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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Bourgeois Apocalypse by Helen Rickerby $25
”I write not to communicate or reveal but to mull and conceal, but I guess that's a form of communication too, of connection, of little anchors, little hooks, little holes you can put your eye up to, your heart up to, and maybe you will see something you will recognise.” In her new collection — a poetic collage-essay-memoir — Helen Rickerby crafts poems out of personal correspondence and sentences from her journals, cataloguing her life over a tumultuous period of lockdowns, terrorist attacks and mid-life crises. In glimpses of the day-to-day, in occasional bits of Italian homework and dining-room dance parties, pieces of a life are constructed into a sensuous yet disarming whole. Through friendships and grief, joy and love, combining wry humour with philosophical musing, Rickerby reflects on doubt, gaps, the nature of poetry, connection and disconnection, and not going quietly into middle age. This is a work of fragments encompassing the whole of a life. [Paperback]
”This is a dazzling work, part notebook, part memoir, part puzzle. The reader might feel played like a fish, lured in with a line that seems to be leading to a scene, or a situation, only to find themselves disoriented by a change of pronoun, a detail out of place, a movement in time. Before long it becomes apparent that the sentences do not quite read consecutively, but by now the reader is hooked by the text's strange rhythms, narrative threads and depths of passionate feeling.” —Anna Jackson
>>Read a sample!

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $48
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman — who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name — is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the ‘something’ is. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unearths lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. [Paperback with French flaps]
”On a government-sponsored tour of 1930s colonised Taiwan, a Japanese author with an insatiable appetite develops complex feelings towards her local interpreter. Despite the instant spark between the two women, the power imbalance inherent in their relationship proves difficult to navigate. With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel. —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Reading the book is like peeling an onion: the smell is at first undetectable; but with each layer you peel, the smell gets more intoxicating, pungent, intense, and at the very end, it brings tears to your eyes." —Christina Ng
"Yáng Shuāng-zǐ 's novel, a runaway bestseller in Taiwan, ranges from playful and intimate depictions of the lush countryside of Taiwan to the ordered world of the colonial city. But what at first feels like a simple travelogue is actually an examination of an often-overlooked period of East Asian history and of the human heart. This wise and wily novel, as self-aware as it is provocative, ultimately goes down like the luscious soup dumplings that appear in its pages and sent me scrambling for takeout. But what does it mean to eat someone else's food, and what is the nature of a relationship when any kind of power is involved? Beginning in a world as solid and stately as Kawabata's The Makioka Sisters, Taiwan Travelogue deftly takes the reader down a rabbit hole as filled with longing and misunderstanding as Sarah Waters's The Night Watch." —Marie Mutsuki Mockett
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent $38
When Erin Vincent was fourteen her parents were struck down by a truck driver. Years later, the number fourteen reverberates – in books and films and art and music and in the lives of the people who made them. Finding in these places not comfort or consolation but an infinite network of orrespondences, Fourteen Ways of Looking becomes a paradigm for the act of writing itself. [Paperback]
”Fourteen Ways of Looking is a deep dive into the moment after which nothing is the same — life as afterlife, and yet it’s what we have. Vincent’s effort is both psychological and literary: trying to wrangle meaning from an event that may have none, or may hold it all. And what then, of her autonomy to make her own life? In her efforts to free herself by going back to the source of trauma, she is both Odysseus and Euridice, damned and saved. A remarkable achievement.” —Anna Funder
”Erin Vincent’s book is magnificent, simply one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I read it in a reverie of blissed-out, horrified amazement. It will be compared to Markson, but it’s better than Markson – more formally disciplined, more cold-blooded in its self-scrutiny. I can easily imagine this book becoming a cultural touchstone like Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.” —Sarah Manguso
”Fourteen — for Erin Vincent — is the age at which her self was formed, and this text is itself an astonishing formal experiment. The number fourteen becomes uncanny and arbitrary, both divine symbol and violent accident, as she remembers her younger self and tries to find patterns in chaos. An incredible achievement: unclassifiable, humane and haunting. I was moved to tears.” —Clare Pollard
”Through a structure and project that holds the book to the tightest of attention, Vincent brings to this astute exploration of personal grief the world’s grief, the reader’s grief, the planet’s grief. All of time concertinas into these perfectly formed fragments that interrogate the number fourteen through the lens of how we are changed by the things of life that stop us in our tracks. However, I think the final message of Vincent’s magnificent work is the things we notice once we have been changed and the ways these act as markers to our inevitable tentative steps into the rest of life. This is an astounding work — resonant, intelligent and generous.” —Pip Adam
>>The presence of an orphan.

Brawler by Lauren Groff $38
Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region — from New England to Florida to California — these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme — the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us. Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can. Precise, surprising and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival.[Paperback]
”Few collections have an opener as powerful and instantly classic as Brawler's 'The Wind'. For most writers, it would be an impossible act to follow, and yet every story here continues a conversation about secrets, hopes, fears and the persistence of love in the face of it all. Brawler captures a towering talent and follows protagonists caught in the undertow of their messiest emotions. As one character says, ‘in every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death’. Groff's bargain with the reader is simple, and impossible to refuse: instead of easy epiphanies, she offers glimpses of acute clarity, meaning or happiness. They will not repeat; but they are enough to carry you through a life.” —Financial Times
”I'm in awe at how Groff conjures a whole world in each brilliant story.” —Claire Fuller
”These are stories of fracture and survival, of the fulcrums on which lives tilt. On finishing Brawler, the world felt more densely peopled, richer with stories. Groff reminds us of the myriad human galaxies all around us, spinning off brightly into the dark.” —Melissa Harrison
>>You just do language.
>>Taut yet teeming.
>>Includes swimming.

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel) $42
High in Albania’s Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekja escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most.  Years later, as Bekija — now Matija — tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been. [Paperback with French flaps]
”She Who Remains reads like a dark fairy tale from a time when life was lived closer to the bone . . . Bold and visionary, Rene Karabash's novel unfurls a world of blood feuds and sworn virgins — women accepted into society as men — in a dreamlike narration that burns up the page with feverish urgency. Izidora Angel's translation from Bulgarian thrillingly captures the novel's dense tapestry of hypnotic language.” —Katrina Dodson
”Rene Karabash has composed an enigmatic and mesmerizing tale, one as lyrical, lucid and enchanting as a song. The rhythm of the sentences has the pulse of a dark and sparkling river, carrying the reader away. She Who Remains is a fever dream about breaking down archaic rituals and being haunted by them; a modern fairy tale written in blood and milk, spinning its spellbinding threads into a story of loss and longing, destiny and desire.” —Kirstine Reffstrup
”In a village governed by archaic laws in the Albanian Alps, a teenage girl swears a vow of chastity to escape an arranged marriage. As a ‘sworn virgin’, with a new name, Matija is free to live as a man. But that freedom comes at a cost that tears Matija’s family apart. Told with understated poetry, this novel perfectly captures the slippery uncertainty of painful memories. Matija is a compelling narrator, whose story swept us up completely. She Who Remains is an unforgettable modern fairy tale.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova (translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale) $36
The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, she feels a flicker of liberation — the possibility of starting over — but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them. For a moment, reinvention seems within reach. Oscillating between reality and dream, written in rich, hypnotic prose,  The Disappearing Act is a haunting meditation on identity, language and the fragile desire to disappear. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The Disappearing Act is about what happens when the story of one's life cleaves in uncomfortable, incongruous ways.... Much of the novel exists on this symbolic plane. But Stepanova is equally adept at building a physical world that evokes the experience of exile.... If there is a through-line to Stepanova's work, it is not some grand, totalizing vision but rather the habit of looking closely at what falls through the cracks.” —Matthew Janney, Financial Times
”M describes the country she comes from as a ‘beast’ waging war against its neighbour. We can guess her meaning without turning to the author's biographical note. Maria Stepanova — whose masterly In Memory of Memory combined family memoir, essay and fiction — left her native Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We might also wonder how closely The Disappearing Act tracks her own life. But the novelist M is not here to discuss autofiction — she has more important things to reflect on.... Wherever her escapade brings her next, she is proof that it takes a novelist with poetic imagination to capture the nature of the beast.” —Anna Aslanyan, Guardian
”Essential. Written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present's failure to learn lessons from the past. The Disappearing Act, expertly translated by Sasha Dugdale, is the dreamlike testimony of a novelist, known simply as M, who is witnessing from exile her country of origin's invasion of a separate sovereign state. Creatively and psychologically paralysed by the horrors of war seen at a distance, M can no longer write; every innocuous image becomes superimposed with horror, and so she retreats into self-erasure and memory in order to survive, never mind evolve.” —Catherine Taylor, Irish Times
”Political evil has re-emerged across the West, imposing agony upon all people of conscience, and new challenges on writers and artists. In her incandescent poems and essays, Maria Stepanova has never shirked the weight of history long borne by writers from Russia, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her artistic, intellectual and spiritual resources seem even richer in her first novel, The Disappearing Act. I have not read a novel that attests, with such melancholy precision, to the shame, absurdity and confusion of being human today, or describes so acutely the immense but too often frustrated craving for radical self-transformation.” —Pankaj Mishra"
”A profound, unsettling meditation — at once lucid and mournful — on political exile, reinvention after the rupture of belonging, the writer's reckoning with collective responsibility, and the beasts we carry — national, ancestral, unnamed — that shape us even as they threaten us.” —Lea Ypi
>>Read Thomas’s review of In Memory of Memory.

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre (translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri) $48
Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront? Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The Duke is the story of a feud between two men set in an Italian village in the Dolomites. The build-up of tension as the quarrel gradually escalates is electric, as each move they make turns the heat up one more notch. Anyone who’s been in a dispute will recognise the reluctance to step away from the fight. The characters that the author paints are wonderfully evocative, including many of the minor figures who form part of the village. The village itself is one of the strongest ‘characters’ and we loved the feeling of claustrophobia of the place as the narrative unfolds. Packed full of plot twists, this is storytelling at its best.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan) $40
On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison's waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls. Ana Paula Maia has once again delivered a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Set in a remote penal colony built on land scarred by slavery and colonialism, this vivid and haunting novel unfolds in a landscape where punishment has replaced justice and cruelty has become the norm. As the colony nears its end, the warden introduces a ritualised full-moon hunt, releasing prisoners into the forest for sport. Through spare yet masterful prose, Ana Paula Maia renders a closed world thick with dread, brutality and moral decay. The prisoners and guards alike are trapped within a system that corrodes and suffocates everyone it touches. On Earth As It Is Beneath is a stark, unsettling exploration of power, violence, destruction and institutional corruption that will linger with readers long after the final page.” —Booker International Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

The Sky Was My Blanket: A young man’s journey across wartime Europe by Uri Shulevitz $39
Born in the tumult of World War I, a young Jewish boy named Yehiel Szulewicz chafes at the borders of his hometown of Zyrardów, Poland, and at the rules set in place by his restrictive parents. Brimming with a desire for true adventure, he leaves home at fifteen-and-a-half years old to seek his future elsewhere. Little does Yehiel know, he’ll never see his parents again. His journey takes him beyond Polish borders, to Austria, Croatia, France, and Spain. With no money and no ID papers, he often sleeps under the stars, with only the sky as his blanket. But even wayfaring Yehiel can’t outrun the evil spreading across Europe in the years leading up to World War II. As the fascists and Nazis rise to power, Yehiel soon finds himself a member of the Spanish Republican Army and then the Jewish Resistance in Vichy France, fighting for freedom, his friends, and his very life. Inspired by the true story of Uri Shulevitz’s uncle and illustrated by the author, The Sky Was My Blanket is a riveting account of one man’s courage and resilience. [Hardback]

A World Appears: A journey into consciousness by Michael Pollan $45
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point scientists, philosophers, and researchers can all agree on with a level of certainty: that it feels like something to be ourselves. And yet, the fact that each and every one of us has a subjective experience of the world continues to be one of the greatest mysteries in nature. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would studying the idea of an inner life even look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea?  What began for Michael Pollan as a startling awareness of his own consciousness soon evolved into a greater fascination with this strange and elusive phenomenon. In A World Appears, Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness via several radically different perspectives — scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical, and psychedelic — to see what each has to teach us about this central kernel of our lives. When scientists began to study consciousness in earnest, in the early 1990s, they questioned how and why it came to be that three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view — if indeed the brain is the locus of our felt reality. But Pollan ventures to the latest cutting-edge advances in the field, beyond the brain labs attempting to track down the neural correlates of this enigmatic experience and offering us a seat at the table with plant neurobiologists studying nature's surprisingly complex intelligence and ability to problem solve, neuroscientists and psychoanalysts attempting to engineer feeling into AI, and psychologists interpreting the thoughts that enter our slippery stream of consciousness. [Paperback]
>>Inside voice.

Could, Should, Might, Don’t: How we think about the future by Nick Foster $40
As the tempo of change accelerates beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined, the ability to think clearly about what lies ahead has never been more important — yet we remain remarkably bad at it. So how might we think about the future with greater rigour? From the Could of excitable, science fiction utopianism and the Should of data-driven, dogmatic certainty, to the Might of scenario planning and the Don't of fear-driven risk avoidance, Foster explores how humanity has grappled with the concept of the future throughout history, tracing the emergence of distinct schools of thought and exploring the virtues, blind spots and inevitable shortcomings of each. Could Should Might Don't resists making cocksure prophecies and bombastic predictions, instead encouraging us to create more balanced, detailed and truthful versions of the future, so that we might improve what we leave behind for those who might follow. [Paperback]
”This is the book on the future we'd been waiting for - an impassioned argument for replacing lazy certainties and fearful fantasies with a rigorous, rationally optimistic and ultimately empowering stance toward what might be coming next.” —Oliver Burkeman
”I couldn't put down this brilliant, eye-opening work — it's just the kind we need at the moment. Foster has spent a lifetime exploring tomorrows, and his message is clear: serious thinking about the future is essential if we hope to shape it rather than be blindsided by it>” —David Eagleman
>>Mostly nonsense.
>>The future of thinking about the future.

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

The Black Monk by Charlotte Grimshaw $38
The eagerly anticipated new novel — Grimshaw’s first since The Mirror Book. While Alice Lidell's brother Cedric spirals into addiction, she finds herself confronted not only by his decline, but by memories of past experiences. From their chaotic Auckland childhood to her present day life, Alice is haunted by a mysterious figure she calls the Black Monk. As Alice tries to hold her family together, the Black Monk appears in various guises — a stranger met in a cemetery, a face on television, a character surfacing in her own writing. Part psychological thriller, part family saga, this is a daring, superbly written novel that examines the themes of the moment — shame, addiction, truth and the stories we tell to survive. [Paperback]
"Charlotte is one of New Zealand's most accomplished and acclaimed writers with a significant publishing record. She has few peers as a fiction writer and essayist, and as a reviewer and public intellectual. Her work for newspapers and magazines reveals her curiosity about the world, her immersion in contemporary politics and social issues; it demonstrates her clear-sighted thinking, willingness to interrogate and expose, and desire to engage with difficult topics. Her writing can be searing and fearless. Her work as a fiction writer wins literary awards and is adapted for television, a rare combination anywhere, especially for an author who is not writing commercial or historical fiction." —Paula Morris
>>A resource and a defence.

Scorpions by Yumiko Kurahashi (translated from Japanese by Michael Day) $39
Yumiko Kurahashi's 1963 novella Scorpions takes the form of a transcript of a one-sided interview with L following the arrest and institutionalisation of her twin brother K. The two have played a role in a series of horrifying deaths culminating in the murder of their mother. Through a first-person narrative that varies in tone from scientifically clinical to darkly humorous, mingling together references to the Bible and Greek mythology, odd bits of dialogue and obtuse descriptions, we learn of K and L's shocking crimes as well as the professional and personal entanglement of L and an older man they call the Red Pig, their mother's former lover. Scorpions remains, after more than half a century, a shockingly transgressive text. It bears allegiance to the most radical French fiction of its time, particularly the work of Jean Genet, an author Kurahashi admired, whose own novels explored the sanctification of criminal behavior. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Engaging both Japanese and European literatures.

The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken) $28
On the Six-Thousand Ship, things have started to feel changed. Since bringing aboard a number of strange objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew — both human and humanoid — have begun to feel a yearning. They want to be near the objects, to feel them pressed against their skin, but they also all now feel a curious new hunger for home — Earth, that place many cannot even remember. The Board of Directors are eager to understand more, and so instruct a commission to interview each of the employees. Those who are born dream of soil, the smell of warm asphalt, the sound of animals and birds. Those who are made know only what is programmed, and yet feel it deeply, truly. As their testimonies accumulate, a tapestry of longing and quiet rebellion emerges, blurring the lines between work and life, between human and machine. The Employees was the breakout novel from one of the most celebrated authors in world literature, and is now seen as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literary science fiction. In stark, pristine prose, Olga Ravn forms a timeless meditation on productivity, pleasure and what the far-flung future might miss. New edition. [Paperback]
”Everything I'm looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art.” —Max Porter
”What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby. —Tank Magazine
”The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human.” —Justine Jordan, The Guardian
”The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship. What The Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all.” —Laura Miller, New York Review of Books
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Read Stella’s review.
>>Join our April online discussion.
>>The Wax Child.
>>My Work.

Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno $35
From “a writer who has invented a new form" (Annie Ernaux), an exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and how we regard ourselves among the animals. Animal Stories begins with Zambreno's visit to the monkey house at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where one stark tree "seems to be the stage design for a simian production of Waiting for Godot". But who are the players and who is the audience, and can they recognize each other? What follows is a series of reports from the deep strangeness of the zoo, a space that is "more often than not deeply sad, an odd choice for regular pilgrimages of fun”. Amid excursions with their young children, Zambreno turns to Garry Winogrand's photographs and John Berger's writings on animals, reshaping the spectator as the subject to decode our complex "zoo feelings" — what we project, and what we refuse to see. Then, in the "Kafka system" that dovetails with these zoo studies, Zambreno thinks through the notebooks and animal stories of a writer known for playing at the threshold between species, continuing their investigation into the false divide between human and animal. Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves. [Paperback]
"I loved the precision of Kate Zambreno's Animal Stories-a literal attention so heightened that it becomes distinct and peculiar...Few human animals have Zambreno's baleful honesty, insight, or relish for comedy, when they look at themselves." —Daisy Hildyard
"A personal, historical, and philosophical reflection on the gap between human and animal perceptions of each other. Animal Stories considers the tragicomic implications of our own animal being.” —Brian Dillon
"A view on the world using a deep field of focus that renders details near and far with equal clarity. Ostensibly unrelated figures are thus united within the writer's rich conceptual frame. Blazingly erudite, Animal Stories reflects Zambreno's vital unboundedness." —The Brooklyn Rail
>>Death at the zoo.

Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan $40
Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger's five-year diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. The diary was falling apart — water-stained and illegible in places — but magnetic to Scanlan nonetheless. After reading and rereading the diary, studying and dissecting it, for the next fifteen years she played with the sentences that caught her attention, cutting, editing, arranging, and rearranging them into the composition that became Aug 9—Fog (she chose the title from a note that was tucked into the diary). "Sure grand out," the diarist writes. "That puzzle a humdinger," she says, followed by, "A letter from Lloyd saying John died the 16th." An entire state of mourning reveals itself in "2 canned hams." The result of Scanlan's collaging is an utterly compelling, deeply moving meditation on life and death. In Aug 9—Fog, Scanlan's spare, minimalist approach has a maximal emotional effect, remaining with the reader long after the book ends. It is an unclassifiable work from a visionary young writer and artist--a singular portrait of a life revealed by revision and restraint. [Now in paperback]
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>What is buried in what is written?
>>Read our reviews of Kick the Latch.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Dominant Animal.

Lithium by Malén Denis (translated from Spanish by Laura Hatry and John Wronoski $42
Malén Denis's Lithium is a novel about what cannot be fully named or pinned down. "Language in this book," the author notes, "acts as a pharmakon- — both poison and remedy — inviting the reader to navigate its ambivalence. I wrote it by following the golden thread of poetry and the echoes of psychoanalysis, letting the images lead rather than the plot." Lithium employs an especially potent, poetic language to convey love found and love lost. It is a book blazing with bruised perceptions of the precarity of a life lived between jobs and between homes; it's a feverish work swinging from hope to despair, about trying drugs both prescribed and not, about migration, about cat-sitting, and about isolation, about the search for meaning and for happiness when both prove so elusive, and it is about summoning the strength to wrench oneself from indecision to action. [Paperback]
"Malén Denis hypnotises like the bright flames of burning lithium." —Babelio
"Lithium grapples with the unsayable." —Pagina 12
”Lithium is a meditation on the things that last and those that never can; on female pain and the ways it is accommodated or simply ignored. It offers no easy answers but feels truer to life for this. It is a book about the bravery that being young so often requires.” —Declan Fry, ABC
>>We need to at least attempt.
>>It is necessary to speak from the uncomfortable place of subjectivity (use your right-click menu to translate.)
>>Helen Levitt x Malén Denis.

The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius (translated by Tom Holland) $65
The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD. By placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius succeeded in painting Rome's ultimate portraits of power. The shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals of the emperors are laid bare; we are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities; we sit at their tables and enter their bedrooms. The result is perhaps the most influential series of biographies ever written. That Rome lives more vividly in people's imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Now Tom Holland brings us even closer in a new translation. Giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of Rome's first emperors, and of how they swayed the fates of millions, The Lives of the Caesars is an astonishing, immersive experience of a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own. [Hardback]
”Tom Holland is a master populariser of the ancients. His new translation of Suetonius is a peerlessly enjoyable introduction to the earlier imperial Romans. It reminds us that the monsters who, astoundingly, achieve power in 21st-century democracies had forebears in the ancient world who matched them folly for folly, whim for whim, vanity for vanity.” —Max Hastings

Ferment: Simple ferments and pickles, and how to eat them by Kenji Morimoto $60
Pickles and ferments bring so much flavour and variety to meals and are easy to make, but they can seem daunting. Enter third-culture cook and fermenting expert Kenji Morimoto, who shows just how simple it is to introduce homemade kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, miso, super-quick pickles and more into your everyday cooking with delicious, gut-healthy results. Recent research encourages us to eat thirty plants a week to help our microbiome to thrive. Thanks to Morimoto's inventive and modern recipes, eating fermented foods becomes a pleasure as well as the healthiest choice. Whether it's Kimchi Bhajis served with Miso Coriander Chutney, One Pot Citrus Miso Salmon and Edamame Rice, Kombucha Sorbet or Pickled Rhubarb Pound Cake, this is flavour-forward food that you won't have seen before. Part one shows how to make ferments and pickles, giving you all the trouble-shooting advice and step-by-step guidance you need. Part two introduces more than 70 exciting recipes to make with them, or if you prefer you can prepare them with your favourite shop-bought varieties instead. [Hardback]
”This book is a beautifully crafted and illustrated guide to the subtle arts of preserving food that will make us all feel ready to start fermenting today.” —Tim Spector
”Kenji demystifies fermentation, so now you too can make fermenting as instinctive as reaching for salt. This book is an open-hearted collection of stories, practical tips and excellent recipes.” —Ottolenghi Test Kitchen
>>Look inside!

On the Highway of the Stories of the Gods by Martin Edmond $48
On the Highway of the Stories of the Gods recounts a series of journeys Martin Edmond and Mayu Kanamori took in Japan in 2023. They go first to Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands in the archipelago, then to the smaller island of Sado, in the Sea of Japan, whose goldmines underwrote the wealth of the Tokugawa shogunate. After that they journey through Tohoku, in the north of Honshu, following in the footsteps of poets Basho and Sora along the narrow roads of the heartland. Finally Edmond opens the window on their own place of residence in Kurohime. In each of these locations, landscape and the everyday blend into history, mythology, belief, and magic. We learn the stories of the gods of the Shinto pantheon and of their interplay with Christianity and Buddhism. We hear about the development of Japanese Noh theatre, about shrines and monasteries, mountains and rivers. We are told the correct social protocols of bathing in onsen, and experience the richness of Japan's wilderness. The love Edmond feels for his adopted country flows through his prose and he shows us a country that is gentle, communal, welcoming, and always surprising. [Paperback]
>>Edmond introduces the book.
>>Other books by Martin Edmond.

I Will Not Be Scared by Jean-François Sénéchal and Simone Rea $35
Our fears can consume the entirety of our lives -- unless we find ways to free ourselves of them. As a young rabbit tries to fall asleep one night, kept awake by the trauma of his family's past life in a war-torn region, he replays scenes in his head of an entirely new battle: being attacked by bullies the previous day at school. While his mother tries to encourage him to open up about the incident itself, he hesitates, instead questioning whether he possesses enough courage at all. It's only through addressing the root of his fears, a process that is never easy, that he understands how to free himself and move forward. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Ghost Nation: The story of Taiwan and its struggle for survival by Chris Horton $40
While it lies at the epicentre of China’s and the USA's tense relationship, Taiwan’s story and people go overlooked and misunderstood. In Ghost Nation, readers will discover why this disputed country has become so critical to the future of the world and its economy. Drawing on over a decade of living and reporting from Taiwan, leading journalist Chris Horton unravels the complexity of this thriving democracy and technological powerhouse. Exploring the ghosts of Taiwan's past, a history haunted by colonisation and political turmoil, Horton interviews influential figures and everyday citizens to provide a panoramic view of this fascinating country. As Taiwan grapples with its identity and dreams of international recognition, this riveting and empathetic account will leave readers with an appreciation for Taiwan's history and people. [Paperback]
”If you think it's an exaggeration to say that Taiwan is the fulcrum on which the world's balance of power rests, then Chris Horton's book should change your mind. Few books qualify as essential reading but Ghost Nation is one of them.” —Clive Hamilton, author of The Hidden Hand

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

Mulysses by Øyvind Torseter (translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson) $50
An astonishing, high-adventure graphic novel that playfully remixes The Odyssey, Moby Dick, and more, from the esteemed Norwegian cartoonist. Fresh out of a job, with his apartment slated for demolition and his possessions seized, Mulysses is in need of $5,000—and fast! As luck would have it, he crosses paths just in time with a wealthy collector, who offers him the fortune he seeks if he succeeds in bringing back the world’s biggest eye, fabled to grant its owner enormous power. Like Ulysses, Ishmael, and many others before him, Mulysses takes to the sea in search of both adventure and himself. [Hardback]
"Mulysses plays on the deadpan humor of Moby-Dick and the Cyclops section of the Odyssey... The hero-narrator, a cute mule-like chap who also appears in Torseter's The Heartless Troll and The Hole, reminds me of Tove Jansson's Moomintroll. All this is accomplished with minimalist, scratchy lines, rare patches of color, amusing characters and few words. I can picture an adult reading it with a child and both being happy. Mulysses is an engaging little mash-up that is, thankfully, no mess at all." —New York Times
>>Look inside!

Party Boy by Breton Dukes $35
Marco is stressed. On one hand, he’s a cook in a progressive city bar, a married father of three, doing all he can to raise his boys right. On the other (slightly burnt) hand, his life is chaos. Every day seems full of cruel and unusual obstacles, from temperamental arancini to a car breakdown at the worst possible time. Painkillers and booze can only do so much to protect him from the fallout of his adolescence — the bullying, the fear, the things that were done to him and the things he did. Now his fiftieth birthday is approaching, and all the ghosts of his life are invited to the party. It feels like his last chance, though he isn’t sure for what. [Paperback]
”A novel I’ve been hoping for! Party Boy is a shock of a book about damaged males, about being a father, a husband, a son, an idiot, someone trying to make amends. Somehow it manages to be both pulse-rattling and poetic, and from its daring mix of comedy and terror, what arrives is finally a deeply affecting portrait of a man on the edge.’” —Damien Wilkins
>>Culpability.
>>Emotional toll.

The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch masters by Benjamin Moser $40
Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting — casually at first, and then more and more obsessively — the country's great museums. Beyond the sainted Rembrandt — who harbored a startling darkness — and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp. Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway — and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail? The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we've never seen them before. And it's a highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait. Illustrated in colour throughout. [Paperback]
”Moser considers individual lives, life in general and the fragility of all biographies. Unknowns make the knowns shine brighter. Moser relishes strange facts and is attuned to the charisma of his subjects.. This is a meditation on belonging, how we strive to adopt a nation through its art, how we fall in love with a place, its past and foreignness.” —Prospect
”Benjamin Moser's fascinating study of Dutch art and artists is more than the sum of its extraordinary parts. Part memoir, part critical and historical analysis, the book also offers a superb commentary — one of the best I've ever read — on what it means to be displaced in a never entirely whole world, and what it means to see between the cracks. I learned so much reading this fine book, and so will you.” —Hilton Als

This, My Second Life by Patrick Charnley $38
After a near-death experience and life-changing injury, twenty-year-old Jago Trevarno goes to stay with his uncle on his small coastal farm a few miles from St Ives in Cornwall. Their existence is a simple one, their lives measured by the span of the days, the rhythms of the seasons and the animals they care for. But lurking in the shadows is local villain, Bill Sligo, who has designs on Jacob's farm and in particular on a field near the cliffs housing a derelict mineshaft. Wanting to repay his uncle's kindness, Jago determines to find out what Bill Sligo is up to. Jago is still vulnerable though, and in pursuing Sligo he delves into a murky world that he is ill-equipped to deal with. How far will Bill Sligo go to get what he wants? Jago doesn't know it yet, but once again he is in grave danger. Beautifully written, spare and elegiac, filled with shafts of light and darkness as well as the beauty and harshness of the Cornish landscape, Jago's journey is one of hope, renewal and resilience as he comes to terms with this, his second life. [Hardback]
”An astonishing account of recovery. The prose is spare and beautiful, the narrative simple but sound — it is as finely wrought as poetry. Jago's distinctive voice emerges, a true and clear and entirely convincing creation, always reaching towards the light and life.” —The Guardian
”A beautifully written, authentic and deeply affecting portrait of adversity, care and hope that will appeal to fans of Benjamin Myers' The Offing and Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These.” —Daily Mail
”An unexpectedly life affirming story woven into the fabric of a thriller.” —Esther Freud
>>The author’s second life.

Against the Machine: On the unmaking of humanity by Paul Kingsnorth $65
novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents an original — and terrifying — account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilisation, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game. It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Here Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity requires — a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic and poetic, Against the Machine is a manual for dissidents in the technological age. [Hardback]
”Invigorating. No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact.” —New Statesman
”A trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology's promise of power and autonomy.” —The New York Times
”The most powerful and important book I have read in years. This book should be required reading not only for politicians, technocrats, teachers and all who help shape our world, but for every still-living soul in this terrifying age of the Machine.” —Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary

The Year After Kahlia: Surviving, loving, and writing my way through loss by Kirsten O’Connor $35
When Kahlia O’Connor died by suicide at twenty-four, her world stopped. What followed wasn’t healing; it was survival, raw and unfiltered. The Year After Kahlia is a memoir of love that refuses to fade, and a mother learning how to keep breathing in a world her daughter no longer inhabits. It speaks honestly about grief, suicide, motherhood, and what it takes to re-enter life after it’s fallen apart. Told with startling clarity and fierce love, it’s both a companion and a call for truth — to speak openly about what hurts and to remember what still matters. [Paperback]
“This book is a much-needed companion for when the unthinkable happens. With raw honesty and immense compassion, Kirsten shares the devastating loss of her daughter and the disorienting year of grief that followed. The Year After Kahlia offers solace and permission to those who grieve: there is no right way, no linear path, no fixing required. ” —Chameli Gad
>>How was the world continuing?
>>Further resources.

My Friend May by Julie Flett $35
I'd like to tell you a rather true story about a big black cat. Her name was May. Margaux and her cat May became friends when Margaux was just six years old. They grew up together, sharing countless memories along the way. But one day, May is late coming home. Where is May? Is she under the porch? Maybe on the roof? Margaux's nitsis (the Cree word for auntie) helps search for May in the tall grass. But soon nitsis needs to leave: she's moving away to the big city, and has to pack her things into boxes. Margaux helps nitsis, but she can't take her mind off May. Will she ever return? nitsis is worried, too. But little do they know, May has a surprise in store for both of them! This beautifully illustrated and heartwarming story with a surprise happy ending invites readers to share their own cat stories. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Videotape by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy $23
Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War. In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age — individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people. By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. Yet the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Other titles in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

The Only Cure: Freud and the neuroscience of mental healing by Mark Solms $40
Once dismissed as unscientific, psychoanalytic therapy is proving to be among our most effective medical treatments of any kind — outperforming psychiatric drugs and rivalling vaccines in its power to prevent and heal. Why does it work so well? Perhaps because one of the most controversial figures in psychology was right all along. Neuroscience now confirms much of what Sigmund Freud conjectured over a century ago: our deepest struggles stem, not from chemical imbalances, but from buried memories and unconscious conflicts that no pill can touch. Using case studies and cutting-edge brain science, neuroscientist Mark Solms makes the case that psychoanalysis should resume its position as our master theory of the mind. Yet modern research also reveals where Freud got important things wrong. Could correcting these errors make therapy even more effective?As psychiatric diagnoses soar and standard treatments continue to fail many patients, The Only Cure offers a real science of healing, rooted in the radical idea that our suffering arises from truths we haven't yet faced. [Paperback]
”This is an extraordinary book on so many different levels. It's a dramatic history of psychoanalysis, a reassessment of Freud, a fascinating and moving autobiography, and a compelling argument for rethinking the place of feelings and subjectivity within the framework of science. And hence it's also about caring, and nurture — and love. How minds change is the question at the centre of this book. It's changing mine.” —Brian Eno
”Solms made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. I'm convinced.” —Michael Pollan

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the rise of the Mafia, and the struggle for Italy’s soul by Caroline Moorehead $40
Corruption, sleaze and violence were woven into the fabric of twentieth-century Sicilian life, as the Mafia rose to dominance; this is the story of one man who stood in opposition. In 1986, the largest Mafia trial in Italy's history took place in Sicily. The maxi-processo saw 471 men and 4 women take the stand, accused of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and many thousands of murders. Sitting in the galley was Leonardo Sciascia, then aged sixty-five. One of the greatest European writers of the twentieth century, he had published the first Mafia novel, The Day of the Owl, in 1961, and was widely seen by Italians as a true moral figure in a country where corruption had seeped into every corner of public and private life. Sciascia was born in 1921 and came of age as the Mafia grew to prominence across Sicily. Widespread poverty and hardship following the First World War meant that many Sicilians no longer recognised Rome's leadership, which had left a void for local gangsters to fill. Witnessing the scale of corruption and violence, Sciascia predicted it would soon spread north, and he was right- by the 1980s, the Mafia had infiltrated every level of Italian politics and grown into an international, highly successful business. [Paperback]
”Sciascia is the noblest of Italian novelists, and in this magnificent and deeply affecting biography, Caroline Moorehead has given a full account of him, his people, his island, his tragic times.” —Philip Hensher

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski $95
From the author of House of Leaves comes this much-anticipated 1200-page novel about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter. While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines. For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow. As one Orvop high school teacher described that extraordinary feat just days before she died, Fer sure no one expected Kalin March to look Old Porch in the eye and tell him: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards. [Hardback]
"This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you'll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there's so much more. I immersed myself. Have never read anything like it." —Stephen King
"An authentic western epic. A maximalist canvas of intricate, intimate detail. Tom's Crossing fills the contemporary western vacuum left behind by Cormac McCarthy, but it's informed by every era of the Great American Novel, from Melville and Faulkner to Pynchon and, looking further afield, Roberto Bolano's 2666. An unexpectedly earnest trove of story within story within story within." —Neil McRobert, Vulture

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

Hunter by Shuang Xuetao (translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang) $30
These gritty, surreal stories by one of the most highly-celebrated young Chinese writers reveal new and striking visions of life in China today. A provincial ambulance drives through the night in search of a hospital, a fifth-rate actor goes method as a hitman on a sweltering rooftop, a legendary knife fighter is found working on the factory floor of a northern village. Hunter's stories of deceptive, brutal realism play with myth and history, offering sketches of ordinary life that take a magic realist turn. Filled with dark humour and written with a tinge of noir, these stories grapple with the realities of life in contemporary China. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Hunter is one of the best collections of short stories I have read in years. Shuang Xuetao's stories are enthralling, haunting, vicious and viciously funny. This is work that continually takes the reader to unexpected places, while never putting a foot wrong.” —Colin Barrett
”Hunter by Shuang Xuetao is at once personal and historical. Like an unfolding screen, the depiction of the society and its people in northern China is powerfully real, charged with black humour. Jeremy Tiang's translation has brilliantly rendered the author's sharp wit and unique literary voice.” —Xiaolu Guo
”Brutally funny, intricate, and alive . Shuang's work is at ease with the fantastical, which is perhaps the disguise of the unsayable.” —Madeleine Thien
>>Read an extract.

