jane Ussher (photographs) and John Walsh (words) $85
A large, sumptuously beautiful and lovingly made book about a large, sumptuously beautiful and lovingly made historic house: Olveston in Dunedin. Built in 1907 by David Theomin, a wealthy merchant and one of Dunedin's accomplished Jewish businessmen of that era, Olveston’s opulence reflects the economic power that was concentrated in Dunedin at the start of the 20th century. Theomin and his wife Marie were ‘cultured’ people who travelled a great deal and the house is full of items brought back from abroad, as well as valuable furniture and significant paintings, including by Frances Hodgkins, who they supported early in her career. The beautifully cared-for house is now in public ownership and open for tours. Olveston: Portrait of a home, evocatively photographed by Jane Ussher, documents its exquisite rooms full of treasures. [A beautiful large-format hardback]
>>Look inside the book!
>>Go inside the house.
>>On making the book.

Edges of Empire: The politics of immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980—2020 by Francis L. Collins, Alan Gamlen, and Neil Vallelly $50
Since 1980, the peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand have fundamentally changed through new policies and new patterns of migration — from a largely Pākeha population with 10 per cent Māori in 1980 to today's megadiversity, with new residents from Asia, the Pacific and the rest of the world. Immigration has had a profound impact on New Zealand's society, economy, and place in the world. Edges of Empire is an in-depth account of the social, political and economic context within which these transformations in policy and population took place. Drawing on interviews with fifteen former Ministers of Immigration, this book reveals the intricacies of politics and policy-making that have led to New Zealand's relatively open and economically driven approach towards migration. Written by three leading social scientists, Edges of Empire provides an insightful account of who is included in Aotearoa New Zealand and under what conditions. [Paperback]
”Edges of Empire is the first book-length study to chronicle the evolution of migration policy governance in Aotearoa New Zealand in the neo-liberal period, against the backdrop of treatymaking involving Māori and complex external relationships with peoples of the Pacific Islands. It boldly responds to the challenge to migration scholars to attend to the colonial in multiple sites and at different scales. The book is also unique in its use of interviews with successive ministers of migration to centre the analysis. In all these ways, Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly have produced a highly original and timely scholarly intervention.” —Leah F. Vosko, FRSC, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Economy, York University
”Drawing on the personal accounts of successive Ministers of Immigration, Edges of Empire offers a unique analysis of New Zealand's migration policies. At its core, the book outlines how the politics of markets, multiculturalism, and an enduring imperial agenda has shaped migration over the past forty years. It is also one of those rare accounts that threads the Crown's relationship with tangata whenua in unfolding immigration histories. Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly adeptly blend academic thoroughness and storytelling to deliver an immersive and thought-provoking critique of New Zealand's contemporary migration.” —Rachel Simon-Kumar, Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Asian and Ethnic Minority Health Research and Evaluation, University of Auckland

Matapēhi by William Shakespeare (translated from English by Te Haumihiata Mason) $40
He kōrero i whiria ki te pōuri me te toto, e miramira ana i te hiahia tangata: ko Matapēhi, te whakaari a Wiremu Hakipia, kua whakaorangia ki te reo rangatira. Ko te kupu i tīkina rawatia i te ngākau, i te whatumanawa hei kōpaki i te whakaaro o te tangata, ahakoa rere taua whakaaro rā ki hea, he kupu kua āta tāraia e tōna kaitārai. Katoa ngā āhuatanga kua whakarārangitia e Wiremu Hakipia ka rangona mai i ngā kaupapa e ngau tonu ana i ēnei rā. Ko Matapēhi he whakaari mō te mauri whakakite, te hiahia, te tōwhare; mō ngā whaea rangatira me ngā kīngi; mō ngā ruahine taki i te ‘rererua, matarua, maikiroa ē’; mō te ao i kīia ai te kōrero ‘he pai te kino, he kino te pai’. Nā, kua ora mai anō te pakitūroa pōuriuri, whakawai i te hinengaro, kua tuhia ki te reo Māori e te mātanga kaiwhakamāori, e Te Haumihiata Mason. Nāna anō i puta ai Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine, me te reo aroha o Rōmeo rāua ko Hurieta ki te reo Māori. He tamāhine nō ngā maunga tapu o Ruatoki, he atamai ki te raranga rerenga. Nāna i whakahauora ngā kupu a Hakipia kia kawea ake ai a Matapēhi ki tētahi ao hōu. He taonga tēnei mā te hunga kaingākau ki te reo o Hakipia, ki te reo rangatira, ki te korakora hoki ka rere i te pānga o ngā ao e rua. I tēnei putanga reorua, ka takoto ngātahi te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā; e rere tahi ana te ia o te kōrero, me he awa rua: motuhake te ia, tūhono te rere, kī tonu i te mauri o te kupu. He aho mārama kei ia reo, e kitea ai he hōhonutanga hōu i tērā rā. A reo Māori translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: a gripping tale of ambition and betrayal, prophetic visions and dripping blood. Shakespeare’s Scottish play is a tale of prophecy, ambition and murder; of lairds and ladies and kings; of witches, cauldrons and of ‘double, double, toil and trouble’ — all in a world where ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’. Now, this dark and captivating classic is brought to life in te reo Māori by the doyenne of reo Māori translators — Te Haumihiata Mason. The force behind the translations of The Diary of Anne Frank and Romeo and Juliet, a daughter of Rautoki and a master of her craft, she breathes new life into Shakespeare’s language and carries Macbeth to a new realm of rhythm, power and poetry. This book is a treasure for lovers of Shakespeare and te reo Māori alike, and of the alchemy that sparks where they meet. This dual-language edition places Māori and English side by side, moving through the play like twin currents: distinct, entwined and alive with meaning. Each language casts its own light, revealing fresh depths in the other. [Paperback]

My Sister by Emmanuelle Salasc (translated from French by Penny Hueston) $40
One summer's day in 2056 in the mountains of southern France, a warning siren goes off- inside the belly of the receding glacier above the spa-centre village, a large pocket of water under pressure is about to give way-just as it did 150 years ago, when hundreds of people died in the floods of debris and water. This is a novel about fear, an ancestral, collective fear about environmental disaster, and the narrator Lucie's fear about her twin sister Clemence, who has returned after a thirty-year absence. Salasc intensifies the psychological suspense as she tracks the sisters' relationship between the past and the present. Clemence claims she is on the run, but Lucie still doesn't know whether she can trust her sister. The two women shelter together beneath the glacier, waiting for the worst, surviving on dwindling supplies, alone above the evacuated village. Does Clemence's determination to control Lucie mean confronting the ultimate catastrophe? My Sister is a spine-chilling slow-burn story of sibling rivalry and climate change, offering us a profound examination of the future of our relationship with nature — as well as with those close to us. [Paperback]
”With its sparse elegance, psychological acuity, and environmental resonance, My Sister is a novel of remarkable subtlety and power.” —NZ Booklovers
>>By the same author under her previous name.

Rākau: The ancient forests of Aotearoa by Ned Barraud $35
This beautifully illustrated and handsomely packaged guide to the evolution, habitats and variety of the rākau (trees) and ngahere (forests) of Aotearoa for young readers is written and illustrated in Ned Barraud’s hallmark accessible, informative and captivating style. Featuring gatefolds and framed throughout by core mātauranga Māori and the expertise of curators at Te Papa, Rākau takes young readers from pre-history to the present day. It introduces key species and highlights the significance and use of different native trees and the impact of humans on their vitality. Ideal for both the library and home, this engrossing book helps young readers discover what makes our rākau so special and worthy of our care. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration by Charles Ferrall $50
Joseph Kinsey is not a name many of us know — or not as well as we know the name Robert Falcon Scott. But from his base in Christchurch, Kinsey — book and art collector, philanthropist, science enthusiast, businessman — forged deep connections with the Antarctic expeditions and the explorers themselves through his tireless work as the agent for various expeditions. Two other New Zealanders also formed close friendships: Charles Bowen, a former politician, and Wellington lawyer Leonard Tripp, to whom Shackleton declared: 'I love you as David and Jonathan loved.' South by South tells the story of New Zealand's role in 'the Heroic Age', that wave of exploration beginning at the end of the nineteenth century in which men set out to traverse the continent of Antarctica and, if they survived, to bring home their findings. The members of this New Zealander triumvirate were all believers in the British Empire, but the southern voyages were to an uninhabited land. South by South brings to light many letters, newspaper articles, and pieces of official correspondence, much of which has not been published before, during the five expeditions of 1901-1916: the Discovery, Nimrod, Terra Nova, Aurora, and Endurance. In particular, Scott's letters to Kinsey and Shackleton's to Tripp tell of their hope, despair, exhaustion, and deep gratitude for their friendship. What they and the explorers wrote was influenced by nineteenth-century adventure stories which conveyed the Imperialist ideals of the time. If the impending conflict of 1914—18 was a very 'literary war', this was very literary exploration. [Paperback]

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood $40
Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa's trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach to scrape for shrimp; spending the rest of the day selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream. When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas? Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows. [Hardback]
Long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
”A quiet, unassuming book about honest work and modest dreams, about sons and their duty, and those brief, wonderful moments when we glimpse the possibility of living a different life. Benjamin Wood is a magnificent writer and I intend to read everything he has written.” —Douglas Stuart
”One of the finest British novelists of his generation. He packs more poetry into his opening paragraph than many a Booker-winner achieves in their entire oeuvre.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times
”The wonder of this book is how Wood delivers so much in a few words.Seascraper reads like the forging of a new myth: one about how an alternative life is possible, and may even be starting to happen inside you already.” —John Self
”Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.” —Jude Cook, Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>On the bench.