Parliamentary Privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand by Geoffrey Palmer $30
Published ahead of the 2026 NZ General Election, this book by Sir Geoffrey Palmer invites public scrutiny of how Parliament wields its powers. Parliamentary privilege is ‘the oil of the democratic machine’. It can be defined as the special legal powers that allow Parliament to regulate its affairs – and is a curious mix of history, parliamentary practice, law and politics. ‘However, it is also viscous and volatile,’ writes Palmer, ‘and should not be left to sit too long without change.’ This incisive book examines how parliamentary privilege operates in New Zealand, and where change is needed. Palmer traces its evolution and shows how reform has lagged behind that of comparable democracies such as Canada. With his characteristic clarity and frankness, Palmer calls for greater transparency, fairness and consistency in how Parliament exercises its powers. Such changes are essential if we are to protect individual rights and democratic integrity.
”This is a work of both scholarship and advocacy. I commend this book not just to those who are already fascinated by Parliament, but to all those who care about living in a well-functioning democracy. That should be all of us.” —David Caygill

This Is Where The Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin $35
Moving from Pakistan's sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station. Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives paints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience, and tragedy. Yazid rises from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; Saqib, an errand boy, is eventually trusted to lead his boss's new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib's boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm's profits. In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin's characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country. [Paperback]
 “Set to be a standout novel of 2026 — Brutal, funny and brilliantly told. Mueenuddin's writing is always fluent and often very funny. He brings the smells and tastes of Pakistan to vibrant life; the birds and trees feel as present as the weight of history and the impossible tangles within tangles of corruption and responsibility ... The portrayals are immediate, the storytelling instantly involving.” —Patrick Gale, Guardian
”Expect to see this novel all over prize lists in 2026. Mueenuddin is a literary magician.” —The Times
”Mueenuddin recalls Chekhov, but another writer comes to mind as well: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, whose 1958 The Leopard offers a layered totalising portrait of a society that is both changing and failing to change. This Is Where the Serpent Lives has that kind of ambition and captures its world in the same exhilarating and unsparing way.” —Wall Street Journal

Trip by Amie Barrodale $38
"Three days after I died, my son ran away." Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth in the North American desert. But Sandra soon discovers that a mother's work is never done, not even when you're dead. It turns out limbo is a great place from which to keep an eye on your errant son. When Trip is picked up on the side of the road by a strange man, Sandra is the only one who knows where he is. As Trip ventures further south towards the coast and directly into the eye of a hurricane, Sandra's struggle to save him from the other realm begins. From Florida's Gulf Stream to the raging seas, through Munich-bound aeroplanes and from one body to another, Trip takes us on an absurd, profound and irresistibly entertaining odyssey — a story of childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between. [Paperback]
”Raw and funny, yet graceful and astonishingly precise, Trip is a book with the power to resonate in the most intimate ways for any reader. I read it in awe, as if Barrodale had written it just for me. Amie Barrodale is the most important writer of my generation.” —Ottessa Moshfegh
”Beautifully crafted, hard-boiled fun. Trip is a good time.” —Nell Zink
”Amie Barrodale's Trip is an extraordinary novel. It is as if Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson have joined together to write a tender story of a recently dead mom who wanders the bardo but is always drawn back to her imperiled son, an autistic teenager who is on a boat with a stranger, lost at sea…” —Akhil Sharma
>>Craft, critics, and the blurb economy.

On Mysticism: The experience of ecstasy by Simon Critchley $30
Mysticism has been called 'experience at its most intense form', and here philosopher Simon Critchley asks: wouldn't you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn't you like to be lifted up and out of yourself? Mysticism is not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and practice. It is a way of freeing yourself of your standard habits, fancies and imagining so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. It is the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence. This is a book about Julian of Norwich and medieval mystics that also ranges through the work of Anne Carson, Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. It looks at Nick Cave and German krautrock and considers how music relates to ecstasy. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life. [Paperback]
>>A few other books by Simon Critchley.
>>Critchley is the ‘Head Philosopher’ of the International Necronautical Society.

On Photography by Susan Sontag $30
Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives. [Paperback]
”Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites.” —The Times
”A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves.” —Washington Post
”The most original and illuminating study of the subject.” —New Yorker
>>Read also Walter Benjamin.
>>Read also Roland Barthes.

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison $28
On a hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Decades later, none of the participants can remember what transpired; but their clouded memories bind them together. Unable to move on, Pam Stuyvesant has epilepsy and is plagued by sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him, and invents histories to soothe Pam's fears. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The narrator is seemingly the least effected participant in the ritual: he is haunted by the smell of roses, and his guilt as he attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Strange, dreamlike and moving, The Course of the Heart is an examination of the edges of humanity where we lie, hide, hurt and heal. New edition, with an introduction by Julia Armfield. [Paperback]
”A gloriously intelligent, beautifully written and thoroughly maddening book.” —Independent
”A spare textual elegance and closure-denying restraint that impresses and fulfills.” —Iain Banks, Guardian
”One of the best writers currently at work in English.” —Robert Macfarlane
”Is M John Harrison the best writer at work today? He's certainly among the deftest and most original.” —Olivia Laing, Guardian
”A new generation will love discovering this book for themselves: it has the giddy thrill of youth, plenty of terror and metaphysical transcendence, but it's never silly; instead, M John Harrison unpicks the very notion of escapism.” —Observer

Intertidal: The hidden world between land and sea by Yuvan Aves $50
Over two years and three monsoons, Yuvan Aves pays scrupulous attention to the living world of his coastal city. The result is a diary of deep observation of coast and wetland, climate and self. Set in beaches and marshes, and the wild places of the mind, Intertidal comprises daily accounts of being in a multispecies milieu. In language that is jewel-like and precise, we hear frog calls through the night, spot butterflies miles into the ocean, find blue buttons washed ashore, see the churning of longshore currents and meditate on the composting abilities of worms. We also witness communities stand together to preserve the homes and livelihoods of the human and non-human inhabitants of the coast and the marsh. Intertidal asks us to reimagine values to live by in the here and now, heeding the living world and attending to the climate's calling, moving away from the old political, religious and cultural values that have proved to be ecologically disastrous. Yuvan Aves invites us to see beyond the binaries of sea and coast, mindscape and landscape, human and not human, self and other. Set in beaches, marshes, and the wild places of the mind, Intertidal revels in the healing power of nature and explores what it means to reclaim an ecology that has been colonised. [Hardback]
”Gentle and poetic, subtle, watchful and observant, writing very much in the tradition of Robert Macfarlane and haunted by the ghosts of Barry Lopez and J.A. Baker. This is a startlingly brilliant and moving debut.” —William Dalrymple
”Its intensity of vision' and stylistic flair reminds me of J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, and its democratic, inclusive account of ecology reminds me of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Intertidal is a wondrous work of walking, seeing and thinking.” —Robert Macfarlane

The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow — The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi by Elin Anna Labba (translated by Fiona Graham) $45
The deep and personal story — told through history, poetry, and images — of the forced displacement of the Sámi people from their homeland in northern Norway and Sweden and its reverberations today. More than a hundred years have passed since the Sámi were forcibly displaced from their homes in northern Norway and Sweden, a hundred years since Elin Anna Labba's ancestors and relations drove their reindeer over the strait to the mainland for the last time. The place where they lived has remained empty ever since. We carry our homes in our hearts, Labba shares, citing the Sámi poet Áillohas. How do you bear that weight if you were forced to leave? In a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir, and lyrical reimagining, Labba travels to the lost homeland of her ancestors to tell of the forced removal of the Sámi in the early twentieth century and to reclaim a place in history, and in today's world, for these Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia. When Norway became a country independent from Sweden in 1905, the two nations came to an agreement that called for the displacement of the Northern Sámi, who spent summers on the Norwegian coast and winters in Sweden. This "dislocation," as the authorities called it, gave rise to a new word in Sámi language, bággojohtin, forced displacement. The first of the sirdolaččat, or "the displaced," left their homes fully believing they would soon return. Through stories, photographs, letters, and joik lyrics, Labba gathers a chorus of Sámi expression that resonates across the years, evoking the nomadic life they were required to abandon and the immense hardship and challenges they endured: children left behind with relatives, reindeer lost when they returned to familiar territory, sorrow and estrangement that linger through generations. Starkly poetic and emotionally heart-wrenching, this dark history is told through the voices of the sirdolaččat, echoing the displacements of other Indigenous people around the world as it depicts the singular experience of the Northern Sámi. [Hardback]

Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gaugin by Sue Prideaux $37
Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia. Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew. Colour plates. [Now in paperback]
>>Casting new light.
>>A new world.
>>Also available in hardback!

The Very Fine Clock by Muriel Spark, illustrated by Edward Gorey $35
Once there was a very fine clock named Ticky, who lived with Professor Horace John Morris and kept perfect time. Each night, at fourteen minutes past ten, his time was used to set the rest of the clocks in the house. When the professor's friends suggest that Ticky be made a professor, too, he explains what really happens during the quiet hours of the day when the professor is out, when all the rooms have been cleaned and dusted, and the clocks talk to one another and tell the stories of their lives. No artist is better suited to capture Ticky's quiet stateliness and grace than Edward Gorey, who brings this tale masterfully to life through his characteristic pen and ink drawings. Full of wit, wisdom, and affairs of the heart, The Very Fine Clock is a very fine picture book. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Electric Spark.
>>Born to Be Posthumous.

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

Lyrical Ballads by Bill Manhire $30
Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valéry’s definition of poetry as ‘a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense’. In that spirit, many of the poems in this long-awaited new collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that — suddenly, on the page — become new and delightfully weird. Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled collection: the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and absurdity: ‘The Tobacco Tin’, a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and ‘Tell You What’, a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world. As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who don’t fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives. [Paperback]

they by Helle Helle (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken) $35
A mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter live in an apartment above a hairdresser's shop in a small island town. Each day is marked by routine and quiet intimacy. They are so enmeshed, so alike in their manners and opinions, it can be hard to tell them apart. Then the mother begins to feel unwell. They carry on with their lives, talk about anything but the diagnosis. The mother goes in and out of hospital, and the daughter, just starting high school, makes new friends but remains essentially alone. Illness, and the possibility of loss, cast a growing shadow over her life. Writing in a multi-layered, perpetual present tense, Helle Helle finds a tender voice for the comedy and awkwardness of her characters' lives, rendered into riveting and affecting English by acclaimed translator Martin Aitken. they is an exquisite portrait of the fragile love between a mother and daughter, and a love letter to 1980s life on the island of Lolland, where the author grew up.
”One of my favorite Danish writers — she's the master.” —Olga Ravn
”Helle Helle's minimalism isn't boring; it crackles with mystery. It's the everyday, and yet it's insistently beautiful.” —Weekendavisen
”Helle Helle's they sharply renders the startling and singular specifics of a life: hairspray, glass trolls, radiators, crocheted curtains, shrimps, baguettes, liver pâté, harem pants, peacoats, denim skirts, the selling of milk, eggs and soap, fried eggs, pineapple, peaches and cheese, garlic, condensed milk, jam, terry-cloth, lemonade, female guitarists, cans of tomato soup, Band-Aids, rustic whole grain bread, cold spaghetti. All this within the binary star gravitational pull of a mother-daughter relationship peering into the void of the mother's sudden, almost certainly terminal, illness. It's a book about class, memory, and the texture of time itself. I'm now a Helle Helle completist.” —Rita Bullwinkel
>>Beautiful minimalism.
>>On reading.

What to Wear by Jenny Bornholdt $25
The poems in What to Wear observe that life means doing ordinary and marvellous things, like going to Bunnings, falling asleep on the train, losing and finding poems, losing and dreaming of our mothers, loving, dying, and deciding what to wear. [Paperback]
”Mischievously joyful, like being in on the very best in-joke. Jenny Bornholdt reveals the strange magic of the everyday. Some of these poems move like a heat-seeking missile set to the heart.’” —Louise Wallace

Leather & Chains: My 1986 diary by Kate Camp $40
Kate Camp turns her poet' s eye on her 1986 diary. Reading The Diary in its entirety for the first time, she revels in 80s touchstones like Revlon Custom Eyes and Ghostbusters on VHS. But amid the daily details, like smoking menthols in Suzy' s Coffee Lounge and wearing Jazzercise tights in a phone box, are moments of drama, even tragedy — being black-out drunk in a spa pool, or watching her father move out of the family home. At the centre of it all is Cameron, his black hair falling over his eyes, intoning in his fake Scottish accent, “Treat me rough, baby.” These entries — over 100 reproduced in full — are a time capsule of a very different era. The Kate Camp of today responds to the blithe accounts of sex, drugs and risk-taking with horror and admiration — and insight. How real are our memories? Can we ever know ourselves? And why is every entry signed off Leather & Chains? [Flexibound]
”Kate Camp reads the words of grownupchild Kate of 1986 — achingly funny, arch and louche, often shocking, always clever. And all of it threaded through with such pain and sadness and unsettling darkness, such yearning to be loved. I thought I knew The Diary so well, after all these years listening and watching from the wings. But reading The Diary myself, as she does in this remarkable project, is richer, funnier and, yes, sadder than experiencing it live in eight-minute snippets. I've often wondered about Kate Camp: how did she get to be so fearless, so peerless, so bold? The answer is in these pages.” —Tracy Farr

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman $35
In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his story is not actually over — rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated. Philosophically and formally adventurous, at once intimate and cosmic in scope, Helen of Nowhere asks: What must we give up in exchange for true happiness? [Paperback with French flaps]
”Wildly original, unpredictable and funny. Is Helen of Nowhere a ghost story? A satire about back-to-the-land philosophies? A comedy about male obsolescence? Or, conversely, a skewering of identity politics? Perhaps it's just a fable about burn-out or the human hunger for love. It could be all of these.... This is fiction that will sharpen your attention to the world, make it more intense. It reminds us that we don't have to understand or like everything about a book to get something out of it. In fact, allowing ourselves to feel stimulated and perplexed feels like intellectual freedom and an awakening of human potential.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times
”Virtuosically written, with an insanity inside its sanity — or the other way around — that seems the proper use to make of reality in this moment.” —Rachel Cusk
”Helen of Nowhere is one of the most surprising novels I've ever read. Goodman has found a unique way of blending political urgency and psychological insight with an almost hallucinatory spiritual dimension that manages to strike the reader as perfectly justified, deeply funny and profoundly true.” —Vincenzo Latronico
”Goodman has wrought an epic in miniature, somehow as appealingly vast as a Greek tragedy or a Platonic dialogue, equal parts philosophy and art that's also delightfully wicked, like something from a fairytale or a fever dream.” —Sarah Manguso
>>Continually evolving truths.
>>A house holds a mirror.
>>Love, theory, and the ‘post-cis male moment’.

Coming. Apart. by Edy Poppy (translated from Norwegian by May-Brit Akerholt) $35
The sharp, sensual stories of Coming. Apart. chart the unraveling of relationships in all their complexity. From rural Norway to Berlin, Edy Poppy follows characters caught between intimacy and escape lovers who drift, clash, fracture. A couple's erotic games slip into something darker. A woman retreats to the countryside, shadowed by memory. Another navigates obsession, ambivalence, and solitude with uneasy clarity. Written in a voice that is both visceral and exacting, Edy Poppy's story collection moves along the fault lines of connection and desire. Blurring fiction and lived experience, Poppy offers a fierce meditation on what it means to stay or leave. [Paperback]
"Edy Poppy is a courageous writer who dares to transgress the limits most of us set for ourselves. But she does it so playfully and with such elegance that the reader can't resist coming along to explore forbidden realms. Anatomy. Monotony. has become a cult classic in many circles, and I see no reason why Coming. Apart. should not have the same impact." —Elle
"Fantastic!" —Chris Kraus
“In Coming. Apart. Edy Poppy unflinchingly strips bare the messiness of connection and lust, power imbalances, and the agonizing tension between freedom and constraint—boldly exposing humankind’s darkest desires and traumas, and exploring territory many wouldn’t dare to think, let alone put to paper. It is a mettlesome and provocative collection of short stories that refuses to be ignored.” —Tupelo Quarterly
>>Obsessive surveillance.
>>The next wound.
>>Gaze as a tool.