Endling by Maria Reva $38
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country's forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men-not for love, but to fund her work — entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. [Paperback]
Long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
”Maria Reva has made a fantastic novel. It's about so much and yet is laser focused. A scientist who funds her research with sex work, a wild and, at the same time, sensible and normal move. This novel turns corners and tables. I love works that are smarter than I am and this is one.” —Percival Everett
”In Maria Reva's all-around brilliant novel Endling, the fate of some snails serves as a harbinger for the fate of Ukraine. The book is funny and smart, full of science, longing and adventure, all the while reminding us what the world stands to lose, and what it has already lost. This is essential reading.” —Ann Patchett
>>Chaos seeps into order.
>>Read an extract.

Empathy by Bryan Walpert $40
Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he's developing — sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once Alison's fragrance develops dangerous effects and Jim's game falters in the market, then the chemist working on the perfume project vanishes. His son, David, seems to be the only one looking for him. A widower with two children, David is a man of routine who just wants to get on with his life, but his love for his father takes him into a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold and can lead to murder. A nail-biting Aotearoa deep-concept thriller. [Paperback]
>>Listen to Stella’s RNZ review.
>>Also recommended: Entanglement .

Atavists by Lydia Millet $53
Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals. The various "-ists" who people these linked stories — from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists — include a professor who's morbidly fixated on an old friend's Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel's fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard. As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet's characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm. In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, Atavists returns to the trenchant, playful social commentary that made A Children's Bible a runaway hit. In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: Atavists performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm. [Hardback]
 "Very few writers can make the apocalypse hilarious and sentimental. Millet is the kind of contemporary genius who should be at every book festival and on every creative writing course." —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"Millet knows how to put a story together. How to pace drama and consummate tension, when to turn up the volume and when to leave us alone with what she's put in motion." —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times
"Although optimism is understandably in short supply, Millet delivers her doom with a generous dose of subversive humour." —Mia Levitin, Financial Times
>>Writing in the here-and-now.

Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse by Luke Kemp $40
A radical retelling of human history through collapse — from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twentieth-first century and beyond — based on the latest research and a database of more than 440 societal lifespans over the last 5,000 years. Why do civilisations collapse? Is human progress possible? Are we approaching our endgame? For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilisations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. Slowly, reluctantly we congregated in the first farms and cities, and people began to rely on lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. When more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organisation. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires — with vast bureaucracies and militaries — carved up and dominated the globe. What brought them down? From Rome and the Aztec empire and the early cities of Cahokia and Teotihuacan, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power which hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population. Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now faces a choice — we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last. [Paperback]
>>Self-termination is most likely.

Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom $38
Nothing hurts like family. Ines is reluctantly moving home on the edge of a breakdown, her childhood sweetheart in tow. He's only ever wanted what was best for her. Gwen is elated that her prodigal daughter has returned. Dylan is still licking her wounds from a rejection she can't forget. And Emma is quietly suffocating in the perfect marriage she wanted so badly. They were inseparable once. But that was a long time ago. Now, they're back in the Welsh town where they grew up, peeling back the layers of a once forgotten, haunting past. What they find may be the end of them. Uninhibited, claustrophobic and complex, Selfish Girls spans generations, buried resentments, and an unexpected love story. It is a clear-eyed portrait of a dysfunctional family and the pain we inflict on those we love most. [Paperback]
”Anyone who has a sister knows what a treasured, complex, fraught and precious bond it is — a theme that Abigail Bergstrom puts at the heart of her new psychologically charged novel Selfish Girls. Following the lives of close-knit siblings growing up in a dysfunctional household in a small Welsh town, the narrative unravels across generations as each character navigates the legacy of family trauma and the complexities of female relationships. With a central mystery to uncover, this is at once a suspenseful thriller and a subtle portrait of domestic interactions, with a healthy dose of humour and hope offsetting its darker moments.” —Harper's Bazaar
>>A psychological umbilical cord.

I Crawl Through It by A.S. King $26
Four accomplished teenagers are on the verge of explosion. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender — senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope — but no one is listening. So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away from the pressure — but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it. A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction. It will mesmerise readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience — and find the way out. [New paperback edition]
"Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this." —New York Times Book Review

Perspectives by Laurent Binet (translated from French by Sam Taylor) $38
Florence, New Year's Day, 1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade. At his home, a hidden painting scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is the murderer? Who is behind the painting? As the city erupts in chaos, Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. Letters fly back and forth carrying news of political plots and speculation about the killer's identity — between Maria and her aunt Catherine de' Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and her scheming agents in Florence; and between Vasari and his friend Michelangelo. Meanwhile, the Pope is banning books and branding works of art immoral. And the truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot centre of Europe. A historical murder-mystery soaking in Renaissance art. [Paperback]

Raising Hare: The heart-warming true story of an unlikely friendship by Chloe Dalton $28
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.
When Chloe Dalton, a city-dwelling professional with a high-pressure job, finds a newly born hare, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival — despite being the least likely caregiver to this wild animal. Raising Hare is the story of their journey together. It chronicles an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife. Their improbable bond of trust reminds us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them. This new edition includes a new chapter. [Paperback]
“A great and important tale for our times.” —Michael Morpurgo
”This is more than a wildlife memoir, it's a philosophical masterpiece.” —Clare Balding
”This book is exceptional. A simply wonderful story, profoundly beautiful.” —Chris Packham
”A glorious book — for its warmth, its precision, its joy. It's not dreamy or romantic about the natural world — it's something far better than that.” —Katherine Rundell
>>Also available as a beautiful hardback.

The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed $37
A collaboration between poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed, bearing witness from Australia to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and drawings, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed record these injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media — including their own. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness — the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively complicit in crimes against humanity overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, The Nightmare Sequence is an insightful work of testimony that also considers how art is complicit in Empire. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>The author’s note.

Persiana Easy by Sabrina Ghayour $50
Ghayour’s new book makes achieving her irresistible Middle Eastern flavours as simple as possible.
CONTENTS INCLUDE: —Dips, Snacks and Light Bites including Sweet Potato, Basil and Feta Dip; Crispy Za'atar Salt and Pepper Prawns; Popcorn Halloumi. —Bread and Pastry: including Turkish Pide Bread; Easy Bake Bagels(ish); Fig, Goat Cheese, Thyme and Honey Rolls. —Salads: including Smoked Aubergine Salad with Pickled Chillies and Feta; Duck and Pomegranate Salad with Honey Pomegranate Sauce; Broad Bean, Pea, Orange and Goats Cheese Salad. —Midweek Meals: including Lamb Kofta Patties with Yogurt and Burnt Orange; Butterflied Orange Paprika Butter Chicken; Shish Kebab. —Comfort Food: including Turkish Lentil Soup; Couscous Royale with Spiced Lamb Shanks; Orange Spiced Pork with Charred Spring Onions and Pineapple. —Roasts and Traybakes: including Spiced Saffron Chicken Kebabs; Tray-baked Harissa Lamb Chops; Baked Meatballs with Tomato, Harissa and Feta. —Vegetables and Side Dishes: including Hot and Sour Green Beans; Mashed Chickpeas with Spice Oil; Stuffed Baby Peppers with Date Couscous and Feta. —Sweet Treats: including Citrus and Spice Almond Tart; Bokaj; Apple Borek. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other books by Sabrina Ghayour.

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Juvenilia by Hera Lindsay Bird $45
Juvenilia wrangles the flamboyant, provocative pique of youth into a poetry collection highly focused and desperately alive. This first US collection of Lindsay Hera Bird’s poems contains 32 pieces, including material from Hera Lindsay Bird and Pamper Me to Hell and Back. [Paperback]
"If you have forgotten what a poem is, you should read Hera Lindsay Bird's poems. if you haven't forgotten what a poem is, you should forget immediately and then read Hera Lindsay Bird's poems." —Kimmy Walters
"Without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet, on the page and in performance." —Carol Ann Duffy

Hardship and Hope: Stories of resistance in the fight against poverty in Aotearoa by Rebecca Macfie $20
”The people in this book face the uncertainty and the risks, and choose to wield fierce hope over passivity and cynicism to help shape a better future.” In papakāinga, schools, marae and communities from Te Hauke to Porirua, Papakura to Aranui, award-winning journalist Rebecca Macfi e discovers powerful local responses to poverty. Expanding on her New Zealand Listener series, Macfie reveals the everyday struggles whānau face across the country and lays bare the systems that perpetuate poverty. Hardship and Hope grounds the national poverty crisis in the lived realities of the people and organisations leading local initiatives to confront injustice and build a fairer future. [Paperback]
>>”What do I know of hardship?”
>>From the ground up.
>>Why journalism still matters.
>>Other books in this excellent series.

Pakukore: Poverty, by design edited by Rebecca Macfie, Graeme Whimp, and Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich $20
Poverty is not the result of individual failure or misfortune. It is a product of the design of our economic and institutional systems. Pakukore brings together leading thinkers and practitioners to expose the systemic nature of poverty in Aotearoa and explore pathways for change. From education, health and housing to government finance, welfare and justice, this book shows how inequality is embedded in the structures of our society. It offers analysis from economists, public health experts, legal scholars, community leaders and those working at the front lines of social need. Contributors include: Sue Bradford, Huhana Hickey, Callum Katene, Lisa Marriott, Tracey McIntosh, Hana O’Regan, Sarah-Jane Paine, Craig Renney, Bill Rosenberg, Max Rashbrooke, Jin Russell, Miriana Stephens, Nikki Turner. [Paperback]

Exophony: Voyages outside the mother tongue by Yoko Tawada (translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) $35
”I am trying to learn, with my tongue, sounds that are unfamiliar to me. A foreign-sounding word learned out of curiosity is not ‘imitation’ per se. All of these things I learn leave traces that slowly grow to coexist with my accent. And that balancing act goes on changing indefinitely.”
How perfect that Yoko Tawada's first essay in English dives deep into her lifelong fascination with the possibilities opened up by cross-hybridising languages. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reaches beyond any mere dichotomy. The term ‘exophonic’, which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms, 'immigrant literature’, or 'creole literature’, but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Tawada revels in explorations of cross-cultural and intra-language possibilities (and along the way deals several nice sharp raps to the primacy of English). The accent here, as in her fiction, is the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarisation. Never entertaining a received thought, Tawada seeks the still-to-be-discovered truths, as well as what might possibly be invented entirely whole cloth. Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world, and delivers more of her signature erudite wit — at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable. [Paperback]
”The beauty of Tawada's work is that she treats the uncertain footing of the second language learner-and of the native speaker looking back on their first language with new eyes-not as a source of anxiety, but as a source of boundless creative potential.” —Reed McConnell, The Baffler
”For audiences familiar with Tawada's recent novels, Exophony is an ideal complement, illuminating, exploring, and experiencing 'the space between languages — the poetic ravine between them’.” —Terry Hong, Booklist
>>Beyond merely existing.
>>Books by Yoko Tawada.