Edith Holler by Edward Carey $28
Norwich, 1901: Edith Holler spends her days among the eccentric denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave. Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, young Edith decides to write a play of her own about Mawther Meg, a monstrous figure said to have used the blood of countless children to make the local delicacy, Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar woman named Margaret Unthank, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play — the one thing that's truly hers — from the newcomer's sinister designs. Teeming with unforgettable characters and illuminated by Carey's trademark illustrations, Edith Holler is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman's struggle to escape her family's control and craft her own creative destiny. [Paperback]
 “An extraordinary achievement: funny, troubling, playful, magical and vastly energetic — sometimes all at once. Edith herself is a fierce, strange creature and entirely unforgettable. Hold on to your hat — and avoid the Beetle Spread.” —A.L. Kennedy
>>The Edith Holler card theatre. >>Yours to download.
>>Millions of words had fallen.

A Long Game: How to write fiction by Elizabeth McCracken $50
'Write every day', 'Show, don't tell', 'Write what you know', 'Kill Your Darlings' — These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, generally accepted as true. They are all pieces of writing advice that Elizabeth McCracken expertly and persuasively shoots down in A Long Game. McCracken has been writing for most of her life. Here, she shares insights gleaned along the way, deconstructing received wisdom whilst playfully tackling the mysteries that are inherent to writing and creativity. A book about the life of an artist and a guide to fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource and will lead all writers, at any stage of their career, back to the page. [Hardback]
”Elizabeth McCracken was my teacher, and it's a joy to know that now more people will have access to her brilliance through A Long Game. A guidebook for any fiction writer, and a problem-solving and cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business.” —Yiyun Li
”Elizabeth McCracken is that rarest of combinations — a world class writer and a world class writing teacher. With A Long Game she has distilled the electric, inspiring genius, enthusiasm, and wit that she has brought to the classroom for more than three decades and put it into a book that's practically a masters program in itself.” —Paul Harding
”Elizabeth McCracken, one of the greatest, wisest, funniest, and most humane writers you will ever encounter, has written one the greatest, wisest, funniest, and most humane books about writing you will ever read. Have a pen ready. You'll want to underline sentences on every page that make you stop and think or inwardly cheer or nod in recognition. Most importantly, you'll want to run to your desk and write. A Long Game is an absolute gift.” —Cristina Henriquez
>>Rip up all the rules.

Augustus the Strong: A study in artistic greatness and political fiasco by Time Blanning $36
Augustus is one of the great what-ifs of the 18th century. He could have turned the accident of ruling two major realms into the basis for a powerful European state — a bulwark against the Russians and a block on Prussian expansion. Alas, there was no opportunity Augustus did not waste and no decision he did not get wrong. By the time of his death Poland was fatally damaged and would subsequently disappear as an independent state until the 20th century. Tim Blanning's entertaining and original book is a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance. Augustus's posthumous sobriquet 'The Strong' referred not to any political accomplishment, but to his legendary physical strength and sexual athleticism. Yet he was also one of the creative artists of the age, combining driving energy, exquisite taste and apparently boundless resources to master-mind the creation of peerless Dresden, the baroque jewel of jewels. Augustus the Strong brilliantly evokes this time of opulence and excess, decadence and folly. [Paperback]
”Tim Blanning's riotous biography of an often-forgotten 18th-century king provides historical perspective on the current state of Europe. It is so riotous it is impossible to read without thinking of picaresque characters such as Fielding's Tom Jones and Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. An irresistible feast of a biography of the now oft-forgotten Polish king whom he gloriously brings to life.” —Simon Sebag-Montefiore
”The wonderful story of one of the worst monarchs in European history, told with enormous wit and scholarship by a supremely talented historian. If you have the slightest interest in Germans, Poles, porcelain, jewels, the Enlightenment, military disasters or the pleasures of fox-tossing, then this is the book for you.” —Dominic Sandbrook

Discord by Jeremy Cooper $48
On a night in August, an audience at the Royal Albert Hall attends the first ever concert of ‘Distant Voices’. The Proms performance is the culmination of a year's work between the middle-aged composer Rebekah Rosen and the young star-saxophonist Evie Bennet. Alternating between both perspectives, Discord charts the course of their intense and at times fractious relationship, the resonances and dissonances both women find within one another, as well as the struggles and satisfactions that accompany an artistic life. At the heart of the novel is an inquiry into the generative force behind creative collaboration. In what ways does the inexpressible — that amorphous space of friction and unity between musicians — become indelible? And by what process do flawed individuals create works of transcendence? [Paperback with French flaps]
”It's very hard indeed to write fiction about music but Jeremy Cooper does so with triumphant aplomb. Discord is a tremendous, quietly enthralling achievement.” —William Boyd
”Jeremy Cooper's Discord is as nakedly truthful a novel as you could ever hope to read. Its characters are completely and utterly convincing and their interactions with one another are filled with all of the loveliness and foolishness and tenderness of real life.” —Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
”Quietly, irresistibly compelling. Jeremy Cooper's interior worlds fill you up, become the air around you, conduct the sounds of every day — while you are reading, and while the book waits for you to pick it up again. Discord is an enthralling human melody.” —Ben Pester

Slow Burn / Ahi Tāmau: Women and Photography / Mareikura Whakaahua by Lissa Mitchell $35
"Researching, collecting and writing about photography, I have often wondered where the women were." Lissa Mitchell. Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau showcases the diverse range of photography by women and non-binary artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, spanning the 1960s to today. Published to accompany a major survey exhibition from Te Papa's collections and to spark a conversation between past and present, this fully illustrated book explores themes of identity, whānau, place, and time through a feminist lens. Highlighting over 150 works by 50 artists, Slow Burn illustrates how ways of seeing can be passed down, reimagined, and slowly reignited. Featured artists include Anne Noble, Fiona Pardington, Natalie Robertson and Lisa Reihana. The curator's essay provides further historical context to the exhibition, and biographies of the photographers make this a valuable research resource. Slow Burn builds on ten years of deeply considered research, inclusive collection decisions, and the 2023 publication of Lissa's acclaimed book Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960. The exhibition and this book bring work by photographers from the last 65 years out of the storeroom and into conversation with each other — a celebration of photography's ever-evolving nature in Aotearoa. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>Through Shaded Glass.

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

I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken $50
Richard Siken's long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with a body forgetting itself — "the mind that / didn't work, the leg that wouldn't move...". Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won't connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: "dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged." To say "black tree" when one means "night." Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. "Part insight, part anecdote," he is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in "The field [that] had been swept clean of habit." Recommended. [Hardback]
"An astonishing feat of poetic prowess. Siken has created 'an encyclopedia of myself,' a kaleidoscope of memory, language and identity that reveals — at times revels — in the faultiness of our own narratives. Siken's voice — and language — is both rooted and aloft, even as he avers that these are not 'poems of song.' Beyond such marvels, this is a virtuosity of candor and technique, bound by a seemingly effortless linguistic choreography that leans into multiplicity and mutability, with continuous sparks and joys, from one of our finest contemporary poets." —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books
"The second-person strategies of Crush are abandoned in I Do Know Some Things for a more direct style, but Siken's signature intensity still throbs between sentences. Siken's prose is often deft and exciting. As he relearned everything, the prose poem helped him rediscover how to create poetic tension, how to be dynamic without the gravity-defying magic of enjambment. Syntactic variation. Quick, unexpected shifts in register. Artful repetition. These are all refined strategies in the collection. The prose is also a steadying element. It is another way of not losing oneself, of not falling through the cracks." —Richie Hoffman, Yale Review
>>Wiped clean.
>>The most fundamental poetic device.
>>Landmarks for meaning.

The Hand of the Hand by Laura Vazquez (translated from French by Shira Abramovich and Lénaïg Cariou) $48
The Hand of the Hand brings us poetry from a visceral alternate world in which earth, animal, and human intertwine — where stomachs have meadows, milk pours itself over trees, and flies wash the dead. Vazquez pulls deceptively simple, bare language into puzzling formations, creating an ambient unease. By turns lyrical and absurd, The Hand of the Hand explores the mystery and strangeness of what it means to be both speech and body, tongue and dirt. English/French bilingual edition. [Paperback]
”The tentacular porousness of Laura Vazquez’s début collection sweeps selfhood off its feet.” —Sarah Riggs
”This remarkable and subtle poetic series moves continually outward—one thing leads to another and another, gaining momentum until its evocations achieve a true fusion of body and world. Whether through forests, ants, stones, or words, it’s a fusion that allows the reader, too, to become one with the world as a unified gesture, and it’s the hand—as bridge, as touch, as grasp—that animates this gesture, this hand that seems ubiquitous, which, in fact, it is. “ —Cole Swensen
”In this knockout first collection in English, Laura Vazquez shows us the simplicity and the complexity of the real. But what is the real? It’s these poems, written right on the very skin of it, where the human and everything else feel it. These poems, like Lucretius’, explain the world to us at the granular, allowing us to see these strange perceptions and arrangements of body (‘I folded my tongue, the way I know how’) in all its pleasure and wonder.” —Eleni Sikelianos
>>Read some extracts.
>>The Endless Week.

Some Helpful Models of Grief by Hana Pera Aoake $30
A composite chronicle of various loves — desired, lost, or never realised — and their corresponding joys and griefs against the backdrops of contemporary art and late capitalism. These poems radiate with Aoake's characteristic force, tenderness, intelligence, and humour, often all within the very same breath. The personal is the political is the personal. [Paperback]
”Everything Hana writes has a pulse. It could be moss, Britney or Plato but it sings a song that is nervous, in the body and out of the body. You’d be a fool not to take in all of Hana’s grins.” —Talia Marshall
”Hana’s writing is daring, elliptical, charismatic and above all, interesting. The kind of writer where it doesn’t matter what the subject is, you know you are always in good company.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
“He haerenga whakatautau, he haerenga atamai, he haerenga ngoto. Sometimes difficile, always différente, Some helpful models of grief is an unique, polymorphous panorama of pāmamae that will be sure to beguile any reader.” —Vaughan Rapatahana
”Hana has always had a way of using words to weave together complex stories and narratives. The words and pieces found throughout this collection are tender and beautiful.” —Khadro Mohamed
>>Read some extracts!
>>Look inside.
>>A bathful of kawakawa and hot water.

Telegraphy by Farah Ali $38
Growing up in Pakistan, Annie experiences the death of her mother, goes to college in Karachi, falls in love with a singer in a band, marries the wrong man, and all her life has visions and illnesses no doctor can explain. Signals are received by the body from across time and space. Passages interwoven with Annie’s narrative include Vesalius stealing the corpse of a hanged man, a visit to the house of the 17th-century Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, correspondence between far-flung friends in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, a family’s centuries-long dispersal following an earthquake in Kibyra in 23 CE, and a man stepping onto a landmine in contemporary Waziristan. [Paperback with French flaps]
‘“Farah Ali’s novel, Telegraphy, connects the past with the present, the mythical with the ‘real’. It connects our desires, our longing, the fear that haunts even waking hours, with what we end up becoming — pieces of a whole that was fractured from the beginning, the skin around the bones just a fragile casing for the unbearable weight of suffering. Well crafted, deeply pensive, this is a novel that speaks to each one of us, if we dare to speak to ourselves.” —Feryal Ali Gauhar
”Telegraphy is a deeply strange book. The ethereal quality of Farah Ali’s writing holds this curious, clever, almost devious book with such tenderness, I felt I was in the hands of a writer who had been working for decades to distil this fine work.” —Lara Pawson
”A true book of the body, its pains and resonances, and a bold, unique structure with a captivating voice.” —Han Smith 

Landscape with Landscape by Gerald Murnane $48
Landscape with Landscape was Gerald Murnane's fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. "I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years," Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it can be seen to contain some of his best writing, and to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, 'The Battle of Acosta Nu', is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Murnane is unlike anyone else, the sort of writer who demands to be read in a new way but, above all, demands to be read.” —Brian Evenson, Chicago Review of Books
”The emotional conviction is so intense, the sombre lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.” —J. M. Coetzee
”This is some of his finest writing, and a major work by any measure.” —Michael LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement
>>Read Thomas’s reviews of some others of Murnane’s fictions.

frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss $35
”The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,” Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cells on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of 'beauty or relief'. Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and — in a word — frank. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This book is a response to death, a way of living in knowledge of death's privations. What Seuss is hoping for is an extended enough death to allow for a witty recognition of the shape it is imposing on the life it ends. Beyond that, though, what she wants is enough life to make her death into a kind of 'last rhyme', a sound that radiates both into the past and into the future, where it might make contact with your body, or mine.” —Kamran Javadizadeh, London Review of Books
”Seuss layers the work with a litany of cultural and literary references. It is at that bright, fascinating collision between tradition and innovation that these poems reside.” —Soft Punk Magazine
”These poems are taut and careful glimpses into a life lived on the fringes but threaded with wildness; there is a constant sense that everything they contain might erupt at any moment. If autobiographical writing is an attempt to fix a life inside language, frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry are both convincing arguments for the absolute impossibility of ever really succeeding in doing so. Instead, they offer an alternative: debris, glimpses, constellations, ghosts. Suffering and all its attendant bewilderment is given the space it deserves, and pleasure, transcendence, and love are all given due space alongside it.” —Maija Makela, Stinging Fly
>>What is a coffin for?
>>Body parts will always wash up.

A Parliament of Fog by Layne Waerea $35
For more than a decade, fog has rematerialised throughout the work of lawyer-turned-artist Layne Waerea. Her public interventions and performances explore what she describes as “legal-social subjectivities”, centering the implications of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as Aotearoa New Zealand’s only living treaty with Māori. For Waerea, the act of chasing fog pursues a physical or ideological space where borders can be tested — “a fertile area where there are lots of question marks” — and where imagination, hope, participation, and failure can be explored. A Parliament of Fog celebrates ten years of Waerea’s ongoing project the chasing fog club (Est. 2014), and also marks the occasion of its second-ever “Annual General Meeting.” Developed over 2023-24 within a fraught political climate leading up to the New Zealand elections and the first term of a new right-wing coalition government, the publication approaches the club — and Waerea’s recent practice — as a springboard for taking the pulse of the moment. Reflecting on the recent activities of the club in dialogue with a group of collaborators, A Parliament of Fog considers how conditions of opacity, uncertainty, and transition might offer space for collective reimagining. Featuring contributions by the chasing fog club (Est 2014), Sophie Davis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Deborah Rundle, and Layne Waerea. [Paperback (appropriately spiral-bound)]
>>Look inside.

50 Years of the Waitangi Tribunal: Whakamana i te Tiriti edited by Maria Bargh and Carwen Jones $50
The Waitangi Tribunal has been a unique and integral part of the Aotearoa New Zealand judicial and legislative process, upholding te Tiriti o Waitangi and providing expertise on historical claims, Maori language, land, resources and contemporary issues. This collection contains chapters on themes of land, water and the natural environment, the settlements process, the Kaupapa Inquiries, and issues of social policy, mana, and rangatiratanga, each written by an expert in the area. There are also interviews with two past chairpersons of the Tribunal. The collection highlights the breadth of issues considered by the Tribunal and also the impact the Tribunal has had on complex legal concepts, representation of communities, and understanding of te Tiriti o Waitangi. [Paperback]

The State of Māori Rights by Margaret Mutu $55
The State of Māori Rights was first published in 2011 and brought together a Māori view of events and issues that occurred between 1994 and 2009 with a direct impact on Māori. This includes the 1994 fiscal envelope policy debate, the 50,000-strong protest march against the foreshore and seabed legislation, the Waitangi Tribunal and its Treaty claims process, and media attacks on Māori MPs. This new edition, revised and updated with new chapters, brings Margaret Mutu’s The State of Māori Rights through to 2024, a time when Māori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi are once again being violated. Mutu covers Māori responses to COVID-19 and to national disasters such as the White Island eruption and the Christchurch Mosque Attacks on the Muslim community. Māori initiatives and success stories run through these years too, which, in Mutu’s words, “encourage us not to lose sight of our ancestors’ vision”. [Paperback with French flaps]

Metronome by Matthew H. Birkhold $23
When the metronome was invented in 1815, it transformed the music world. Composers and musicians now had a tool that could help them maintain a precise and consistent tempo. And while giants of classical music like Beethoven early embraced the metronome and proponents came to see its essential role in music instruction, critics believed it created mindless players and inhibited the creation of great art. The metronome evokes strong feelings because of its uncompromising power. Through it, we are connected to the past, propelled into the future, and kept focused on the present. For that reason, this object has appeared in unlikely settings as athletes, scientists, psychologists, authors, and other professionals have found uses for it beyond music. Metronome uncovers the surprising and fraught history of a timeless object. [Paperback with French flaps]
”In this clever and thoughtful exploration, Matthew Birkhold reveals how a simple ticking device became both liberator and tyrant, reshaping not just how we make music but how we understand rhythm, precision, and ultimately, our own humanity.” —Christopher Cerrone
”Matthew Birkhold reveals the fascinating history of the metronome that not only covers music, but touches upon dance, art, education, philosophy, physics, psychology, and sports medicine. Devised by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in 1815, Beethoven was an early supporter, but soon Maelzel's metronome (the original M.M.) inspired passionate debates amongst musicians, conductors, composers, pedagogues, and musicologists. Birkhold has successfully unveiled the deeper meanings of an innocuous device that spells out perfect time, as opposed to human time. An illuminating read.” —Fumi Tomita
>>How starfish move without a brain.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A people’s history of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet $40
When the Inter-Continental Hotel opened in Kabul in 1969, it reflected the hopes of the country: a glistening white edifice that embodied Afghanistan's dreams of becoming an affluent, modern power. Five decades later, and the Inter-Continental is a dilapidated, shrapnel-damaged shell. It has endured civil wars, terrorist attacks, the US occupation, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. But its decaying grandeur still hints at ordinary Afghans' hopes of stability and prosperity. Lyse Doucet, the BBC's Chief International Correspondent, has been staying at the Inter-Continental since 1988. She has spent decades meeting its staff and guests, and listening to their stories. And now, she uses their experiences to offer an evocative history of modern Afghanistan. It is the story of Hazrat, the octogenarian receptionist who for five decades has been witnessing diplomats and journalists, mujahideen and US soldiers, passing through the hotel's doors. It is the story of Abida, the first female chef to work in the Inter-Continental's famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Sadeq, the 24-year-old front-desk worker who personifies the ambitions of a new generation of Afghans. The result is a remarkably vivid account of how ordinary Afghans have experienced half a century of disorder. [Paperback]

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

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno $38
An unnamed narrator who has fled a set of friends she despised, who bring out the very worst in her and each other, finds herself once more sat at their dinner table for a single, hideous evening. Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole — an artist-curator couple — and attended by their pretentious circle. It's the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all. Most of all, however, she despises herself for being lured back to this cavernous apartment, to this hollow, bourgeois social set, for a dinner party that isn't even being thrown in their deceased friend's honour, but in the honour of an up-and-coming actress who is by now several hours late. As the guests sip at their drinks and await the actress's arrival, the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself — and us — with a silent, tender, merciless takedown. [Hardback]
”As observant as a sniper, and just as ruthless, Zoe Dubno in Happiness and Love pulls off an unlikely yet ultimately very successful literary metempsychosis. Bernhard's fierce sarcasm and disappointment resonate very clearly in her voice; despite the distance that separates his 1980s Vienna from her contemporary New York, Dubno shows us — at times comically, at times despairingly — that the superficiality, hypocrisy, and flatness never change.” —Vincenzo Latronico
”Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, Happiness and Love is an ecstatic performance of heightened perception.” —Chris Kraus
>>Read Stella’s review.
>>Cutting wood in New York.
>>The book is ‘based’ on Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes $38
Departure(s) is a work of fiction — but that doesn't mean it's not true. Departure(s) is the story of a man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. It is the story of an elderly Jack Russell called Jimmy, enviably oblivious to his own mortality. It is also the story of how the body fails us, whether through age, illness, accident or intent. And it is the story of how experiences fade into anecdotes, and then into memory. Does it matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it just matter that it mattered enough to be remembered? It begins at the end of life — but it doesn't end there. Ultimately, it's about the only things that ever really mattered — how we find happiness in this life, and when it is time to say goodbye. [Hardback]
”A moving, engaging book. Barnes’s humorous narrative explores the effect of time on love. A rather lovely swansong.” —Independent
”An elegant, thoughtful final book, which considers old age, fate and happiness. It's an arch blend of memoir and make-believe — and rather touching.” —The Times
”A richly layered autofiction. Artfully constructed to seem casually conversational, it braids erudite essayism and fiction, and every line is turned inside out with qualifications.” —Observer
”At a little over 150 pages, Departure(s) is brief but it is not slight and, each time I read it, I thought about it for days afterwards. If this is his [Barnes's] last book, he has given his career a triumphant ending.” —Financial Times
”Disparate elements are bound together by the skilful management of theme and tone. Departure(s) is at once confidently authoritative and tentatively questioning. Barnes assumes a personal relation with his readers, built on the kind of intimacy that cancer's company doesn't provide.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Changing My Mind.

Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and The World by Anne Enright $40
Anne Enright has always been alert to the places where public and private meet, where individual lives are caught by, or alter, the sweep of history. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright's own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. Attention brings Anne Enright's wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright's fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. [Paperback]
”With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world.” —Eimear McBride
”Anne Enright's essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my copy of the book.” —Maggie O'Farrell

The Haunted Wood: A history of childhood reading by Sam Leith $30
Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book? The stories we read as children matter. The best ones are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past — collective and individual, remembered and imagined — and invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of the children's literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations. [Now in paperback]
”Sam Leith has been encyclopedic and forensic in this journey through children's books. It's a joy for anyone who cares or wonders why we have children's literature.” —Michael Rosen
”Scholarly but wholly accessible and written with such love, The Haunted Wood is an utter joy.” —Lucy Mangan
”One of the best surveys of children's literature I've read. It takes a particular sort of sensibility to look at children's literature with all the informed knowledge of a lifetime's reading of 'proper' books, and neither patronise (terribly good for a children's book) nor solemnly over-praise. Sam Leith hits the right spot again and again. The Haunted Wood is a marvel, and I hope it becomes a standard text for anyone interested in literature of any sort.” —Philip Pullman

Whāia te Taniwha: Kōrero from Te Waipounamu edited by Chloe Cull and Karuna Thurlow $30
Taniwha have shaped the land and navigated the waterways of Te Waipounamu for generations. They are shapeshifters, oceanic guides, leaders, ancestors, adversaries, guardians and tricksters who have left their marks on the land around us. Let the twelve Kāi Tahu artists and writers in this new book for rakatahi take you on a journey around the motu as we follow the tales of taniwha, both ancient and new. Weaving together te reo Māori and English, they explore how we can learn from taniwha — and what they can teach us about ourselves and our ever-changing world. Highlights: —A compelling introduction to taniwha for tamariki and rangatahi aged 8 to 15. —Stories located in Te Waipounamu South Island, by Kāi Tahu artists and writers. —Bilingual texts for te reo Māori speakers and learners alike, with a particular emphasis on te reo o Kāi Tahu. —Perfect for use by kaiako and ākonga in both English Medium and Māori Medium education contexts. Contributors: Justice-Manawanui Arahanga-Pryor, Leisa Aumua, Conor Clarke, Lucy Denham, A. J. Manaaki Hope, Meriana Johnsen, Moewai Rauputi Marsh, Waiariki Parata-Taiapa, Andrea Read, Jayda Janet Siyakurima, Ruby Solly, Paris Tainui. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Green Ink by Stephen May $40
David Lloyd George is at Chequers for the weekend with his mistress Frances Stevenson, fretting about the fact that his involvement in selling public honours is about to be revealed by one Victor Grayson. Victor is a bisexual hedonist and former firebrand socialist MP turned secret-service informant. Intent on rebuilding his profile as the leader of the revolutionary Left, he doesn't know exactly how much of a hornet's nest he's stirred up. Doesn't know that this is, in fact, his last day. No one really knows what happened to Victor Grayson — he vanished one night in late September 1920, having threatened to reveal all he knew about the prime minister's involvement in selling honours. Was he murdered by the British government? By enemies in the socialist movement (who he had betrayed in the war)? Did he fall in the Thames drunk? Did he vanish to save his own life, and become an antiques dealer in Kent? Whatever the truth, Green Ink imagines what might have been with brio, humour and humanity. [Hardback]
 “May skilfully orchestrates a large cast of both historical and fictional characters. The novel's period detail is impeccable. One of its chief pleasures is the authorial voice, which, with its maxims on pity, ambition, boredom and so forth, is of an omniscience rarely encountered in contemporary fiction.” —Financial Times
”An idiosyncratic, rather dreamlike novel: it doesn't so much bring history to life as use a clutch of historical figures to showcase the author's own captivatingly offbeat intelligence.” —Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph 
”A vivid and wholly credible recreation of post-Great War London. All is imagined here in convincing and sardonic — and frequently hilarious — detail.” —Robert Edric 
”Stephen May is the spry, sardonic voice of the new historical fiction.” —Hilary Mantel
>>War, trauma, and politics.
>>A firebrand’s last day.
>>On Victor Grayson.

Gaza: The story of a genocide edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro $30
"Genocide destroys cities and claims lives, but it also remakes the psyches of those it spares." The story of genocide belongs first to its survivors. In this urgent and powerful collection, Ahmed Alnaouq recounts the devastating loss of twenty-one family members. Noor Alyacoubi offers a searing account of starvation in Gaza. Mariam Barghouti examines the brutality of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, while Lina Mounzer reports on the aftermath of Israel's simultaneous bombing of Lebanon. Their testimonies, along with those of many others, illuminate the enduring psychological and physical toll of state violence. Gaza: The Story of a Genocide brings together personal testimony, expert analysis, poetry, photography, and frontline reportage to document the full scope of destruction inflicted on the indigenous Palestinian people — their lives, their land, and their future. With illustrations by Joe Sacco and Mona Chalabi, it includes the work of the late poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis, Gaza, on October 20, 2023. Other contributors include Mosab Abu Toha, Susan Abulhawa, Laila Al-Arian, Tareq Baconi, Eman Basher, Omar Barghouti, Yara Eid, Huda J. Fakhreddine, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, Yara Hawari, Maryam Iqbal, Nina Lakhani, Ahmed Masoud, Lina Mounzer, Malaka Shwaikh, Shareef Sarhan, and Mary Turfah. [Paperback]

Hate: The uses of a powerful emotion by Şeyda Kurt $37
Hatred is typically characterised as ugly, destructive and, above all, the political tool and dominant emotion of intransigent right-wingers. But is something important lost in this simplistic depiction? Don't those engaged in anticolonial, feminist, or class struggles — the very people who, in mainstream narratives, are usually portrayed as victims and objects of hate — have just reasons for feeling hatred? Şeyda Kurt, who approaches the topic from both personal and historical angles, challenges the consensual liberal perspective, reframing the exploited and oppressed as vehicles as well as targets of hatred. She weaves together the stories of Jewish avengers resisting German fascism, the Haitian revolutionaries, contemporary abolitionists, and many others, ultimately arriving at the revolution in Syrian Kurdistan and the question of a just peace. Kurt argues that the pursuit of justice is sometimes spurred by destructive impulses and hostility. What happens then to the tenderness we share as human beings? When we allow ourselves to hate, what becomes of the kindness we would bestow upon a world we are striving to protect? Kurt examines strategic hatred as a powerful force driving resistance, abolition, and even, paradoxically perhaps, radical care. [Hardback]
”A brilliant meditation on the relationships between hate, domination, and resistance. Kurt shows how the concept of hate is deployed to stigmatize and discredit anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist resistance, and how liberal moral stances against hate operate to pacify and to justify state violence through appeals to democracy and rule of law. This book is a vital tool for demystifying hate, so that we might see its role in liberation struggles.” —Dean Spade
>>Is hate politically useful?

The Hill in the Dark Grove by Liam Higginson $38
Carwyn and Rhian — the last in a long family line of sheep farmers — are living out a brutal year in their hillside farm, deep in the mountains of Eryri, North Wales. When Carwyn stumbles across a stone circle and some sort of burial mound in one of the fields on their land, he quickly develops an obsession. His wife, Rhian, meanwhile, is confronted with the growing realization that the man with whom she shares her life and home is slowly becoming a frightening stranger. As the harsh mountain winter closes in, Rhian finds herself alone with her increasingly peculiar husband, the mountains, and the looming megalithic stones. The Hill in the Dark Grove is a story of a lost way of life and the lengths we go to to protect what we know. [Paperback]
”Witty, tender, ultimately terrifying. Evocative and deftly done; The Hill in the Dark Grove is a book of echoes, haunted by the sheer vastness of time and landscape, and how they enact upon us and the stories we tell. A celebration of love's persistence, a summoning of ancient lore, a superb debut.” —Kiran Millwood Hargrave
”Liam Higginson is a new talent in Welsh storytelling; atmospheric, chilling and incredibly touching, The Hill in the Dark Grove holds the reader in its arms, and shows us how our stories, our objects and memories, are shaped and held by the land.” —Joshua Jones
”The Hill in the Dark Grove is a sumptuously written, dark meditation on aging, obsolescence, and the brutalising march of time and progress, as well as a chilling folk horror novel. There's something long buried in the mountains of North Wales and within the sheep herders, Carwyn and Rhian, who are economically pushed beyond their limits; Liam Higginson expertly brings it all to the surface.” —Paul Tremblay

The War of Art: A history of artists’ protest in America by Lauren O’Neill-Butler $45
Artists in America have long battled against injustices, believing that art can in fact "do more." The War of Art tells this history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debates of the 1960s to the present. In contrast to the financialized art market and celebrity artists, the book explores the power of collective effort - from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat. Lauren O'Neill-Butler charts the post-war development of artists' protest and connects these struggles to a long tradition of feminism and civil rights activism. The book offers portraits of the key individuals and groups of artists who have campaigned for solidarity, housing, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS awareness, and against Indigenous injustice and the exclusion of women in the art world. This includes: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), David Wojnarowicz's work with ACT UP, Top Value Television (TVTV), Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), fierce pussy, Project Row Houses, and Nan Goldin's Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN). Based upon in-depth oral histories with the key figures in these movements, and illustrated throughout, The War of Art is an essential corrective to the idea that art history excludes politics. [Hardback]
”A wonderfully smart, readable and informative study of a topic that matters to almost everyone interested in art, which is more than enough to recommend it. But gems like the luminous chapter on Agnes Denes and the eye-opening revisionary discussion of her relation to Smithson make it something even better. Essential reading.” —Walter Benn Michaels

Ready, Steady, School! by Marianne Dubuc $48
A wonderful large-format search-and-find book. Next year, Pom will be starting school. But a year's too long to wait when you're excited. Today, Pom has decided to visit some friends by dropping in on different animal schools. At Little Leapers, the rabbits are learning how to read, write and count. At Bulrushes, the frogs are creating beautiful artwork. At F is for Foxtrot, the foxes are playing different sports.. What if Pom's dream school was a little bit of all that? One thing's for sure: school is an amazing adventure! This book is perfect for those keen to start school and for those who might need a little reassurance. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

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

Delirious New Lynn, or, Portage and Euphoria, or, The Carryover: A guidebook by Oscar Mardell $35
Delirious New Lynn is the record of an obsession with an unnavigable backwater, a voracious drift down various culs-de-sac, an anti-psychogeography, a map of the schisms between mind and place, a poetics of trash, a rummage through the wastelands of Neoliberalism, a scavenger-hunt for meaning and nothingness, coincidence and randomness, beauty and ugliness, comedy and tragedy, comfort and horror, magnificence and absurdity, and spirituality too. Above all, it is a profusion of lists and digressions. This new book from the author of Great Works will have you in intellectual stitches as it snidely nails the Auckland suburb (and so much else about life in these times and on these shores). [Paperback]
>>Read an extract.
>>Look inside.

The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez (translated from French by Alex Niemi) $48
Like Beckett's novels or Kafka's stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim's online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. [Paperback]
 "Reading this book feels like falling into a whirlpool: it's inescapable." —Maggie Lange, W Magazine
"Vazquez has created a unique and enduring novel. Something hard and real and tangible glitters amid the vapour of text and image she describes." —Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review
"Are the kids ok? Are the elders? Are the gods? Are the dead? In this mesmeric novel, loneliness and the (online) community, language and image, the immediate and the mediated, violence and care construct a tender, precarious microzone called intimacy. A lumbar puncture of a book, a golden strain." —Joyelle McSweeney
"It's a rigorously unsettling reading experience, without plot, tension, or character development. But the details and countless vignettes deliver an immense range of emotion. Grotesquely inventive and amusing, like a corner torn from a Hieronymus Bosch painting." —Kirkus
"They say a truly great author can write about anything and make it interesting, and with The Endless Week Laura Vazquez proves that true on every page. If you're in search of an ultra-contemporary novel that shatters all the rules with inimitable humor and style to spare, look no further — she's arrived." —Blake Butler
>>Inside out experience.

Sister Europe by Nell Zink $65
As a Berlin night draws in around the pristine glass exterior of the Hotel Interconti, a ragtag group of friends, family, and potential lovers find themselves frustrated. By promise or threat, they have all gathered at a lavish celebration of an elderly author's venerable career. But dinner is delayed, the speeches are a drag and the gang — a young trans teen and her father; an ageing publisher and his flakey date; a dog, a troubled heiress and an Arab Prince — begin to feel the pinch of boredom, hunger and horniness. Together they will make their bid for freedom, and will soon embark on an exhilarating odyssey through the city's shadow and light. Sophisticated, sexy and exquisitely funny, Sister Europe is the remarkable new novel from one of the most singular, brilliant writers working today: a vivid tale of growing up, growing old and getting down. [Hardback]
"To stay out late in Zink's world, loitering, is a pleasure. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality-a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
"This sly, sprightly novel provides a distraction from the news while the news is all over it. One of the pleasures of Sister Europe is that it's thoroughly up-to-date but still shaped in the timeless way of Wodehousian comedy of errors." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Zink is one of the most humane writers we've got, and one of the best. As ever, Zink is funny in a way that requires careful observation and precision. The night narrated here feels like the kind of time outside of time in which classical comedies take place — a liminal space in which characters experience transformations impossible in the everyday world. Here, some characters find each other, some find their way home, and some get a bit closer to finding themselves." —Kirkus Review
”Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.” —Jonathan Franzen
”Zink writes with a joyful recklessness that makes her one of the freshest talents around.” —The Guardian
>>Not entirely sure.
>>Connecting the dots.
>>At the back.
>>Somehow connected.