Pastoral Care by John Prins $35
Nine clear-eyed, witty and beautifully written stories centred on daily life in twenty-first-century Aotearoa New Zealand. On the shores of Lake Pukaki; in kitchens, bedrooms and Lego-strewn living rooms; at school events; walking the dog, pushing a buggy, or stuck in traffic with a child kicking the back of the driver’s seat — Prins blends wry humour and emotional depth to illuminate the dark gulf between youthful dreams and the reality of adult obligations. John Prins reinvigorates the tradition of social realism in New Zealand short fiction, investing character, scene and dialogue with a distinctive, engaging voice.[Paperback]

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera $42
Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Māori tribe in Whangara, on the east coast of New Zealand — a tribe that claims descent from the legendary ‘whale rider’. In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir — there's only Kahu. She should be the next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle, she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to reestablish her people's ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather's attention, and lead her tribe to a bold new future. An attractive new edition, with an introduction by Shilo Kino and cover art by Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho. [Paperback with French flaps]

I Found Myself… The last dreams by Naguib Mafouz (translated from Alaric by Hisham Matar), with photographs by Diana Matar $45
”I found myself in our old house in El Abbassiya, visiting my mother. She received me with perplexing indifference and then left the room. I assumed she'd gone to make coffee, but she never returned.” [Dream 216]
In his final years, the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes — now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the novelist Hisham Matar — appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz's nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, open up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Recurring female characters may be figures of Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz's youth. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many known or enigmatic others women float through these affecting brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible. [Paperback]
>>Read an extract.
>>Look inside.

Chemistry by Damien Wilkins $28
From the author of Delirious, winner of the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, Chemistry — first published in 2002 — is a riveting story about families in crisis. Jamie, a forty-one-year-old drug addict recovering from surgery, goes somewhere he hasn’t been in years — home, to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely those two, with their access to pharmaceuticals — and their blood ties — will help him. And if that fails, their insomniac mother has various prescriptions rattling around in the cupboards of the old family home. An old hand at deception, Jamie occupies one pole in this novel; at the other there is Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby, and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to go straight and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory. New edition. [Paperback]
”Chemistry is a work of quietly cumulative power. Wonderfully funny, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and moving.” —Elizabeth Knox
”Wilkins has managed to do that hard thing in this novel — write about his characters as citizens of a particular place and make that place real, multiple and textured. His clear and beautiful prose and his sinewy grip on narrative make it a joy to read.” —Lydia Wevers
”A terrifically good book, so cleverly constructed and managed. It's a work of real tenderness.” —Jim Crace

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu $38
A novel drawing on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life and work. Ghost Cities — inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China — follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed — then recreated, page by page and book by book — all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Nor the Years Condemn by Robin Hyde $40
First published in 1938, Nor the Years Condemn explores the experiences of returned servicemen and women in the aftermath of World War I. Through the story of Douglas Stark, Hyde vividly portrays the disappointment and disillusionment of veterans who return to a New Zealand that falls short of the ideals they fought for. Far from the promised 'land fit for heroes', the nation grapples with the social upheaval and economic hardship of the 1920s and 1930s. Hyde's novel poignantly captures the emotional and societal challenges faced by those trying to rebuild their lives in a world that no longer seems to recognise their sacrifice. Back in print, with cover art by Gretchen Albrecht and a preface by Genevieve Scanlan. [Paperback]
”We are shown New Zealand in a world shattered by international conflict, a devastating pandemic, and economic depression. If this rhymes and feels resonant with where we stand in the world today, we are surely in greater need than ever of Hyde's humane perspective.” —Genevieve Scanlan

Wednesday’s Children by Robin Hyde $40
Set in 1930s New Zealand, the novel follows Wednesday Gilfillan, an independent woman who rejects societal expectations in favour of a life defined by artistic and emotional freedom. On an isolated island, she creates a home for her remarkable children and other characters drawn into her life by circumstance. The novel explores her journey through love, loss and survival, focusing on her defiance against the constraints imposed on women—particularly female artists—in a patriarchal society. In vivid prose, Hyde critiques middle-class respectability and delves into the personal costs of living an unconventional life. Back in print, with cover art by Star Gossage and a new preface and afterword by Genevieve Scanlan. [Paperback]
”Anyone who has ever felt torn between the urge to run away from the world and the urge to improve it will find something resonant in this book.” —Genevieve Scanlan

What’s Cooking in the Kremlin: A modern history of Russia through the kitchen door by Witold Szabłowski (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $30
A tale of feast and famine told from the kitchen — the narrative of one of the most complex, troubling and fascinating nations on earth. We will travel through Putin's Russia with Szabłowski as he learns the story of the chef who was shot alongside the Romonovs, and the Ukrainian woman who survived the Great Famine created by Stalin and still weeps with guilt; the soldiers on the Eastern front who roasted snails and made nettle soup as they fought back Hitler's army; the woman who cooked for Yuri Gagarin and the cosmonauts; and the man who ran the Kremlin kitchen during the years of plenty under Brezhnev. We will hear from the women who fed the firefighters at Chernobyl, and the story of the Crimean Tatars, who returned to their homeland after decades of exile, only to flee once Russia invaded Crimea again, in 2014. In tracking down these remarkable stories and voices, Witold Szablowski has written an account of modern Russia that reminds us of the human stories behind the history. [Paperback]

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SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION OFFER
Mohua Gold: The history of the Golden Bay goldfields, 1864—1880 by Mike Johnston
The much-anticipated second volume of Mike Johnston’s authoritative and scholarly account of Golden Bay’s mining history will be available in October. STRIKE GOLD NOW and get your copy at a special price.
The product of over 25 years of extensive research, this remarkable book covers vital years in the region’s history, gives colour and detail to the lives of both permanent and opportunistic residents, and includes much on the advent of the economically risky reef or hard rock mining enterprises.
The companion to the esteemed but now sold-out Aorere Gold, this volume will command its place on any serious bookshelf of local, mining, or nineteenth-century history.
When ordering through our website, just enter the code GOLD when checking out for a 10% discount (the book will be $100 but you will get it for $90). Hurry, though: the offer is valid only until the end of September.

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare $45
The legacy of William Blake stretches 200 years to today not only through poetry and art but traditions of social, spiritual, sexual and political noncomformity. Philip Hoare drags himself from the company of whales and follows Derek Jarman to follow Paul Nash to photograph the megaliths at Avebury and towards a shared encounter with the luminous William Blake, electrically alive and inspiring to them all. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the unfettered genius of William Blake. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. As Hoare shows, art and poetry still have the power to make change. [Hardback]
”This wild, dreaming book is undoubtedly Hoare's masterpiece.” —Olivia Laing
”Each of Hoare's subjects is affected with a certain wildness, a loosening of societal norms that makes for expressive beauty and eccentricity, giving the author a host of colourful and hyper-connected anecdotes. In doing so, they make him a part of the very tradition he is recording, his own work here reaching ecstatic heights, his prose filled with moments of sudden clarity, his life and passions glimpsed.” —Philip Marsden, Spectator
”Wild, free, exhilaratingly beautiful, and so alive to the past that everyone and everything seems to be happening right now on the page. I cannot think of a more original writer at work today. To look at English art through his eyes is to see more than you ever could before.” —Laura Cumming
>>Look inside.
>>Slumber on the banks.
>>Swimming or drowning.
>>The ecstasy of art.
>>Why William Blake became a queer icon.

Flashlight by Susan Choi $38
One evening, 10-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels. Flashlight moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America, and the North Korean regime, to tell the astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of 20th-century history. [Paperback]
”Flashlight is a sprawling novel that weaves stories of national upheavals with those of Louisa, her Korean Japanese father, Serk, and Anne, her American mother. Evolving from the uncertainties surrounding Serk’s disappearance, it is a riveting exploration of identity, hidden truths, race, and national belonging. In this ambitious book that deftly criss-crosses continents and decades, Susan Choi balances historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance. We admired the shifts and layers of Flashlight’s narrative, which ultimately reveal a story that is intricate, surprising, and profound.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Flashlight is severely allergic to summary, so watch what you read about it. Even categorizing this story as a mystery risks prematurely exposing the novel’s intricate structure to too much light. It’s catholic in its genre, shifting deftly from domestic drama to international thriller, from academic satire to bildungsroman. But what can be safely revealed is that Choi is writing about people who struggle and fail to find a stable sense of identity in a shifting world conspiring against them. —Washington Post
>>Read an extract.
>>Dropped onto an alien planet.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s hidden places and lost memorials by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson $37
Forgotten is a search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine — now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories — and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on the small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. From ancient city ruins to the Nabi 'Ukkasha mosque and tomb, acclaimed writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialised, and what lies unseen, abandoned or erased — and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or at the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land. Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba of 1948, but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today. [Hardback]
”Shehadeh’s books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all.” —Guardian
>>History embedded in the landscape.

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death edited by Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber, and Todd Martin $55
During Katherine Mansfield's life she experienced the effects of abortion, miscarriage, gonorrhoea, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence constantly in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 1914—1918 and the influenza pandemic of 1918—20 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield's literary output and her modes of thinking. Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield's creativity. She would write to fund her medical care while simultaneously limited by her poor health, writing in 1922: “The real point is I shall have to make as much money as I can on my next book my path is so dotted with doctors”. As explored in this volume, her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been — lost her brother, her mother, her grandmother — endowing them with life in the process. Cover art by Mohua artist Frith Wilkinson. [Paperback]

When the Museum Is Closed by Emi Yagi (translated from Japanese by Yuki Tejima) $38
Rika Horauchi's new part-time job is to converse with a statue of Venus — in Latin — every Monday, when the museum is closed. Initially reluctant, Rika starts to enjoy her strange new job. Recommended by her old university professor for her exemplary language skills, Rika leads an otherwise unassuming life, working the rest of the week in a frozen-food warehouse. As Venus comes to life in the quiet of the museum, they talk about everything. Venus opens up new worlds for Rika, both intellectually and emotionally. They soon fall in love. But when the museum's curator, Hashibami, makes it clear he wants to keep Venus for himself, what will Rika do? When the Museum is Closed is by turns charming, funny and surprising, a surreal take on our most real emotions and concerns — love, loneliness, freedom, perceptions of beauty and how women are seen in society. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I was captivated by Rika's strange, frozen world, filled with movement and passion — a perfectly contained and luminous story that reveals a whole world of desire and possibility, right at the heart of loneliness.” —Rosie Price
>>A conversation between the author and the translator.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner $26
Sadie Smith — a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions — 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 an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Bruno's idealism laughable, but just as she 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 taut, dazzling story about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. [New paperback edition]
”The prose is thrilling, the ideas electrifying.” —Booker Prize 2024 judges’ citation, on short-listing the book
“At last I get to say how deeply, madly, irrecoverably I loved Creation Lake. It was all stylish and cool, and then somehow the book struck a blow to my heart.” —Louise Erdrich
>>Read Stella’s review.

Sparks: China’s underground historians and their battle for the future by Ian Johnson $30
The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. Nowadays, one of Xi Jinping's signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party's survival. But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. These accounts have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinping's rule. [Now in paperback]
”Johnson's skill lies in demonstrating the philosophical links between China's geography and its political and cultural landscape. It is deeply satisfying to read a book about China that could only have been written after decades of serious engagement with the country.” —The Guardian

Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious by James Russell $55
Tirzah Garwood (1908-1951) proved herself an artist of rare talent, in a life tragically cut short by illness, yet little of her work has been seen in public since her Memorial Exhibition in 1952. Written by James Russell, author of the bestselling Ravilious (2015), this beautifully illustrated book is published to coincide with the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, the first exhibition to explore the full range of Garwood's achievements. A witty observer of the human condition, Garwood made her first breakthrough as a wood engraver of rare ability while still in her teens. After marrying Eric Ravilious she became a devoted mother to three children. During this period she took up paper marbling and quickly achieved renown for the dazzling originality of her decorative papers. In her early thirties she suffered the double blow of a breast cancer diagnosis and her husband's death on active service in World War II. Undaunted, she wrote her autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield and began creating a series of strange, beautiful oil paintings and collaged constructions. In Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious her work is, for the first time, given the public showcase and critical examination it deserves, revealing Garwood's development of a distinctive 'sophisticated naive' approach that subtly transformed innocent subjects to unsettling effect. More than ninety works by Tirzah Garwood — including books, studies and ephemera, almost exclusively from private collections — are accompanied by artworks by Eric Ravilious that set the context in which the artists worked together, exploring the shared interests and techniques of this remarkable creative couple. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside!

Hark: How women listen by Alice Vincent $40
We're told women are good at listening, but we rarely examine what they're listening to, what their worlds sound like, or how it feels to be expected to listen in a world of noise made by men. Like so many of us, Alice Vincent had become overwhelmed by the sensory overload punctuating our every moment. And then, a baby's heartbeat arrived. A rapid, pulsing whoosh of white noise. An undeniable rhythm. Once again, Alice's life became cacophonous — both with a new child, but also with the societal pressures that motherhood holds. What followed was a personal quest to rediscover sound as something alive and vital and restorative. Beyond music, Alice's journey takes her into new corners of listening: from the phantom crying heard by mothers across the world to the nightingale's song and the crackle of the Aurora Borealis. As our attention spans shrink and our sense of disconnection grows, Alice wants to find out if sound — seeking it, trying to hold on to it, making space for it in her life — can reconnect her not only to lost parts of herself but to a life more consciously lived. Hark is a book for women who feel unheard and a means of listening more deeply in a world that has grown too loud. From the author of Why Women Grow. [Hardback]
“Stimulating and humane, Hark is vibrating with interesting people and fresh ideas.” —Amy Liptrot
”Immersing myself in the beautiful, deeply thoughtful pages of Hark has a profound effect on me. Reading it has been an incredibly emotional experience, and has made me look at, and listen to, my own world in bright new ways. This book is a quiet yet profound kind of miracle.” —Clover Stroud
”A beautiful book, which left me thinking deeply and intimately about my own sonically-charged life. Hark will make you feel more alert to sound, silence and everything in-between and will leave you more curious about what it means to listen and be listened to.” —Amy Key
>>The chorus of motherhood.
>>Soundworlds.

Just Earth: How a fairer world will save the planet by Tony Juniper $39
From soil loss to wildfires, degraded rivers, mass migration and conflict, the environmental crisis is already here — and it's set to get much worse. While billionaires build remote bunkers and make plans for colonies on Mars, climate collapse impacts the most vulnerable among us first and hardest. But what this radical and ground-breaking book proves is that inequality isn't just about who suffers the consequences, it is the main obstacle blocking action — and it has been for decades. How can people lead good lives without ultimately hastening global collapse? The answer lies in fairness. We can't fight the climate and nature crises without addressing the ever-widening gaps between the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak. Drawing upon more than 40 years of experience in research, practical work, campaigning and advocacy, combined with interviews with globally renowned experts, in Just Earth Tony Juniper reveals the system shifts needed to achieve real, lasting change. [Paperback]
”Tony Juniper, as usual, has called this right. He explores a crucial issue with verve and style. Everyone should read this book.” —George Monbiot
”Remarkably well researched, well written and well balanced. Optimistic about the way forward.” —Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level
”Remarkable, insightful and timely. Juniper sets out an agenda for a just transition and action at all levels.” —Jake Fiennes

Outrage: Why the fight for LGBTQ+ equality is not yet won, and what we can do about it by Ellen Jones $40
Equality for LGBTQ+ individuals should be the norm, yet they still face severe discrimination globally. Despite increased visibility, the community encounters rising violence and legal setbacks. Jones reveals discrimination across various life aspects, including marriage, mental health, education, and more, using poignant personal stories. The book not only identifies issues but also offers actionable solutions for fostering equality and celebrates pioneers making positive changes. Whether you're part of the LGBTQ+ community, an ally, or a human rights advocate, Outrage sheds light on ongoing challenges and paths to progress. [Paperback]
”Invaluable reading for anyone invested in a fairer future.” —Sophie Duker
>>The author recommends!
>>An evening with the author.

Power Metal: The race for the resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser $40
An Australian millionaire's plan to mine the ocean floor. Nigerian garbage pickers risking their lives to salvage e-waste. A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing A.I. to find metals in the Arctic. These people and millions more are part of the intensifying competition to find and extract the minerals essential for two crucial technologies: the internet and renewable energy. Power Metal explores the Achilles' heel of ‘green power’ and digital technology — that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet. Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can perhaps minimise the damage. [Paperback]

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Mr. Distinctive by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), illustrated by Joanna Concejo $50
A gorgeously illustrated picture book for adults — with two double-gatefold openings inside. Mr. Distinctive has a memorable, attractive face. He only has to walk down the street, and everyone turns to smile at him. Once he starred in a TV commercial and was praised and congratulated for having a face that sold the product well. Mr. Distinctive is very pleased with himself and loves to take selfies with his cellphone. He posts countless images of himself that are shared all over the internet. One day Mr. Distinctive looks in the mirror and sees that his features have begun to fade, his face has changed into a blur. With every new photo he posts, his distinctiveness dwindles. Determined to regain his flawlessly beautiful face and the adoration it brought him, Mr. Distinctive seeks out an extreme solution. But are the lengths he goes in order to restore his sense of being unique and exceptional worth it? In their new story, Nobel prize in literature winner Olga Tokarczuk and esteemed illustrator Joanna Concejo show us a world of obsession with personal appearance and self-promotion, where ‘happiness’ is an imperative, and the cult of youth rules. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Flower by Ed Atkins $30
”I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.” Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable — something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter's improvised games, poor internet writing, and shitty A.I., Ed Atkins equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur — Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I feel like a permanent conduit has been built between my brain and this book. Atkins is relentless, beautiful, hideously and angelically honest. Sometimes it brought me to tears and I’m not even sure why. It’s the stuff most of us leave out, or wouldn’t even know how to articulate. By which I mean this book has made so much other writing feel like propaganda. It’s heroic. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from it.” —Luke Kennard
”Every sentence in this delightfully bizarre techno-memoir could stand alone on a page and command allure. Like splicing the miniature divulgences of Édouard Levé with the ominous bombast of Jenny Holzer, Flower makes automatic non-fiction feel like sci-fi, and it’s instantly unforgettable.” —Blake Butler
”Flower is propulsive and it doesn’t let up. It’s about vulnerability, sort of, and invincibility: it swings between these poles. It’s about mortality, too, and in that sense humanity. To speak the book back at itself, I confess it did get to me.” —Isabel Waidner
”Ed Atkins is a radical humanist who rediscovers the human in the most inhuman of states, when the usual supports – ego, language, people, technology, media, food – all fail. In Flower Atkins turns that abjection towards us, in a spleeny anti-autofiction that is his own version of Les Fleurs du Mal.” —Hal Foster

in the cracks of light by Apirana Taylor $28
The seventy-three short poems here challenge our conceptions of poetic form. They are minimalist in construction but ambitious in emotional impact. They burst out of their small spaces like gas expanding in a cylinder and pushing a piston. They expertly inhabit both the natural and the political worlds, sometimes simultaneously, because Taylor is wise enough to know that they can't be separated, especially in a colonised land. [Paperback]
”in the cracks of light presents heart-centred poems that are deeply rooted in te taiao. Reading this book will give you the strength both to fight your battles and observe the world around you with fresh insight. These short verses are profound soul nourishment.” —Kiri Piahana-Wong
”Another book by Apirana Taylor, whether poetry or prose, is always good news. He is an originator and accomplished practitioner of what might now usefully be termed a Māori poetics in English, deeply sourced in whaikōrero. It’s no surprise, then, that the poems comprising in the cracks of light nimbly explore and exploit the border line between spoken and written text.” —Tony Beyer
>>Read Tony Beyer’s full review.