Books: A manifesto, Or, How to build a library by Ian Patterson $50
This is a book about books, about the subversive power of reading and the strange, enduring magic of books as objects. Ever since childhood, books have been at the centre of Ian Patterson's life, as a poet, teacher, translator, bookseller, and collector. As he constructs the last of many libraries, he makes an impassioned case for the radical importance of reading in our lives — from Proust to Jilly Cooper, from golden-age detective novels to avant-garde poetry. Wise, irreverent and exhilaratingly wide-ranging, Books: A Manifesto reminds us that poems know things that we might not yet know ourselves, urges us to seek out the puzzles alive in the art of translation and celebrates the singular elasticity of the 'bookshop minute'. But even more than this, the book insists on reading not as a luxury but a necessary part of reality: we live within language, and when we think, it's with the tools that reading gives us. Our time of cultural and political crisis demands more than books — but without them, and without the breadth of knowledge, sense of history, awareness of alternatives and hope for the future they offer, things will not get better. At once a primer for enriching your own library and a manifesto for why that matters, this book is an invitation to a deeper, richer world of thought and feeling — and a reminder of just how much books matter. [Hardback]
”A bibliophile's autobiography, a supremely generous instruction in reading and collecting, a short history of antiquarian bookselling, a celebration of unserious pleasures and a polemic for the most serious ones — Books: A Manifesto is all of this and more. Of course Patterson hasn't read everything: he's reread it, bought and sold it a few times, might even have translated it, and has profound and genial thoughts.” —Brian Dillon

Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba (translated from Japanese by Avery Fischer Udagawa), illustrated by Mihi Satake $23
Kazu knows something odd is going on when he sees a girl in a white kimono sneak out of his house in the middle of the night was he dreaming? Did he see a ghost? Things get even stranger when he shows up to school the next day to see the very same figure sitting in his classroom. No one else thinks it's weird, and, even though Kazu doesn't remember ever seeing her before, they all seem convinced that the ghost-girl Akari has been their friend for years! When Kazu's summer project to learn about Kimyo Temple draws the meddling attention of his mysterious neighbour Ms. Minakami and his secretive new classmate Akari, Kazu soon learns that not everything is as it seems in his hometown. Kazu discovers that Kimyo Temple is linked to a long forgotten legend about bringing the dead to life, which could explain Akari's sudden appearance is she a zombie or a ghost? Kazu and Akari join forces to find and protect the source of the temple's power. An unfinished story in a magazine from Akari's youth might just hold the key to keeping Akari in the world of the living, and it's up to them to find the story's ending and solve the mystery as the adults around them conspire to stop them from finding the truth. [Paperback]
”This imaginative tale, enchantingly written and charmingly illustrated by veteran Japanese creators for young people, has a timeless feel. Its captivating blend of humor and mystery is undergirded with real substance that will provoke deeper contemplation. Udagawa's translation naturally and seamlessly renders the text completely accessible to non-Japanese readers. An instant classic filled with supernatural intrigue and real-world friendship. This charming story is both a layered, profound reflection on living life with purpose and a funny, suspenseful book with all the hallmarks of classic middle-grade literature.” —Kirkus Reviews

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt $36
”Maman was exigeante — there is no English word-and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.” Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge's, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York? A testament to the power of false friends. [Glazed hardback]
"A staggeringly intelligent examination into the nature of truth, love, respect, beauty and trust. This is that rare thing, or merle blanc, as maman might say: a perfect book. I've read it four times, which you can do between breakfast and lunch." —Nicola Shulman, The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a short, sharp sliver of a story-only 64 pages — but every single word is pitch perfect. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a shot of ice-cold vodka-Belvedere or Grey Goose only, of course." —Lucy Scholes, Prospect
"A wonderfully sideways take on the complex intersections between class, wealth and power — intersections that invariably favour those who have most of them already." -- Alex Clark, The Observer
"The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt's best and funniest book so far — quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading." —Heather Cass White, The Times Literary Supplement

If You Come to Earth by Sophie Blackall $45
Inspired by the thousands of children she has met in travels around the word for Save the Children and UNICEF, two-time Caldecott winner Sophie Blackall has crafted an ambitious yet child-accessible book of ... well ... everything. Simultaneously funny and touching, it is a call to each of us to take care of both the Earth and each other, and to celebrate the many way that people live their lives on earth. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz by Anne Sebba $40
In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a hurriedly assembled band that would play marching music to other inmates, forced labourers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day. While still living amid the most brutal and dehumanising of circumstances, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances of an officer's favourite piece of music. It was the only entirely female orchestra in any of the Nazi prison camps and, for almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra was to save their lives. What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care. From Alma Rose, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member, Sebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestra, its members and the response of other prisoners for the very first time. [Paperback]

The Ant Rebellion by Toprak Işık (translated from Turkish by Alvin Parmar), illustrated by Sedat Girgin $26
Ants are famous for their hard work, but some ants prefer exploiting others rather than doing it themselves. One day the warrior ants discover the nest of the farmer ants and set out to make the farmers their slaves — but they don’t count on the spirit of resistance from the farmers. The Ant Rebellion is a universal allegory about freedom, resistance and change, featuring memorable characters from the loving couple Honey and Glasswing to the hilarious beetle Loafer. [Paperback]

In Venezuela by Michael Palin $45
In February 2025, Michael Palin travelled to Venezuela to get a sense of what life is like in one of South America's most culturally rich, vibrant but also troubled nations. In the journal he kept during his trip he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited, the landscapes he travelled through, and the people he met. Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country. [Hardback]

Homegrown Fruit: A practical guide by Kath Irvine and Jason Ross $58
Kath and Jason take you step by step to create a naturally, healthy orchard that thrives with minimal effort. You’ll learn how to choose the right varieties, plan a productive layout, build a living soil, assess tree health, and confidently prune, train, and care for your trees year-round. Real-world examples, sample plans and down-to-earth advice provide simple, practical solutions for gardens of every shape, size and climate. This inspiring, accessible book is perfect for beginners setting up a new orchard, busy people who want homegrown fruit without the fuss, and seasoned growers seeking deeper knowledge. Kath and Jason have over 25 years experience designing and managing home orchards in a diversity of environments across Aotearoa. The book's focus is on creating a healthy setup and choosing well-suited varieties. From this solid foundation fruit trees flourish, care is easy, there are a lot fewer pests and diseases and, most importantly, growing is fun! [Paperback]

Withstand summer with a new book! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Into the Weeds by Lydia Davis $31
When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that the question makes her uncomfortable. Maybe she would rather not know. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why. In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for pleasure: the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn't exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are writers: to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended. Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, patient inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new. [Hardback]
"Reporting from the slipstream of her reading life, Davis offers less a new way to think than perhaps an old one, pushing back against mechanisation and the collapse of context by reframing reading in the most particular and human terms." —David L. Ulin, The Atlantic
>>On the art of observation.
>>Also by Lydia Davis.

The Earth Is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino (translated from Italian by Shaun Whiteside) $38
A haunting novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive — yet its rumbles are heard. Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside. The pervading mood of nostalgia and melancholy works in stark contrast with the inevitability of the impending catastrophe of the landslide that threatens to obliterate their world forever. [Paperback]
”What people: so vibrant and vital, if ghosts can be described as such. What a place: precarious yet utterly certain in Carmen Pellegrino’s vivid, poetic rendering. And what a book: melancholy, elegant, original and in its own particular way, totally seductive.” —Wendy Erskine

The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi (translated from Italian by Jamie Richards) $38
Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself--by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love. Made up of Rosa's observations, reflections, and recipes, the novel tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother's age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter's inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous. And there’s wonderful food on every page! [Paperback with French flaps]
”A hypnotic theatre of cruelty and tenderness in which the protagonist and narrator Rosa and her friends make vacuum cleaners buzz, exhibit the most lavish forms of desire, desire each other, and desperately, and above all make food, the food which is really the nourishment of the book itself, an obsession formalized here in something like a hundred recipes spread over just under two hundred pages.” —Francesco Durante, Corriere del Mezzogiorno
”The Neapolitan-Milanese Castaldi does not use punctuation, lets thought flow unchained, because life flows like water, and the search for one's identity, always painful, always exhausting, manifests even in our food, the passions in our mouths and hearts.” —Rolling Stone
>>Narrative is only partly recognisable as thoughts.
>>Eating time.
>>Syntax and effect.

Granta 172: Badlands $37
This issue traverses inhospitable landscapes, from troubled childhoods to drone-infested Ukraine. Featuring reportage from William T. Vollman and memoir from Annie Ernaux. Fiction by Brittany Newell, Leopold O’Shea, Natasha Stagg, Stephanie Wambugu and Diane Williams. Poetry by Nasim Luczaj, Paul Muldoon, Sharon Olds and Frederick Seidel. Plus, photography by Sana Badri, Joel Meyerowitz (introduced by George Prochnik) and Cian Oba-Smith (introduced by Julián Herbert). [Paperback]

From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams $28
It's the west of Scotland in the 1950s. New houses are going up. Factories are opening. But Dunky Logan, a 15-year-old brought up in a tenement flat in working-class Kilcaddie, is ditching school to be a labourer on a local farm. Dead set on becoming a hard case, he wants to work shoulder to shoulder with so-called real men. Irish Catholic Mary O'Donnell arrives at the farmhouse as the new maid. She is pregnant — no boyfriend in sight. But she's smart, and she has a plan to get herself up in the world. As Dunky is swallowed up by a vicious cycle of violence, betrayal, and booze, Mary becomes entangled in a savage family feud. Short-listed for the 1969 (first!) Booker Prize. [Paperback]
”An elegy to ordinary lives. A forgotten classic entirely deserving of a place in the canon of great social realism novels of the twentieth century. A raw, unsparing tale of coming of age, of masculinity in crisis, of farm workers holding on as post-war Britain encroaches upon them. A masterpiece of time and place that looks you square in the eye and demands to be read.” —Douglas Stuart
”A devastating study of 1950s Scottish adolescence by one of the most consummate stylists of the whole post-war era. From Scenes Like These is a genuine lost classic just waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.” —DJ Taylor

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty $38
Abigail and her brother Benjamin have always been close. To celebrate his birthday, Abigail hires a grand old house and gathers their friends together for a murder mystery party. As the night goes on, they drink too much and play games. Relationships are forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses someone they shouldn't, someone else's heart is broken. In the morning, everyone wakes up — except Benjamin. Suddenly everything is not quite what it seems. An eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin's killer. The house now has a butler, a gardener and a housekeeper. This is a locked-room mystery, and everyone is a suspect. As Abigail attempts to fathom her brother's unexpected death in a world that has been turned upside down, she begins to wonder whether perhaps the true mystery might have been his life. [Paperback]
”Louise Hegarty's genre-splicing debut is a treat — clever, confident, and always surprising, a mystery story that ingeniously escapes the locked room of the genre to take on the biggest questions of life and death.” —Paul Murray
”Dazzling, formally subversive, brimming with compassion, Fair Play explodes the conventions of a mystery in order to confront us with the genuinely mysterious. An emotional ambush of a novel, this book will delight readers — then it will haunt them.” —Colin Walsh

Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood $38
Catch-22 on speed and set in the Middle East, Vulture is a fast-paced satire of the war news industry and its moral blind spots, and a tragi-comic coming-of-age novel. An ambitious young journalist, Sara is sent to cover a war from the Beach Hotel in Gaza. The four-star hotel is a global media hub, promising safety and generator-powered internet, with hotel staff catering tirelessly to the needs of the world's media, even as their own homes and families are under threat. Sara is determined to launch her career as a star correspondent. So, when her fixer Nasser refuses to set up the dangerous story she thinks will win her a front page, she turns instead to Fadi, the youngest member of a powerful militant family. Driven by the demons of her entitled yet damaging childhood, Sara will stop at nothing to prove herself in this war, even if it means bringing disaster upon those around her. Greenwood's debut novel brings readers deep into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with audacity and humour depicts the media's complicity in this ongoing tragedy. [Paperback]
"Brave, funny and beautifully written." * Martin McDonagh, writer and director *
"In a debut redolent of Graham Greene, Phoebe Greenwood brings to life — in all their cynicism and all their humanity — the bullying, bragging, brilliant characters we rely on to bring us the news." —Benjamin Moser
>>Why did it take the world so long to be outraged?

Slow Down or Die: The economics of degrowth by Timothée Parrique $40
One of the most ingrained beliefs of our age is that perpetual economic growth is the solution to most, if not all, of society's problems. Parrique challenges this myth, demonstrating how producing more won't solve climate change, poverty, or inequality. In fact, our obsession with growth is accelerating social and ecological collapse. Parrique proposes a different vision — a ‘post-growth’ economy, where we look beyond the vagaries of GDP and measure our economies through how well we provide for each other. Instead of infinitely accumulating wealth, our goal must be a just, equitable, and sustainable society. [Paperback]
”A clear vision for a profoundly different economy.” —Irish Times
>>How to blow up an economy.
>>Slow is the new cool.

A Counter of Moons: Living with the unimaginable by Iona Winter $30
In 2020, Iona Winter’s son Reuben died by suicide. Looking for solace and understanding from others’ stories, she found there were few available. A Counter of Moons candidly shares Iona’s experiences, and her reflections challenge widespread ideas about how to deal with grief. At times raw and confronting, at others introspective and tender, this book ultimately speaks about the coexistence of love and pain. It aims to start conversations about suicide bereavement in Aotearoa, to give words to an often wordless experience. [Paperback]

Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town by Li Chen $22
Detective Beans is back to solve all the mysteries that you need solved, and even the ones you don't need solved. He's that good. In between playing Scrabble, having sleepovers and trips to the beach, there's always time for crime solving. Whether it's who ate Mum's donuts, who has lost their handbag in the park, which pigeon stole King Chip, or even a burgled diamond ring, Beans is ready for anything. He's so ready that he's even starting a detective school — if he can find any students… A very enjoyable Aotearoa graphic novel for children. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
>>The Case of the Missing Hat.

The Experiment by Rebecca Stead $22
Nathan never understood what was 'fun' about secrets, probably because he's always had to keep a very big one, even from his best friend, Victor. Although he appears to be a typical intermediate-school kid, Nathan learned at an early age that his family is from another planet, and he's part of an experiment to work out how to behave like a human and blend in. But the experiment suddenly seems to be going wrong. Some of the other experimenters, including Nathan's first crush, Izzy, are disappearing without a word. After his family is called back to the mothership, Nathan begins to question everything he's been taught to believe about who he is and why he's on Earth. Can he, Victor and Izzy uncover the truth? The Experiment is a fast-paced adventure — with aliens — that asks universal questions about how we figure out who we want to be, whether it's ever too late to change, and the importance of friendship. [Paperback]

New books for a new year! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Helm by Sarah Hall $38
Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind — a subject of folklore and wonder, who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time. This is Helm's life story, formed from the chronicles of those the wind enchanted: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate it, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture it - and the farmer's daughter who fell in love. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by measuring instruments, alone in her observation hut, fears the end is nigh. Rich, wild and vital, Helm is the elemental tale of a unique life force — and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other. [Paperback]
”Hall makes language shimmer and burn.” —Damon Galgut
”No one writes like Sarah Hall.” —Sarah Perry
”I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers.” —Benjamin Myers
”A wondrous, elemental novel from a writer of show-stopping genius.” —Guardian
”Hall's writing is alchemical, magnificent, divine, bodily. Here are new ways to understand what it feels like to be human. Here are books to cherish. I lay myself at the altar of everything Hall writes.” —Daisy Johnson
>>The wind was like a childhood friend.
>>Slow motion.

Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje $28
Spanning across twenty years and one life-altering summer in Croatia, Slanting Towards the Sea is at once an unforgettable love story and a powerful exploration of what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself. Ivona divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago. They met as students at the turn of the millennium, when newly democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise. But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguished Ivona's dreams one after another — and a devastating secret forced her to set him free. Now Vlaho is remarried and a proud father of two, while Ivona's life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. Bewildered by life's disappointments, she finds solace in reconnecting with Vlaho and is welcomed into his family by his spirited new wife, Marina. But when a new man enters Ivona's life, the carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved.
Set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline, Slanting Towards the Sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love. [Paperback with French flaps]
”With illuminating prose and gripping storytelling, Lidija Hilje ascertains her place as an exciting new voice in world's literature. Slanting Towards the Sea is a love letter to Croatia and to anyone who dares to dream.” —Nguyen Phan Que Mai
”Oh, what a beautiful book this is — deeply felt, humane, gorgeously written. Hilje's prose is positively hypnotic — I sunk in and didn't want to come up for air.” —Claire Lombardo
>>Trying and failing to write a universal story.

The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof (translated from Danish by Caroline Waight) $38
A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story. A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger called T. He offered her a suitcase full of money and lavish gifts in exchange for total control of her body. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death. But at the last moment, she aborted the treacherous game and fled. Now in London, she reflects on the forces — financial and social — that led her to the brink of destruction, and wonders what it would take to believe in love again. Frank, intimate and dazzling entertaining, The Devil Book takes us from Copenhagen to London to the inside of a mental institution, as well as a fancy apartment block, this unmissable stand-alone novel is the follow up to the critically-acclaimed Money to Burn. [Hardback]
”Covering much of the same ground as her last novel — the interrelation between money, sex, violence and gender, capital's power to console or benumb — The Devil Book shares the same bristling, didactic prose, but with a welcome barbed humour. a lacerating literary harnessing of rage at a decrepit system, held together by Nordenhof's defiantly unique voice.” —Financial Times
>>Writing as a political act.
>>Money to Burn.

Portrait of an Island on Fire by Ariel Saramandi $45
A deeply moving and revelatory reading experience, the essays collected in Portrait of an Island on Fire form a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history. Unceasing in its critiques of racist, patriarchal abuses of power, in its unpicking of the ills at the core of contemporary Mauritian society and their roots, the collection is a milestone in thinking about the lasting social and political effects of colonialism and how they play out at the level of government policy, the handling of environmental issues, in schools, in hospitals, in families, in language. For all its well-placed anger, Ariel Saramandi’s sparklingly intelligent and intimate debut is full of love and momentum – a push for a better future for Mauritius and, by extension, for the world. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ariel Saramandi's interweaving essay collection presents a courageous, stringent and mesmerizing portrait of the island, her home, and the social and political effects of colonialism. She's a great writer.” —Wendy Erskine, The Observer
”Portrait of an Island on Fire is a fascinating look at Mauritius, a personal account of a homeland told with rage, rigour and love. Saramandi brilliantly, subtly teases out the threads of Mauritian history, politics and culture, honouring both the particularities of this unique place and showing the troubled connections — rapacious capitalism, racism, creeping authoritarianism, right-wing paranoia — that seem to stretch across the whole of our fragile planet. This is a beautifully written book of deep knowledge, righteous anger and fierce hope.'“ —Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
”Ariel Saramandi is a courageous and mesmerising new voice, a chronicler of contemporary Mauritius whose writing refracts the influences of her Mauritian compatriots, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah and Shenaz Patel in French, Lindsey Collen in English, in a voice which is wholly her own. Portrait of an Island on Fire unpicks the knots of Mauritius's entangled histories — of plantation slavery, of indentured labour, of colonisation, of communalism and patriarchy — laying out the threads which make up her own history of ancestral oppression and structure her lived experience of privilege and pain; which form the fabric of contemporary capitalist Mauritius, and its particular intersections of race, class, gender, and language - its politics - and its particular forms of the white supremacy, anti-Blackness and toxic masculinity acted out on the bodies of those without power the world over. Saramandi is laser-focused in her rage, joyful in both her refusal to look away, and in her insistence on what sustains her: writing, motherhood, her marriage, friendships, community - and the beauty of her island.” —Natasha Soobramanien, co-author of Diego Garcia

False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez (translated by Natasha Wimmer) $37
What is the difference between an immigrant, someone living in exile, and a refugee? The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere. In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis. With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, False War is an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation. [Paperback with French flaps] 
”Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s second novel is a hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters’ rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration. False War is a rich and capacious novel that has much to say about our contemporary moment.” — Arin Keeble, Guardian
”Álvarez has not fashioned a linear story, but braided these threads together into a polyphonic motet of voices that are alternately sardonic, weary and, above all, angry. It is a tribute to Wimmer’s peerless translation that she effortlessly captures their range, cadence, humour and rage. False War is a poignant study of exile and exclusion, one that avoids the easy tropes of nostalgia and sentimentality: for Álvarez, exile is not an escape but a condition – permanent, internal and profoundly personal.” —Frank Wynne, Irish Times
”I was blown away by this novel. Nothing in the story is reducible. Its formal ambition is met by its execution, and the effect is staggering. Álvarez is an immense writer, a generational talent, and this, for me, is a generation-defining work.” — Michael Magee

Good Girl by Aria Aber $37
In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.  Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani. And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged. [Paperback]
”Aber touches the heart of a young woman struggling to find herself in the heat of clashing cultures ... You'll be immediately arrested by the haunting beauty of her work and the way desire pushes against the seams of despair.” —Washington Post
”At heart, the novel is about the allure of freedom and the estrangement from others that is the cost of both exile and artistic creation. Aber writes with the masterful precision of an archivist. Exile, migration, displacement: These will splinter even the most solid self. But out of the shards, it is possible to make art, as Nila finally realizes — and as Aber has done in this touching novel.” —The Atlantic
”Captures the ache of Muslim girlhood and the vertigo of never feeling quite at home. Aber ingests the millennial playbook and spits out something that happens to be more interesting.” —Vulture
>>Identity and exile.

My First Ikura: A story for growing girls and their whānau by Qiane Matata-Sipu and Isobel Joy Te Aho-White $30
Rooted in te ao Māori, My First Ikura is a beautifully illustrated children’s book that follows a young girl’s first period, guided by the support of her whānau. More than a story of physical change, it celebrates womanhood as a sacred rite of passage. Addresses first menstruation through a Māori cultural framework. Emphasises ceremony, family support and ancestral wisdom — also includes a specially written karakia for families to learn together. Nicely illustrated and produced. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Crucible of Light: Islam and the forging of Europe from the 8th to the 21st century by Elizabeth Drayson $45
Drayson pulls together the epic interwoven history of the Muslim and Christian worlds over an 800-year span, taking in the conquest and re-conquest of Spain, the meteoric rise of Arabo-Norman Sicily, the Ottoman renaissance of the 16th to 18th centuries, the ebb and flow of Balkan history and the fate of contested islands like Cyprus and Malta, with their very different outcomes. Focusing on major turning points, individual stories and key places, from Mecca to Cordoba, from Damascus to Venice, and from Vienna to Istanbul, Drayson tracks unifying themes — classical learning preserved in Islamic libraries, the enduring influence of Moorish architecture and design, the food, the goods traded and the continuing discourse between individuals and cultures that has permeated Europe's history and shaped its borders. Drayson also explores the growing dialogue between Muslims and Christians across Europe today, a dialogue prefigured in the history of medieval and early modern Europe, in which harmony and enlightenment rise above perennial conflicts. These ideas challenge the way contemporary European identity is defined and point to the vital impact of Islamic civilisation upon the continent. Surprisingly few people are aware of how much Europe owes to its Islamic heritage except via pockets of tourism, and this book aims to correct that while exploring the endless complexities that this vexed relationship throws up. At a time when Islam is so narrowly identified with terrorism and migration in Europe it is a necessary corrective. [Paperback]

Taco (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado $23
Taco is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography. Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Physics for Cats: Science cartoons by Tom Gauld $38
What happens to a cat who goes through a wormhole? Find out why every scientist worth their sodium chloride has a Tom Gauld cartoon taped to their electron microscope. This new batch of hilarious gags will be as important to every self-respecting scientist as a lab coat and goggles and oversize rubber gloves. Find out what the hadron's news alert about CERN says! Everyone asks, "What is dark matter?" and "Where is dark matter?" but do they ever take the time to ask, "How is dark matter?" Based all on previous data, we can predict with a 99.99% certainty that you will either laugh, guffaw, chortle or snort (we don't have a large enough sample set to be able to say which particular type of mirth you will experience). [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

We Are Your Children: A history of LGBTQ+ activism by David Roberts $65
A gorgeously illustrated, accessible celebration of queer activism, by the creator of the award-winning Suffragette, David Roberts. With an afterword by Juno Dawson. Touching on major moments in the story of the fight for LGBTQ+ rights including the Stonewall Uprising, the first Gay Pride Rally and the dazzling history of drag and the ballroom scene, We Are Your Children is a wide-ranging and inclusive account of a multifaceted movement, with detailed and characterful colour artwork. This book showcases figures from queer history like Harvey Milk, Julian Hows, Carla Toney, Crystal LaBeija, We Wha, Vincent Jones, Marsha P. Johnson, Alan Turing, Sylvia Rivera and many more. From the secret slang adopted by gay Londoners in the 60s, to the decades of sit-ins and marches, there are countless fascinating stories to be told: stories of resistance, friendship, love, fear, division, unity and astonishing perseverance in the face of discrimination and oppression. Encyclopedic in scope, this will expand anyone’s knowledge and understanding. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

It is not too late to get your books before Christmas — either as gifts or for your own summer reading. We advise the following cut-offs:
Urban delivery: high confidence: Monday 22nd, 3PM / possible: Tuesday 23th, 3PM
Rural delivery: high confidence: Friday 19th, 3PM / possible: Monday 22nd, 3PM
Collection from our door: you can collect books on weekdays 10—5 until Tuesday 23th, and then a brief window on Wednesday 24th: 9—11

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton $33
Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight; acutely aware of the clock: this is a swimmer's state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins an Ontario township swim team with her brother, she finds an affinity for its rhythms — and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice. Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigour and determination, routine and competition, pairing together contemplative essays and paintings. Vivid details of an aquatic life appear: adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure though her relationship to it becomes more relaxed. In these elegant and potent meditations, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment. A delightful book, filled with Shapton’s own artworks and photographs of her swimsuit collection. [New paperback edition]
”Expresses what it's like to be haunted by the person one used to be, and the search for how that person exists in the present. Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity, ruefulness, intelligence, and grace.” —Sheila Heti
>>Look inside!

Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka (translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) $28
In the dying days of the War, children Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter, and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But, as their suffering becomes a constant companion, so do the lights of the fireflies — shining from the bomber planes, and the insects glowing by the lake at night. This unforgettable semi-autobiographical tale was written by Akiyuki Nosaka as an apology to his young sister, who died of malnutrition in the period after the firebombing, and won him the Naoki Prize, cementing his place in the Japanese cultural canon. Published here for the first time as a standalone story, Grave of the Fireflies illuminates the untold sorrows of ordinary people who lived in the shadow of war. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>The story was made into a memorable anime film.

A Room above a Shop by Anthony Shapland $33
From a new voice in Welsh literature, an atmospheric and poignant story of a relationship between two small-town Valleys men during the late 1980s. When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family's ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above — the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip. Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut. [Hardback]
”It was a joy to read, such a tender story, the finespun prose and meticulous description.” — Sara Baume
”An atmospheric portrayal of gay, working-class life in a South Wales Valley, to read A Room Above a Shop is to feel held within the hands of a master craftsman in control of his form. I dare anyone to read this and not feel the ache of M and B's story, their solitude and their desire.” —Joshua Jones"
“There's a moving uncertainty, a vulnerability on the page that allows the reader to hear, and to listen. There's a quiet, brave strength in that.” —Cynan Jones
>>Landing in a scene, writing yourself out.

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock $37
Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism. In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers — Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz — who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatisation of public space, as she navigates two very different landscapes — an earlier, less atomised America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. [Paperback with French flaps]
”In Greyhound, Pocock takes us on an epic road trip through American landscapes, through urban dreams and nightmares. Along the way, she asks: how can our material comfort coexist with the impoverishment of nature? How much degradation do we have to witness before we change our way of living? With an exquisite and beautifully reflective prose, Pocock explores a heart of darkness, and expresses a deep desire and need to connect with the earth. It is a wonderful and vivid text from one of our most important ecofeminist writers.” —Xiaolu Guo

The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun $30
Into the world of 1950s Ireland — a lushly green, windswept landscape studded with holy wells and the decaying country houses of a vanished ruling class — arrives Ithell Colquhoun. An occultist and a surrealist painter, Colquhoun's travels around the island are guided by her artist's eye and her feeling for the world beyond our own, as well as her spikily humorous view of the people she meets. We encounter faeries and pagan rituals, ruined churches and Celtic splendour, rowdy bohemians and Anglo-Irish landowners fallen on hard times, as the author carouses through Dublin and tramps the hills of Connemara in this classic travelogue. Through her unique perceptions we discover a land that is fiercely alive and compelling. It is a place where the wind cries, the stones tell old tales and the mountains watch over the roads and those who travel on them. By intuiting the eerie magic of Ireland, Colquhoun offers up a land of myth and legend, stripped of its modern signs, at the same time offering herself to the reader in this portrait of the artist as a young woman. Richly visual and full of sly wit, this is an account of Ireland as only Colquhoun could see it, a land where myth and magic meet wind and rain, and the song of the secret kingdom is heard on city streets. [Paperback]
>>Also available: The Living Stones: Cornwall.

Against Identity: The wisdom of escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas $50
Modern life encourages us to pursue the perfect identity. Whether we aspire to become the best lawyer or charity worker, life partner or celebrity influencer, we emulate exemplars that exist in the world — hoping it will bring us happiness. But this often leads to a complex game of envy and pride. We achieve these identities but want others to imitate us. We disagree with those whose identities contradict ours — leading to polarisation and even violence. And yet when they thump against us, we are ashamed to ring hollow. In Against Identity, philosopher Alexander Douglas seeks an alternative wisdom. Searching the work of three thinkers — ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, Dutch Enlightenment thinker Benedict de Spinoza, and 20th Century French theorist René Girard — he explores how identity can be a spiritual violence that leads us away from truth. Through their worlds and radically different cultures, we discover how, at moments of historical rupture, our hunger for being grows: and yet, it is exactly these times when we should make peace with our indeterminacy and discover the freedom of escaping our selves. [Hardback]
”A profound meditation upon the way we perceive ourselves and the pits we frequently fall into, either as individuals or as groups, from the schoolyard to the nation state. Against Identity is revelatory, written with singular clarity and granite purpose, using little-known philosophies to think better and live with less turmoil, self-torture and aggression. In times of pessimism and chaos, it is a welcome voice of optimism and possibility.” —Richard Whatmore
”A philosophically rigorous yet impassioned critique of identity as both metaphysical error and social pathology. What the book offers is not an ethic of self-expression but a practice of disidentification: a way of letting go that is neither defeatist nor escapist, but attentive to the costs of identity and the possibilities that open up when we cease to grasp. Against Identity is generous, incisive, and quietly radical.” —Christine Tan

Two Lights: Walking at dawn and dusk on a turning planet by James Roberts $28
With acuity and insight, James Roberts paints a portrait of a life and its landscapes, creating connections with wild creatures and places, from swans in the Cambrian Mountains to wolves in the Pacific Northwest. By walking at dawn and dusk, in the two lights of awakening and deepening — through the stripped, windswept hills of Wales, and the jungles and savannahs of Africa — he navigates from a soul-stripping sense of loss towards hope in the future. In the presence of wild creatures he finds a way back to life. [Paperback]
”A beautifully written, wonderfully tender — and ultimately hopeful — journey through all that we stand to lose on this ever-more-challenged Earth.” —Sharon Blackie
”Deeply personal yet always outward looking, James Roberts delights in the world he discovers about him. Yet he also trembles, because he understands like winter light, that world is diminished... and diminishing. Two Lights reveals why all of us should be writers.” —Robert Minhinnick

French Windows by Antoine Lauraine (translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie) $28
Nathalia Guitry is an enigma that psychotherapist Doctor Faber can't solve. A photographer who can't take photographs since witnessing a murder, she is self-assured, self-aware, and seemingly impervious to his usually effective techniques. He hasn't been able to stop thinking about her since she walked into his consulting room and shattered his predictable professional routine. Desperate to break through Nathalia's uncrackable façade, he proposes something unusual: she'll write him a story about each resident of the building opposite, moving up floor by floor. But as the therapy progresses, he finds his own mask beginning to slip as he becomes consumed by her tales. How does she know so much about these strangers' lives? And what's waiting on the final floor? [Paperback]
”Admirably concise; intriguing, comic and poignant by turns, this is a sheer delight.” — The Guardian

State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg $38
It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button. Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself. A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction. [Paperback]
"The novel form may be a 'pretty outdated technology’, as the narrator laments. But once a writer like van den Berg gets its creaky gears turning, it can still do what it's always done best: reflect our selves back at us and into the world, in all their wildness and weirdness." —Ruth Franklin, The New York Times
"With exquisite prose, smart lines on every page, a building sense of growing strangeness tinged with dread, and surprises all the way to the end, State of Paradise might be van den Berg's best novel so far — and that's saying a lot. A narrative that constantly feels like its dancing on the border between fiction and nonfiction despite all the weirdness it contains, this book is at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida's psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don't miss it." —Gabino Iglesias
>>Haunted by the old self.
>>Merging autofiction with speculative fiction.
>>This is not the novel its author set out to write.

I Was a Rat! Or, The Scarlet Slippers [and] The Scarecrow and His Servant by Philip Pullman, illustrated by Peter Bailey $37
”I was a rat!” So insists a scruffy boy named Roger. Maybe it's true, but what is he now? A terrifying monster running wild in the sewers? The Daily Scourge is sure of it. A victim of 'Rodent Delusion'? The hospital nurse says yes. A lucrative fairground attraction? He is to Mr. Tapscrew. Or is Roger just an ordinary little boy? Only three people believe this version of the story, and it may take a royal intervention — and a bit of magic — to convince everyone else. A playful parody of the press, I Was a Rat! is a magical weaving of humour, fairy tale, and adventure.
When, in A Scarecrow and His Servant, a bolt of lightning brings Scarecrow to life, he proves to be a courteous but pea-brained fellow with grand ideas. He meets a boy, Jack, who becomes his faithful servant and the two embark upon a terrifying series of adventures — including battles, brigands, broken hearts, and treasure islands. But little does the Scarecrow know that he is being followed by a family who desperately wishes he'd never sprung to life.
Two much-loved illustrated tales in a beautiful cloth-bound gift edition. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives by Alice Loxton $28
At eighteen, your life is full of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to — unless you've got the plague… What happens if the First World War breaks out while you're at university? How does a young woman, born without arms or legs, make a living in Georgian London? What turns a rugby-obsessed teenager from a Welsh mining town into Richard Burton? In this unconventional and witty history, Loxton delves into Britain's past, exploring the country through eighteen notable figures at that most formative age — eighteen. From a young Elizabeth Tudor facing deadly intrigue at court, to Empress Matilda already changing the fate of nations, Eighteen invites readers to join an eclectic cast of young Britons across the nation and throughout its history. [Paperback]

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

On the Calculation of Volume: III by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) $30
The third volume of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-volume novel concerning a person trapped in an endlessly repeating 18th of November has arrived. We and many customers have found reading these books a unique and entrancing experience, opening up new possibilities of reading and of thinking.
Do not read the following description: it has spoilers:
”I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday.” Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind — trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone. Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently from Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration.” —Nicole Krauss
"Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time-and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day." —Hernan Diaz
>>It has taken thirty tears to write a novel about one day.
>>Stranded in time.
>>How to make a time-loop endlessly interesting.
>>Get the third volume in the New Directions edition (more stock due soon).
>>Get all the volumes so far (choose either the Faber or the New Directions editions).
>>Read Stella’s review of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the first volume.