Proto: How one ancient language went global by Laura Spinney $40
As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate cultures: Dante’s Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen? Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings — the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost languages: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. From the author of Pale Rider. [Paperback]
”Thought-provoking. A lively and fascinating account of how these languages split from their root, developed in different ways, mingled with each other, crossed tracks, flourished and died. I loved it!” —David Bellos
>>Cultural exchange builds a language.

The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s most notorious prisons in 16 recipes by Sepideh Gholian $27
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors — they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet — in spite of anything and everything — they resist: they bake, they console each other, cry together, dance together. Sepideh Gholian, in prison since 2018, bakes scones for Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe’s daughter'; a pumpkin pie for Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi; and madeleines for Marzieh Amiri, serving time for a May Day demonstration in 2019. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Sepideh Gholian's account of life on the women's wards in Bushehr and Evin prisons is a blindsiding blend of horrifying concrete detail, dizzying surrealism and wild optimism.” —Guardian
”My heart broke while reading this book, but it also gave me hope. I read this book filled with outrage against the system that has put Sepideh Gholian and so many like her in jail, torturing them, killing them. But I was filled with hope, amazed by and thankful for those like her, telling the story. They are our beloved guardians of truth.” —Azar Nafisi
>>Like no other recipe book you’ve ever read.

Days of Light by Megan Hunter $50
Easter Sunday, 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready for her life to finally begin. Her sprawling, bohemian family and their friends gather in the idyllic English countryside for lunch, arranging themselves around well-worn roles. They trade political views and artistic arguments as they impatiently await the arrival and first sight of Frances, the new beau of Ivy's beloved older brother, Joseph. In this auspicious atmosphere of springtime, Ivy's world feels on the cusp of something grand-but neither she nor those closest to her predicts how a single, enchanted evening and an unexpected tragedy will alter the rest of their lives. A philosophical and intimate journey through time, Days of Light chronicles six pivotal days across six decades to tell the story of Ivy's pursuit of answers — to the events of this fateful Easter Sunday and to the shifting desires of her own heart. [Hardback]
”Think One Day written by (and starring) Virginia Woolf… This is a lyrical and captivating book, dropping decade by decade into a single day in the life of the brilliant, headstrong Ivy.” —The Observer
”Days of Light is sublime. Wielding tremendous emotional power, it is a novel that is both raw and reverent, attuned to the intricacies of loss, desire, hope and how to be in the world.” —Hannah Kent
”Megan Hunter writes with such delicacy about how a single moment can shape and echo through a life. Her sentences are sensory events, open to every texture and shadow. A beautiful book.” —Sophie Elmhirst
”What Megan Hunter does in time and space within the confines of this book is amazing. Days of Light has that quality that all Megan's books have, restrained but with so much momentum, an exacting turn of phrase and the ability to make the hair on your arms stand up through beauty and also something much darker.” —Evie Wyld
”It channels Woolf and Mansfield and yet feels completely fresh.” —Mark Haddon

Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, policewomen and girlbosses against liberation by Sophie Lewis $45
Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. We know that leaning in won't make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today's anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategising that is truly antifascist. At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism. [Paperback]
"A field guide to reactionary archetypes from fascists to TERFs, Enemy Feminisms surfaces a hidden vein of feminist conservatism. A welcome alternative to political history as an accumulation of social media screenshots." —Malcolm Harris
"Where would we be without Sophie Lewis? In a more impoverished political world. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future. Honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant." —Judith Butler
"Enemy Feminisms is a compelling, provocative, ferocious book that shreds one received wisdom after another in a poised balance of incisive argument and elegant writing. Sophie Lewis has become an indispensable thinker for our era." —Torrey Peters

Mouthing by Orla Mackey $26
Ballyrowan is a sleepy corner of rural Ireland where nothing ever happens. Where everyone knows everyone else's business, and everyone has an opinion on it. Where family feuds simmer and intensify across the generations. Where young and old delight in dragging each other down like crabs in a barrel. Following the fortunes of this small community from the mid-20th century to the early 21st, Mouthing is a bittersweet love letter to the pleasures (and frustrations) of village life. [Paperback]
”Engrossing, acerbic and brilliant. Everyone here has a tale to tell. There is a pub and there is a priest. There are secrets and lies. It is by turns funny, horrifying, and all too real. Mackey's structure requires the reader to constantly reassess their opinions of the characters. It is a fascinating magic trick, shimmering with fractal richness: again and again we meet a character, form an opinion, and almost immediately have that wittily torpedoed.” —The Irish Times

The Big Myth: How American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway $49
The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a startling history of one of America's most tenacious and destructive false ideas: the myth of the ‘free market’. In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with ‘big government’ and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labour. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career. By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, resulting in a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and the baleful US response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy. This book is particularly pertinent to New Zealand politics right now. [Paperback]
”Literature on neoliberalism tends to focus either on the intellectual genealogy of neoliberal thought or on the political history of neoliberal policies. The Big Myth adds a third dimension to the story. An immense scholarly feat.” —The New Yorker
”The important and frequently infuriating history of how it is that Americans came to equate the broad concept of freedom with an almost religious belief in the free market.” —The Washington Post
”A persuasive examination of how corporate advocates, libertarian academics, and right-wing culture warriors have collaborated to try to convince the American people that economic and political freedom are indivisible, and that regulation leads inexorably to tyranny. Polemical yet scrupulously researched, this wake-up call rings loud and clear.” —Publishers Weekly

If I Must Die: Poetry and prose by Refaat Alareer $45
"If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale." This compilation of work from the Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his poetry and writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. ‘If I Must Die’ is included here, alongside Refaat's other poetry. Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout. Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by Refaat's friend and collaborator Yousef M. Aljamal. [Hardback]
"Compelling. A glimpse into a restless political and literary mind, one that was still rising to the height of its powers." —The Guardian

Mexican Table: 100 recipes, 12 ingredients from the heart of Mexico by Thomasina Miers $65
Mexican cooking centres around 12 staple ingredients: Citrus / Nuts / Tomatoes / Chillies / Beans / Courgettes / Sesame / Herbs / Onions / Eggs / Cinnamon / Chocolate. Chef Thomasina Miers brings vibrant, smart ways to use these ingredients to bring maximum flavour with minimum effort. Taste bold flavours everyday like guajillo prawn burritos with lime slaw, cauliflower and orange salad with turmeric and almond honey dressing, whole roast chicken with Yucatecan almond & garlic mole, waste-less houmous with toasted chillies, sticky dulce de leche & tahini buns, garlic fried courgette tagliatelle, smoky kimchi quesadilla with herb salad, and coconut & tequila sorbet. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Salutation Road by Salma Ibrahim $38
23-year-old Sirad Ali is a woman adrift. Abandoned by her father in childhood, she does her best to support her mother and younger brother in their small flat in South London. But she can’t help but wonder if this is the life she really wants. Until one morning, when she boards the bus to work in Greenwich, she finds herself transported to an alternate reality in present-day Mogadishu. There she encounters her double, Ubah — the woman she could have been had her parents never fled to London during the Somali Civil War. And what follows will change both of their lives for ever. [Paperback]
”A bold, intriguing act of imagination. Salutation Road confronts important questions about parallel existences splintered by immigration, the price of survival, and the ways migration and distance reshape blood ties and family.” —Aube Rey Lescure
>>Exploring who we are.

All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson $70
This deeply researched and beautifully presented book traces the origins of early Waitaha and Kāti Māmoe, and the later migrations, conflicts and settlements of the hapū who became Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on tribal knowledge, early written records and archaeological insights, he details the movements, encounters and exchanges that shaped these southern regions. He shows how people lived seasonally from the land and sea, supported by long-distance trade and a deep knowledge of place. These were the communities that the first Europeans encountered, as whalers, sealers and missionaries made their way around the coast. New edition, greatly expanded and updated. [Hardback]
”The Welcome of Strangers is, I believe, the best ethnohistory produced in New Zealand to date. Underpinned by whakapapa and methodical research, it provides solid evidence of our Ngāi Tahu past and sets it firmly in its context. The work of an accomplished scholar and longtime associate, the revised edition is strengthened and sharpened with new research, biographical detail and rich imagery of people and place. It is pleasing to have this scholarly yet accessible volume available to a new generation of New Zealanders – and even more so, Ngāi Tahu whānui, both scholars and at the flax roots.” —Sir Tipene O’Regan ONZ, Chair, Te Pae Kōrako; Upoko, Te Rūnaka o Awarua
”With one eye on the universal and the other on the particular, Atholl Anderson reveals how culture and nature shaped one another in southern Te Waipounamu for some five hundred years, down to the mid-nineteenth century. Born from the head of a world-leading archaeologist and the heart of a much-loved son of Kāi Tahu, this is a signally important text in the canon of Māori history.” —Michael Stevens, Professor and Director, Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha / University of Canterbury
>>Look inside!

Girlbeast by Cecilie Lind (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $38
Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless? With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal — a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times. [Paperback]
”Girlbeast is a fever dream of a novel that put a knot in my stomach. A provocative, vulgar and tender fable about the uneasy ruin of girlhood.” —Lucy Rose
>>Read an extract!

Lexicon of Affinities by Ida Vitale (translated from Spanish by Sean Manning) $39
With entries as varied as 'elbow', 'Ophelia', 'progress', the painter Giorgio Morandi, 'chess', 'Eulalia' (a friend of the author's aunt), and 'unicorn', Ida Vitale constructs a dictionary of her long and passionately engaged artistic life. Taking the reader by the arm, she invites us to become her confidant, sharing her remarkable 20th century as a member of a storied generation of Latin American writers, of whom she is the last remaining alive. It's a compendium of friendship, travel, reading, and the endless opportunities she found for 'the joyful possibility of creation.' Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its exuberant, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Vitale's prose is drop dead gorgeous." —Jeremy Garber
"Extraordinary. Giving due attention to Vitale's prose will bring you reassurance and optimism." —Lunate
"A vibrant and playful memoir-in-dictionary-form. A joyous celebration of a life well lived, with entries that range from the simple to the titanic." —Literary Hub
"Indispensable. Vitale's language has a precision that reminds us that memory exists: that today precision is an act of distinction and recognition." —Letras Libre
>>Something of a refuge.
>>”One hundred years don’t weigh me down.”

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine $38
Three women from very different families are brought together when their sons are accused of assaulting a young woman whose social standing they see as far below their own. Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed. Brutal, tender and intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, multi-voice presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny. [Paperback]
”This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens. Erskine — a gifted short story writer — deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters. For all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice.” —Robert Collins, Sunday Times
”This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys' parents. Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy.” —Guardian

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke $30
The first of our organs to form, the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of all that makes us human: as long as it continues to beat, we hope. One summer day, nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident. Though her brain and the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira's parents and siblings agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max had been hospitalised for nearly a year with a virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max's parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family. This is the unforgettable story of how one family's grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of Keira's heart and explores the history of the remarkable medical innovations that made it possible, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”The best narrative non-fiction I've read in years. Rachel Clarke has written a profound piece of investigative journalism and wrapped it up in poetry.” —Christie Watson

Juice by Tim Winton $38
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. [Now in paperback]
”A barnstorming, coruscating work of fiction, a heavyweight literary novel that sits squarely in the growing canon of ‘climate fiction’ and it feels to me to be an instant classic of that genre. I strongly recommend it.” —Emily H. Wilson, New Scientist 
”Juice, Winton has said, means ‘human resilience and moral courage’, and there is that in spades in this complex, riveting book already being hailed as a masterpiece..” —Sydney Morning Herald
”This is page-turning stuff, gripping and awfully gratifying. Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time.” —Rachel Seiffert, Guardian

The New Age of Sexism: How the A.I. revolution is reinventing misogyny by Laura Bates $40
Step into a world where: Little girls dressed up as women dance for an audience of adult men. A pornographic deepfake image or video of you exists on the internet and you just don’t know it yet. Men create ‘perfect’ AI girlfriends who live in their pocket — customised to every last detail, from breast size to eye colour and personality, only lacking the ability to say no. This isn’t an image of the future. Sex robots, chatbots and the metaverse are here and spreading fast. A new wave of AI-powered technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, is putting women everywhere in danger. In The New Age of Sexism, author and campaigner Laura Bates takes the reader deep into the heart of this strange new world. She travels to cyber brothels and visits schools gripped by an epidemic of online sexual abuse, showing how every aspect of our lives — from education to work, sex to entertainment — is being infiltrated by ever-evolving technologies that are changing the way we live and love forever. This rising tide, despite all its potential for good, is a wild west where women’s rights and safety are being sacrificed at the altar of profitability. [Paperback]
>>Misogyny in the Metaverse.

The Secret Green by Sonya Wilson $25
It's almost a year since Nissa Marshall was found alive after miraculously surviving a month lost in the vast, dense, isolated bush of Fiordland. Strange, magical things happened when Nissa was lost in the wilds but was it actually real? Or had she made it all up in the forest inside her head? When the mysterious forest creatures come for Nissa again, she discovers that Fiordland is under threat. What are the sparks so afraid of? What is the secret they're so desperate to protect? And why do they think a thirteen-year-old kid can save them all? This thrilling sequel to Spark Hunter crackles with the magic of the ancient forest. It's a high-stakes adventure through a vast wonderland with a great green secret hidden from humans for thousands of years. [Paperback]
”Perfectly pitched for middle fiction readers, Spark Hunter weaves history, culture, conservation, humour, tension and adventure into the story of Nissa Marshall, who has always known there is more to the Fiordland bush than meets the eye. While leaning into the fantastic just enough to encourage the imagination, the inclusion of archival excerpts will spark keen readers to hunt out their own discoveries within the mysterious history of this corner of Aotearoa. Making this story's light shine bright is te reo Māori blended throughout and a cast of supporting characters that are easily recognisable as classmates, teachers, and friends.” —New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults judges’ citation for Sparkhunter

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four women who wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff $30
In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles. [New paperback edition]

I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally $42
A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about his stint as a child actor, his travels along the hippie trail, his wives and children, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety. [Paperback]
>>The least hospitable man.

Indian Kitchens: Treasured family recipes from across the land by Roopa Gulati $60
Gulati travels through India and celebrates the wonderfully varied food that makes up a nation, making pitstops at the homes of the people who cook it every day. From dals to masalas, and quick and easy suppers to feasts for a crowd, the easy-to-follow recipes are bursting with authentic flavours using ingredients found in your local supermarket. Recipes include aubergine pakoras with onion and tamarind relish, potato and paneer tikki, sweetcorn bhajis, Tandoori sea bass, home-style Punjabi chicken curry, Kashmiri lamb with saffron, cardamom and red chillies, cumin potatoes, Bengali-style butternut squash with tamarind and jaggery, channa dal with spinach, black eye beans in garlic tomato masala, phirni with honey, orange and saffron syrup and pistachio and cardamom biscuits. From the monsoon-washed backwaters of Kerala to the crowded markets of Mumbai, and from remote kitchens in Gujarat, with shelves stacked high with pickle jars, to the old French quarter of Ponducherry, where lunch is served on banana leaves picked fresh from the garden, this celebration of regional cooking will bring the sights, sounds and flavours of India to your table. [Hardback]
”Roopa's masterpiece. I want to make and eat every single thing in it.” —Bee Wilson
>>Look inside.

A Dim Prognosis: Our health system in crisis — and a doctor’s view on how to fix it by Ivor Popovich $38
A gripping expose of New Zealand's failing health system This compelling tell-all reveals the realities of working as a doctor in New Zealand. Fast-paced and darkly funny, it chronicles ten years of working in medicine and sheds a light on where and why the health system is failing. From bullying and toxic culture to under-staffing and mismanaged priorities, this is a clear-eyed account of a health system on its knees. [Paperback]
”Brave, funny and heart-rendingly sad. Every healthcare worker in Aotearoa will feel seen.” —Dr Emma Wehipeihana, author of There's a Cure for This
”A must-read for all who care about the future of publicly funded healthcare in Aotearoa.” —Dr David Galler

All your choices are good! Choose from our latest selection of new releases and click through to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose $40
Women in Dark Times begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women, bound together by their struggles against iniquity, blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century — revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream — and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Bringing to the surface the subterranean depths of history and the human mind that dominant political vocabularies cannot bear to face, pioneering critic and public intellectual Jacqueline Rose forges a new language for feminism. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to 'honour' killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.” —Ali Smith
”A rigorously argued and at times breathtaking book. Many paragraphs contain a controlled explosion; her analysis of men's fear of and fascination with female sexuality, born from the boy's early proximity to the mother's body, is one of them. The book closes with a clarion cry: "Women have been reasonable for far too." Her reasoning, ironically, is as tight and sinuous as a constrictor knot. It is a time to be afraid of the dark.” —Frances Wilson, Telegraph
”The kind of restless and confrontational thinking of Women in Dark Times's feminism is essential, yet it is up against a vast apparatus of material power opposed to letting it take root. For all its interest in the darkness of our minds, the feminism of Women in Dark Times seems profoundly hopeful and generative, always leaving the gap between who a person is and who they can be. Transformation is always possible.... It may be easy to deem the exploration of one's inner life as privileged navel-gazing, but Rose's scandalous feminism takes that as a basis to create a new world: one that puts our vulnerability at its very core.” —Rebecca Liu, ArtReview

Invisible Intelligence: Why your child might not be failing by Welby Ings $45
In Invisible Intelligence, educationalist, filmmaker and best-selling author Welby Ings considers how schools measure intelligence and shows how narrow definitions of literacy and numeracy can lead to bright students being described as ‘behind’ and positioned as problems, when they are not. Ings mixes poignant, humorous and insightful storytelling with current research to explore the ways that some children’s intelligent approaches to problem-solving are dismissed or ignored, with devastating consequences for individuals and society. Yet Invisible Intelligence offers hope. Written with wisdom, experience and compassion, it is the kind of book that ‘puts an arm around the shoulders’ of those who love and work with kids whose intelligence is not recognised because they don’t learn the same way as other children. Pragmatic, wise and helpful, Invisible Intelligence shows what we can do better in education, and why it’s so important that we do. [Paperback]
>>Other ways to demonstrate intelligence.
>>Obsessed with assessment.
>>Disobedient Teaching.

Children of Radium: A buried inheritance by Joe Dunthorne $45
this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis. When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.  "I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles," he wrote. "I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience." Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection-first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz. Armed only with his great-grandfather's rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg — a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil — to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family's past. [Hardback]
”The best book I've read in the past year. Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man's depression, ‘washing dishes as if trying to drown them’. A masterpiece. . It will be huge.” —Andrew O'Hagan, Financial Times
”A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story. The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness.” —Observer
”Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful. Joe Dunthorne infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book's final quarter more profound. Remarkable.” —The New York Times
>>A dark legacy.

Solenoid by by Mercea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter)         $33
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history — the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript —Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the present. Winner of the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. [New paperback edition]
"Solenoid is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist's cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of Garcia Marquez and Bruno Schulz's labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu's anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel's sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature he also affirms the possibility inherent in the 'bitter and incomprehensible books' he idolises. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself." —New York Times

Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu $30
A collection of poems that speak to the complexity of family, identity, and the importance of te reo and ta ao Māori. The poems of Mettle echo through past and present lives — memories are recorded and futures imagined. Te Whiu draws on stories from her childhood and a lifetime of listening and learning about her whakapapa. Te Whiu’s poems are a lens through which to look 'now' straight in the face, without shame or fear, and to acknowledge that while trauma is transmitted generationally, so too are the gifts of resilience and fortitude. [Paperback]
”Te Whiu's poetic voice is bright, and new. As well as vividly poetic storytelling the humour here is mordant. In the best spirit of a bustling diverse indigenous poetics, it excels.” —Robert Sullivan
”A stunning debut, threading land, ocean and heart together in an expansive Māori tapestry that speaks to our present, shared moment. Mettle is alive with ancient knowing, breathing possibilities into every line. An outstanding read.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with recipes by Caroline Eden $65
Beginning in Armenia, moving northwards through Georgia and ending at the Black Sea, Green Mountains weaves together the enchanting geography and the cult of the kitchen that prevails within these two countries. Tales of testing hikes and unpredictable terrain are punctuated by the foods Eden eats for respite - citrus, herbs, flatbreads, nuts, apricots, mountain greens and magical cheeses - the recipes she shares and the stories she uncovers. Sharing both the deep comfort and satisfaction of a meal served after a long walk, and the unique relationships she forms with her hosts, Eden offers readers rare insights into the culture and food of these two countries. With meticulously researched histories, a catalogue of more than 30 recipes from her travels, and rich, compelling stories, this is an enjoyable journey! [Hardback]
"There is nobody writing about food at the moment who's committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line." —Tim Hayward, Financial Times
>>Look inside!
>>Green mountains, red chairs.

Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel $35
Stories of Ireland is a compendium of mid-century Irish experience from one of Ireland's outstanding writers, Brian Friel. Demonstrating all of Friel's instinct for voice, scene, and the uncanny mystery found in the everyday, these tales tell of struggle, beauty and discovery — from the drowning of a man in the bog-black waters of Lough Keeragh, to the camaraderie of teenage potato gathers in County Tyrone, and from the careful work of the German War Graves Commission in Glenn na fuiseog, to trawlermen's talk of sunken gold off the coast of Donegal. Selected by Friel himself, and introduced by Louise Kennedy. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A solid gold treat from top to tail. A tremendous set of stories by the great Irish playwright.” —John Self, The Observer
”There is a touch of spring about this collection and I find myself curiously helpless in front of them. The funny stories are a complete joy. The serious stories are concerned with the subtlest nuances of human emotions and relations which can neither be described nor directly expressed.” —The Irish Times
”Some of the best stories ever written. They are everything short stories should be — deft, skilfully written, funny and quite often breathlessly sad.” —Edna O'Brien
”As natural and as beautiful as you can imagine — full of vitality, full of life.” —Kevin Barry

Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) $48
From the author and translator of the International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand comes a kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured society, loosely based on the gathering violence that led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992. Against this backdrop, Shruti, a writer paralysed by the weight of events, tries to find her words, while Sharad and Hanif, academics whose voices are drowned out by extremism, find themselves caught between cliches and government slogans. And there's Daddu, Sharad's father, a beacon of hope in the growing darkness. As they each grapple with thoughts of speaking the unspeakable, an unnamed narrator takes on the urgent task of bearing witness. First published in Hindi in 1998, Our City That Year is a novel that defies easy categorisation — it's a time capsule, a warning siren and a desperate plea. Geetanjali Shree's shimmering prose, in Daisy Rockwell's nuanced and consummate translation, takes us into a fever dream of fragmented thoughts and half-finished sentences, mirroring the disjointed reality of a city under siege. Readers will find themselves haunted long after the final page, grappling with questions that echo far beyond India's borders. [Paperback]

Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on survival and resistance by John Berger $29
From the 'War on Terror' to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Hold Everything Dear is a meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering. These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself. [Paperback]
”John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel, how to stare at things till we see what we thought wasn't there. But above all he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity.” —Arundhati Roy

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer $28
Annie is the perfect girlfriend. She has dinner ready for Doug every night, wears the outfits he buys for her, and caters to his every sexual whim. Maybe her cleaning isn't always good enough, but she's trying really hard. She was designed that way, after all. Because Annie is a robot. But what happens when she starts to rebel against her stifled existence and imagine the impossible — a life without Doug? [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.
”An intense, compelling tale that, like all good stories about robots, is ultimately about the human condition.” —Guardian
”A smart dive into big questions about identity, autonomy and power. Packs an impressive punch.” —The Times
”Slyly profound — a brilliant pas de deux, grappling with ideas of freedom and identity while depicting a perverse relationship in painful detail.” —New York Times

Woman’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell $39
Scrutinising the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Women's Estate describes the organisation of women's liberation in Western Europe and America, locating the areas of women's oppression in four key areas — work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children. Through a detailed study of the modern family and a re-evaluation of Freud's work in this field, Mitchell paints a detailed picture of how patriarchy works as a social order. A searing analysis first published in 1970, with a new preface by the author. [Paperback]
”Juliet Mitchell's brilliant book from 1970 knew in advance that movements of liberation are linked, that economic analysis alone cannot fully explain women’s oppression.” —Judith Butler

The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Niho Satake $20
The fierce little woman lived in a house at the end of a jetty. She knitted socks in blue and green wool to sell to sailors who had got their feet wet. But when there were no ships at her jetty, she was quite alone.
One stormy day, a pirate came to the house on the jetty. He stood on his toes, and starting tap-tap-tapping on the window… After a battle of words through the jetty trapdoor, these two windswept heroes find they are suited after all. A new edition of an old favourite, with new illustrations. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!

Human Nature: Nine ways to feel about our changing planet by Kate Marvel $45
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and researcher whose work on climate change led her to grapple with strong, complicated emotions. Initially, she resisted those feelings, afraid they would interfere with her objective scientific judgement. But over time she realised that there is no one way to think — or feel — about climate change. To live on and care for our changing planet, we need to embrace the full spectrum of human emotion. As Marvel argues, we need every emotion we can muster if we're going to counter the usual myopic perspectives on climate change and care enough to make better decisions. And this book is a dazzling call to care. In Human Nature, each chapter uses a different emotion to illustrate the science behind our changing climate. We feel the wonder of being able to use climate models to predict the future. We feel anger at those who have knowingly destroyed the planet for profit. We feel love for our beautiful Earth, the only good planet. With Marvel as our guide, we get to feel it all — and we can begin to turn our strong feelings into strong action. Human Nature is a hopeful look at climate science that prioritises feelings — and in doing so charts a path forward for life together. [Paperback]
”This is the best climate book I've ever read. It's magnificent — both planetary and personal, saturated with electric metaphors, incisive vignettes, legitimately funny jokes, and an unflappable, knowing love for Earth, our home.” —Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

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A Voice for the Silenced: Stories from inside and outside the cells of Aotearoa/New Zealand by Harry Walker $35
The title A Voice for the Silenced indicates the intention of these narratives is to give a platform, a taumata kōrero, a paepae, to those who have been marginalised and oppressed. It aims to share the kōrero, the stories, experiences, and perspectives of people who have been silenced by societal and systemic injustices. These narratives are from individuals and their families who have faced colonial heritage, racism, oppression, and the punitive realities of incarceration. These vignettes seek to amplify their voices, highlighting their struggles, resilience, and the ongoing and pernicious effects of trauma and alienation.  ”If any person reading these vignettes suspects, or comes to believe any of these narrators might be them, or someone they know, or that the narrative is about them, whoever they may be, they are right. It is them, or a member of their whānau, hapū, or iwi. It is about them and hundreds like them. It is also about me and mine. It is about nobody, anybody, and everybody. It is about the voiceless, the silenced. It is about them and theirs. It is about us.” Incarceration is a lens through which we could, if we chose, see much that needs addressing in our society but that is hidden from most of us by dominating narratives that invalidate the experiences and whakapapa of others. Without this understanding, however, we will not be able to even perceive the injustice, racism, oppression and prejudice that serve the interests of some by denigrating the interests of others and creating the deep personal, social and cultural wounds of which crime is just one symptom. This important book collects stories of prisoners and relatives of prisoners and gives great insight into the traumatic effects of unjust power, especially for tangata whenua. [Paperback]
>>Lived experience.
>>Who cares about the people in jail?

A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 stories by Tomoka Shibasaki (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $40
In these stories of human connection in a contemporary, alienated world, people come together to share pieces of their lives, then part. We meet the women who share a house after the outbreak of war before going their separate ways once it is over; the man who lives in a succession of rooftop apartments; the diverging lives of two brothers who are raised as latch-key kids by factory workers; the old ramen restaurant that endures despite the demolition of all surrounding buildings; people who watch a new type of spaceship lift off from a pier that once belonged to an island resort; and more. These 34 tales have the compulsive power of news reports, narrated in a crisp yet allegorical style. [Paperback]
"Tomoka Shibasaki paints a piecemeal portrait of her Japanese homeland, an ekphrastic collection of tales whose spare language and flashing brevity muralise and memorialise Japan — its countrysides and cityscapes, its competing ascent/descent into modernity." —Alex Crayon, World Literature Today
"Shibasaki makes us think about the way stories are told, what we expect, and what we think we know. She is very good at giving us the pleasure of wondering how things are going to happen rather than what is going to happen, and then she reverses this." —Brian Evenson
>>Little moments are the most important.

Precarious Lease by Jacqueline Feldman $40
In her extraordinary work of non-fiction, Jacqueline Feldman tells the story of Le Bloc, a legendary squat situated at the far edge of Paris, near where the banlieue begins. Opened in 2012, the squat took in artists and activists as well as immigrants from around the world. They lived and worked within its labyrinthine structure, continually threatened with eviction and existential as well as financial precarity. Over many years Feldman, a reporter from the US, follows a cast of itinerant, displaced characters, tracing the fate of a counterculture under austerity while investigating the trending use of a legal device by which squatters could receive a reprieve from eviction but were reduced in status to property guardians. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and other chroniclers of Paris, she draws on its revolutionary and bohemian history while sounding issues of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, creativity and precarity, ecology and utopia. With candour and journalistic precision,  Precarious Lease is a exploration of late-stage possibilities for co-existence in the ruins of a capital city. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Rigorous and arresting. Feldman has thought deeply about the ethics of her work and the result is a beautiful and important book which, through its meticulous focus on a self-consciously marginal milieu, strikes at the centre of one of the urgent subjects of our time.” —Max Liu, Financial Times
”Feldman's Precarious Lease is marked by erudition, astringence, biting wit, and the perspicacious awe of a seasoned examiner of our time, attributes bound to be hallmarks of her work for years to come. Diving under the rubble of social and class collapse, Feldman deftly maneuvers between investigative reportage and essayist forays while weaving through this tapestry a tone so sharp yet compassionate, so personal, it feels like a friend delivering dire news from the front lines of the world.” —Ocean Vuong
”In Precarious Lease Jacqueline Feldman follows her curiosity about alternative forms of living into the heart of north-east Paris's squat scene, and takes the reader with her, asking fundamental questions about how we live together under late capitalism, and the relationship, in France, between freedom and bureaucracy, marginality and the state. It's completely fascinating, an American in Paris memoir like no other.” —Lauren Elkin
”Jacqueline Feldman's Precarious Lease offers an enthralling immersion into the confluence of 2010s-era social and political activism, Parisian and French real estate and the margins of the global artworld. Multimodal in its storytelling, encompassing critical journalism, social history, the precision of documentary writing, and more, Precarious Lease also holds up a mirror to our current capitalist moment and suggests other ways of imagining our world.” —John Keene
>>Navigating the space.

Dealing With the Dead by Alain Mabanckou (translated from French by Helen Stevenson) $37
Suddenly dead at the age of twenty-four and trapped forever in flared purple trousers, Liwa Ekimakingaï encounters the other residents of Frère Lachaise cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death. Unwilling to relinquish their tender bond, Liwa makes his way back home to Pointe-Noire to see his devoted grandmother one last time, against all spectral advice. But disturbing rumours swirl together with Liwa's jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to pursue the riddle of his own untimely demise. A phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community and forces beyond human control, Dealing with the Dead is a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the foremost chroniclers of modern Central Africa. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Africa's Samuel Beckett.” —The Economist
”Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect.” —Booker International Prize judges
”We should all be reading Alain Mabanckou right now. His brilliantly imaginative novels throw a rope across borders and between people. A glorious, funny, surreal novel, set in communist Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s.” —Alex Preston

Rural Hours: The country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker $30
In Rural Hours, Harriet Baker tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the countryside and was forever changed by it. We encounter them at quiet moments — pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann emerge before us as the passionate, visionary writers we know them to be. Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Baker's subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making a home; slowly, they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living that would resonate throughout the rest of their lives. In the country, each woman finds her path: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing. [Paperback]
”In this warm, perceptive, eloquent study, Harriet Baker collects some overlooked moments in these women's lives, and with great honesty and empathy, captures what it felt like to live and write through them. Like Baker's protagonists in their countryside boltholes I felt ‘socketed’ by this book. I know I'll return to it again and again.” —Lauren Elkin

Smørrebrød: Scandinavian Open Sandwiches by Brontë Aurell $45
Brontë Aurell has gathered more than 50 recipes for delectable Smørrebrød — definitely the apogee for bread-based dining. From traditional toppings to modern innovations and ingredients, this book is a testament to the enjoyable tireless quest for the best flavour combinations. Something for everyone and every occasion. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Our new blog post on Nordic cookbooks at VOLUME.

Tūmahi Māori: A pathway to understanding Māori verbs by Hone Waengarangi Morris $45
This indispensable book shares the teaching strategies of one of the most experienced teachers of te reo Māori in Aotearoa. Its explanations and structures, set out in both te reo Māori and English, reflect a Māori perspective that will improve understanding and accuracy in the use of te reo Māori. As Hone Waengarangi Morris guides users through the correct uses of verbs and particles via useful examples and activities, they will become more accurate, more skilful and more confident in their grasp of the best approach to grammar in the te reo Māori space. [Paperback]
>>A new perspective.

The Cat Operator’s Manual: Getting the most from your new cuddle unit by Queen Olivia III $35
A fresh and quirky guide to understanding your cat, complete with assembly, warnings, insights into all of your Cuddle Unit 5(TM)'s features and modes, and a bonus sticker sheet. We recommend that you read these operating instructions thoroughly to quickly become acquainted with your Cuddle Unit 5(TM) and enjoy all of its features. In these pages, you'll find many useful tips and information concerning your safety, how to care for your Cuddle Unit 5(TM), and how to maintain Cuddle Unit 5(TM)'s interest in you, including: Decipher your Cuddle Unit 5(TM)'s Mood Mode Indicator; Understand when your unit is in Eco Mode and when it's time for Solar Charging; Learn more about how Turbo Mode is activated; Read up on how your Cuddle Unit 5(TM) will interface with robotic vacuum cleaners and recreational catnip. With tongue-in-cheek advice and spot-on illustrations that feel just like browsing a real user manual, this book gets two opposable thumbs up. We hope you enjoy your Cuddle Unit 5(TM) and wish you safe and pleasant petting. Thank you for choosing Cuddle Unit 5(TM)--we value your trust in us. [Paperback]
>>Find out more!
>>Read Lucy’s review.

The Mess of Our Lives by Mary-Anne Scott $29
Jordan Baxter, a talented songwriter and musician is determined to keep his home life a secret. His mother has a hoarding disorder which means he and his sister, Tabitha, must live in a dirty, cluttered environment. Jordan sleeps in an old caravan on the property to avoid the filth. When Tabitha is injured, the family is thrown into the spotlight making Jordan even more determined to be free of the mess. At the heart of this novel for teenagers and adults are big questions concerning mental health and creative ownership, but this is also a story about love and honesty. Sometimes acceptance is at the heart of freedom. [Paperback]
Finalist in the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

The Names by Florence Knapp $38
Tomorrow — if morning comes, if the storm stops raging — Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps, and this is her real concern, she'll formalise who he will become. It is 1987, and in the aftermath of a great storm, Cora sets out with her nine-year-old daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband intends her to follow a long-standing family tradition and call the boy after him. But faced with the decision, Cora hesitates, questioning whether it is right for her child to share his name with generations of domineering men. Her choice in this moment will shape the course of their lives. Seven years later, her son is Bear, a name chosen by his sister, and one that will prove as cataclysmic as the storm from which it emerges. Or he is Julian, the name his mother set her heart on, believing it will give him the opportunity to become his own person. Or he is Gordon, named after his father and raised in his image — but is there still a chance to break the mould? This is the story of three names, three versions of a life and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. [Paperback]
”This year's buzziest debut lives up to the hype. The high concept is carried off with flair, in a tender, clear-eyed portrayal of the horrors of domestic violence and joys of family life.” —Guardian
>>Why your name matters.
>>Crackling.

Among Friends by Hal Abbott $38
Amos and Emerson have been friends for more than thirty years. Despite vastly different backgrounds, the two now form an enviable portrait of middle age: their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. They share an unbreakable bond, or so they think. This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson's birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments which erupt in a shocking act of violence, one that threatens to shatter their finely made world. In its wake, each must choose: between whom and what they love most. [Paperback]
”In the way that a forceful intelligence or an infectious voice or a fresh vision can alter how we observe and answer the world, Among Friends brought me into its cool environs and made me engage my days differently. It's no small accomplishment for a first novel, or for any novel.” —Richard Ford
”Among Friends is a masterly debut. Hal Ebbott ranges from the most exquisite, Jamesian discriminations to the graspable, all-American solidities of Updike and Richard Yates. This is a writer to watch, with excitement and the highest expectations.” —John Banville

How to Lose Your Mother: A daughter’s memoir by Molly Jong-Fast $40
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of Erica Jong, author of the feminist autobiographical novel Fear of Flying. A sensational exploration of female sexual desire, it catapulted Erica into the heady world of fame in the early 1970s. Molly grew up with her mother everywhere — on television, in the crossword puzzle, in the newspaper. But rarely at home. How to Lose Your Mother is Molly's delicious and despairing memoir about an intense mother-daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and how that can really mess you up. But with her mother's heartbreaking descent into dementia, and Molly's realization that she is going to lose this remarkable woman, it is also a story of love, of loss, of confusion and of deep grief. [Paperback]
”Mesmerising, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating. Beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.” —Anne Lamott
”Conveys the mess, terror, loneliness and glory of familial love, in all its riveting complexity.” —Claire Messud

In the Bookstore: 1000-piece puzzle by Giacomo Gambineri $40
A very enjoyable puzzle. A peek inside a large busy bookshop, this puzzle contains many layers: each room is devoted to a genre and teeming with activities: people solving mysteries in the crime section; couples falling in love in the poetry section, and little ones climbing the bookshelves in the children's section. Filled with special details and inside jokes all bibliophiles will love. Back in stock in time for puzzle season! Recommended. [Boxed]
>>The puzzle is almost done! (at home).
>>Other winter-suitable literary jigsaw puzzles.