Absence by Issa Quincy $38
A stunning, atmospheric debut novel about memory, death and the many ghosts that inhabit the present moment. A child is beguiled by a poem read to him by his mother. The poem follows this elusive narrator like a whisper throughout his life, echoing across the years in the stories and lives of others as they are recounted to him: an enigmatic and beloved schoolteacher who leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman who lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man shunned by his family, who finds solace and freedom in the letters from an estranged aunt; a black-and-white photograph that tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy. With fierce imagination, Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating a symphony of memories, murmurs and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life. [Hardback]
"Quincy's prose is deftly lyrical and imaginative. He observes the fragility of memory, and what remains after our encounters, however fleeting, with people, say a schoolteacher or an estranged aunt; you might think of him as a counterpart to the novelists Rachel Cusk and Teju Cole." —Jason Okundaye, The Guardian
"Absence challenges readers in the best way: it demands their attention, but offers in return a moving, artful examination of what it means to exist in a space vacated and left behind by others. Its contemplative, poetic style invites readers to ponder the beauty and pain in everyday absences and objects. Through a poem, letters, a photograph, and especially stories told and retold, the characters in Absence are able to recall and relive bits of the past long lost to time. Not in a way that sinks into sentimentality, but one which points to the future and leaves space for things that are not-yet." —Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books
"In combining rare, enthrallingly poetic prose with a decidedly detective-noir influence, Absence hints that perhaps the meaning of presence itself is an archive's greatest mystery." —Kyla D. Walker, Electric Literature
"A thoughtful, imaginative work of fiction. Absence might be described as a chimeric blend of Sebald's Austerlitz and Bolano's 2666. The book combines the retrospective gaze of the former with the disparate superstructure of the latter. Quincy's debut is an inspired one: there is no denying the sheer inventiveness and detail of his architecture." —D.W. White, Necessary Fiction
>>An embodied archive.

The Expansion Project by Ben Pester $38
Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing — its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work. Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees — unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was?? A dizzying, haunted satire of the late-capitalist workplace. [Hardback]
>>On the business bus.
>>Surreal scrutiny.

The Effingers: A Berlin saga by Gabriele Tergit (translated from German by Sophie Duvernoy) $60
A monumental epic of German-Jewish life in Berlin over four generations, translated into English for the first time. Germany, 1878: young brothers Paul and Karl Effinger leave the German provinces to seek their fortune in Berlin. Ambitious and talented, they soon establish themselves as entrepreneurs and marry the daughters of high-society families. A flourishing horizon opens before them, but the Great War and the youthful rebellion of the 1920s lay waste to bourgeois certainties, and, as the generations pass, a rising antisemitism begins to shadow their bright world. With dazzling historical sweep, Gabriele Tergit tells of the family's changing fortunes within the vibrantly evoked, ever-changing metropolis of Berlin. Full of parties, drama and the most delicious gossip, The Effingers is a vibrant, monumental portrait of Germany's Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>”A wonderfully vivid social portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin.”

The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward $45
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch- this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life. Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts--together. In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, "How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?" Short-listed for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize. [Hardback]
”A lyrical, meta, intriguing novel that unfolds and keeps you guessing. Daley-Ward is one of those impressive writers who blends a gripping plot with truly unique prose.” —Roxy Dunn"
”A fantastic, shimmering work. Ysra Daley-Ward's rich exploration of Black womanhood and familial complexities is a must read.” —Irenosen Okojie
”Totally original, entirely compelling and astonishingly well crafted, The Catch solidifies Yrsa Daley-Ward as one of Britain's best and boldest voices.” — Yomi Adegoke
”The Catch is a wonderfully dark, twisty collision of complicated sister-love, grief, and memory. With prose that is lyrical and electric, Yrsa Daley-Ward takes her characters through a journey where absence and longing remake reality in haunting and beautiful ways.” —Essie Chambers
”An inventive novel about family from a risk-taking writer. Daley-Ward explores the tension between the twins beautifully. The novel ends with a genuine shock, but it's earned-it's a surprising conclusion to a beautifully written and structured book. Elegant and unpredictable in the best possible way.” —Kirkus
>>On balancing the public and the private.
>>All correct.

One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson $45
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin, Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? In her guise as Aladdin — the orphan who changes his world — Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as a fact. Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future — an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew. [Hardback]
”Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp. Jeanette Winterson and Shahrazad are the perfect co-pilots to take us into new worlds on the wings of old stories.” —Kamila Shamsie
>>Winter sun.

Firefly by Robert Macfarlane and Luke Adam Hawker $35
Written in lyrical verse, this story follows one sun-seeking child who discovers a meadow illuminated by fireflies: "fallen constellations" that dance like stars among the summer grasses, setting fears to flight. Enchanting to read aloud and exquisite to hold in the hand, each scene is illustrated with spellbinding etchings by Luke Adam Hawker, showing the power of hope in a world steeped in darkness. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

How to End a Story: Collected diaries by Helen Garner $60
Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Her many books display her rare sensitivity to the experiences of others, her indomitability, and her grasp of detail and context. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best. Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s. How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written entirely in private. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf's.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
”Marvellous, all eight hundred pages of it.” —Colm Toibin
”With sharp eyes and ears, Garner is a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses.” —James Wook, The New Yorker

Fatherhood: A history of love and power by Augustine Sedgewick $40
An ambitious history of masculinity and family, from the Bronze Age to the modern day, Fatherhood dares to offer a more caring and affirmative vision of the roles men currently play in society. What is fatherhood, and where did it come from? How has the role of men in families and society changed across thousands of years? What does the history of fatherhood reveal about what it means to be a dad today? Chronicling the intimate stories and struggles of some of history’s most famous fathers, historian Augustine Sedgewick explores the origins and transformation of one of the most potent ideas in human history: fatherhood. From the anxious philosophers of ancient Athens and Henry VIII’s obsessive quest for an heir, to Charles Darwin’s theories of human origins, Bob Dylan’s take down of ‘The Man’, and beyond, Sedgewick shows how successive generations of men have shaped our understanding of what it means to be and have a father, and in turn our ideas of who we are, where we come from and what we are capable of. [Paperback]
”An invigorating, impressively researched and honest read. Anyone doing the work of dismantling and reframing the heavy role of the father will find something here.” —Raymond Antrobus
”A richly absorbing piece of history embedded in a wealth of wonderful storytelling. A pleasure to read.” —Vivian Gornick

Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant $27
In this fiery, theoretical tour-de-force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health. Written by co-hosts of the hit ‘The Death Panel’ podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalised health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as ‘surplus’, regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the ‘unfit’ to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this ‘surplus’ population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one's willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health. [Paperback]
”This book changed the way I think about health, power, state capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and filled with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
”Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.' Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength.” —Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
>>Stay alive another week.

Cat by Rebecca van Laer $23
Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an inevitable future first comes the house, then a dog, then a child. But what if they are just cat people? Moving between memoir, philosophy, and pop culture, Cat is a playful and tender meditation on cats and their people. Van Laer considers cats' role in her personal narrative, where they are mascots of laziness and lawlessness, and in cultural narratives, where they appear as feminine, anarchic, and maladapted, especially in comparison to dogs. From the stereotype of the 'crazy cat lady' to the joy of cat memes to the grief of pet loss, van Laer demonstrates that the cat-person relationship is free of the discipline and dependence required by parenting (and dog-parenting), creating a less hierarchical intimacy that offers a different model for love. [Paperback]
“Rebecca van Laer’s feline marvel is at once cozy and mind-expanding. If you’ve never felt a connection with cats before, you will after reading this brilliant book.” —Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat
"In tender, incisive prose, van Laer examines the ways that she has negotiated her relationship to herself, the world around her, and the ever-mysterious wildness she invites in, and reveals the deep and abiding love that is the foundation of what it takes to be in true communion with other life. If you have ever loved anyone, human or animal, let Cat curl up and rest in your heart." —Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed To The Manticore
“Van Laer’s keen eye captures the ineffable charm of our feline friends and investigates humankind’s relationship to cats with great insight and tenderness. A stirring and deeply profound look at what it means to love and lose, and a must-read for cat people and the cat-curious alike.” —Gina Chung, author of Sea Change and Green Frog
>>Cats are our shadows.
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series, revealing the hidden lives of ordinary things.

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

Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben $35
In the ‘middle of life’ — although this is only thirty-six — and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last. The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw. [Paperback with French flaps]
”So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer's mind.” —Isabel Quigly, Financial Times
”Her heroine is a solitary woman who tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written.” —Hilary Bailey, The Guardian
”Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. An achievement to celebrate.” —Maggie Gee, The Observer
”From the publisher that brought Ann Quin back into print comes another lost classic from an English visionary. Rosalind Belben's work is both terrific and disconcerting, an essential read for lovers of extraordinary fiction.” —Camilla Grudova
>>”Rivals anything by Virginia Woolf.”
>>Writing ugly.
>>The foreplay of wordplay.
>>No ticks in the long grass.

Lorem Ispum by Oli Hazzard $40
Lorem Ipsum consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means ‘following the brush'. This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely. Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of ‘shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken. [Paperback]
>>Should a novel avoid the processes of its own composition?
>>Technology, attention, and the extremely long paragraph.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez $42
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories — literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma's characters unspool their secrets. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States. The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing." —New York Times
>>From the mouth to the page.

Ice by Anna Kavan $28
Ice will soon cover the entire globe. As the glacial tide creeps forward, society breaks down. Hurtling through the frozen chaos is a nameless narrator, seeking the white-haired girl he once loved, desperate to rescue her - or perhaps to annihilate her. Through nightmarish, ever-shifting scenes, she flees him and his powerful enemy, the Warden. But none of them can outrun the ice. Anna Kavan's masterwork is an apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence, rendered in unforgettable, propulsive, hallucinatory prose. [New paperback edition]
”A strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that with foreboding and deep compassion maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation.” —Jeff VanderMeer
”One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.” —New Yorker
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Self-medication.

Suicide by Édouard Levé (translated from French by Jan Steyn) $33
Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel — it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend — perhaps real, perhaps fictional — more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favour of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend: it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life. Back in print at last. [New paperback edition]
"With a precision that can be frightening, Leve describes a man who is wholly alienated from the consolations of the outside world, beholden only to the tiniest shifts in his perception and sensations. As the narrator's revelations about his friend's inner life become increasingly complex, the reader comes to see "tu" as a stand-in for the narrator's own self, an externalised form that allows him empathic clarity about the most disturbed parts of his own being." —Hannah Tennant-Moore, n+1 Magazine
"If this irony-laden book contains a message to the reader it may well be this: 'You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.' If one were to substitute 'reading' and 'reader' with 'creating' and 'creator' one might conclude that it's possible to read Suicide not simply as a veiled cri de coeur by a man looking to air the messy circumstances for which he took his life, but as a controlled work of art by a conceptual artist who wanted to leave us with a lasting document from which we might, paradoxically, muster the strength to carry on." —Christopher Byrd, The Guardian
"Suicide is both fiction and final, nonfictional statement, both novel and memoir. It is we, as readers and participants, who stand at the center of these two mirrors hung opposite each other and find the author infinitely, diminishingly multiplied. Though we'll probably never know whether Levé — who in addition to being a writer was a successful photographer with an interest in conceptual art — killed himself to bring his grim metafiction full circle, it is all but impossible not to read his haunting Suicide in this troubling light." —Laird Hurt, Bookforum
"Suicide reads like a photo album. This is no surprise, considering that Levé was as much an accomplished photographer as he was anything else. The prose is clipped, almost terse; while each line can be seen to represent a single idea in just the same way a photo in an album represents one moment in time. Suicide is at times beautiful, immensely sad at others, and in more moments than one might want to admit there is the potential in the text to be deeply relatable." —Tom McCartan,Three Percent
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Pulverised non-narratives.
>>Also in stock: Autoportrait.

Equality Is a Struggle: Bulletins from the front line, 2021—2025 by Thomas Piketty $45
In this new volume drawn from his columns for the French newspaper Le Monde, renowned economist Thomas Piketty takes measure of the world since 2021: leaders grappling with the aftershocks of a global pandemic; politics shifting rightward in Europe and America; and wars breaking out and escalating, from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Together with an extended introductory essay arguing that an ecological socialism remains the best hope for global equality, these articles present Piketty's vivid first draft of history—on the rise of China, political upheaval, armed conflict, inequity within and between nations, discrimination, and beyond. Despite the gathering clouds, Piketty continues to find reasons for hope. [Hardback]
"In this compelling book, Piketty advocates for ecological socialism. His vision is ambitious but realistic, being based on a majestic understanding of the history of capitalism and detailed pragmatic knowledge of anti-inequality policies." —Ha-Joon Chang

TELENOVELA by Gonzalo C. Garcia $42
Set in Santiago towards the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, TELENOVELA explores the secret lives of a family swept up in this dark period of Chile's history. There is Lucho: bullied by fellow soldiers for his love of poetry, thwarted in his ambitions to become a writer, unhappy at work. He seems like a loving father. He seems plain loveable, in fact. And maybe he is. But as TELENOVELA unfolds, other things come to light about Lucho that are less easy to indulge — or forgive. There is Ramona, Lucho's wife: tormented by anxiety, overwhelmed by self-loathing and body image problems. As a drama student, Ramona once hoped to become a Telenovela star; she secretly daydreams that she might still get her big break. Guileless, gentle, Ramona seems like an innocent. But is she? Then there is Pablo, their son: dreamy, gentle, eager to make friends, to form his own band and write some worthwhile songs. Desperate to be cool. And increasingly, just desperate. Gonzalo C. Garcia makes us feel for these characters and want to understand them — but, as the novel unfolds, come to the frightening realisation of what it really means to have such understanding. And so it is that deeply human and deeply personal stories of mislaid ambition, failure and intergenerational trauma take on national — and universal — significance. [Paperback]
“A unique and breath-taking talent.” —Scarlett Thomas
“Consistently funny — and unexpectedly sympathetic.” —The Guardian
>>Resisting cliche through prose.

There’s a Horse in the Art Gallery! by Sarah Pepperle $25
A delightful new board book introducing young children to the animals living in the art gallery! Full-page colour artworks by amazing artists from Aotearoa and around the world, warm and friendly read-aloud texts, animal names in English and te reo Maori, paintings, sculpture, photography and prints from the 1700s to the present. Artists include Fatu Feu’u, Bill Hammond, Louise Henderson, Eileen Mayo, Ron Mueck, Balthazar Ommeganck, Ani O’Neill, Michael Parekōwhai, Agnes Miller Parker, Michael Smither, Ethel Spowers, Michel Tuffery, Francis Upritchard. [Board book]
>>Look inside!

First Encounters: The early Pacific and European narratives of Abel Tasman’s 1642 voyage by Rüdiger Mack $60
Rüdiger Mack seeks to rebalance our perspective by focusing upon the expedition led by Abel Tasman, in 1642-1643, which ‘discovered’ Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and New Britain, and visited Tonga, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. It also includes the first-ever complete English translation of an important resource for the voyage — from Nicolaes Witsen's 1705 book Noord en Oost Tartarye — as well as preserves excerpts and illustrations from the journal of Tasman's chief navigator, Francois Jacobsz. Rüdiger Mack has uncovered new and fascinating details around this extraordinary exploration, from the reasons for its secrecy, the competitive environment of 17th century exploration, and new insights on first contacts with the indigenous populations of the wider Pacific. The overarching theme is a new and fresh look at the very first beginnings of New Zealand's shared Māori-Pakeha history. The book covers the background, the planning and the European, Māori and Tongan accounts of Abel Tasman’s voyage in 1642-43 during which he was the first European to see Tasmania, New Zealand and several of the Tonga islands. The book is ground-breaking in several ways: —It is the first book that brings together all six known Māori oral history accounts of the first contact between Māori and Europeans. —The book publishes the first complete English translation of an important Dutch source which has previously been largely ignored. —Delving into art history the book has for the first time been able to identify the artist who copied the 45 illustrations into Tasman’s official account after the return of the expedition to Batavia in 1643. —It discusses a Maori place name on the West Coast of the South island which probably refers to Maori seeing Dutch ships at anchor there in December 1642. —The book identifies an archaeological site in Golden Bay, South Island which is connected with Tasman’s brief stay there. —The book discusses the authenticity of two well-known supposed paintings of Abel Tasman and suggests another portrait as a more likely depiction of the famous navigator. [Hardback]

One Pot: 100 simple recipes to cook together by Amandine Bernardi $70
The casserole dish or Dutch oven is an essential kitchen tool for creating convenient meals without compromising on taste. In One Pot, author Amandine Bernardi presents 100 effortless recipes featuring vibrant international dishes. This attractive cookbook offers a range of recipes for every occasion, from quick weeknight dinners to special gatherings. Home cooks will discover wholesome dishes like Ratatouille and Mujadara with Cauliflower; mains, including Beef Bourguignon, Coq au Vin, and Moroccan Fish Stew; and sweet treats, such as Baked Apples with Honey. With a guide to equipment, serving suggestions, and dietary symbols designating vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, and nut-free options, One Pot is suitable for novice and experienced cooks alike. [Hardback]
”As you may have guessed, every recipe in the book can be made in a simple Dutch oven — don't expect a sink full of dirty dishes and finicky specialty tools. Instead, you can revel in simple, elegant takes on ratatouille, beef bourguignon, and coq au vin (did we mention Bernardi is French?) without breaking a sweat.” —Katie Couric Media
>>Look inside.

For the People: Resisting authoritarianism, saving democracy by A.C. Grayling $39
Around the world the foundations of democracy, freedom, civil liberties are being eroded — what can be done? Are we living through the end of the democratic moment? The past few decades have revealed a fragile reality. Once liberal countries are turning to authoritarianism, wealthy individuals and corporations are interfering with elections evermore flagrantly, and faith in democracy has plummeted among every demographic. What happened? From gerrymandering and partisanship to corporate interference and tainted donations, A. C. Grayling reveals the forces undermining our democratic ideals and offers some solutions. [Paperback]

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

I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews)
Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short — sometimes very short — stories. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Pure genius.” — Max Porter
”Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.” — Publishers Weekly
”Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.” — Kirkus Reviews
”Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form. The brevity of The Illiterate alone tells you that this is not her whole story. It is simply the one she tells.” — Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
”For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.” — Missouri Williams, The Nation
>>We can never express precisely what we mean.
>>Deprivation exercises.
>>The uses of illiteracy.
>>The Illiterate.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Notebook.

Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson $55
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as 'Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code. Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art. [Hardback]
”Joyously, brilliantly intelligent. In Wilson, Spark has met her true match.” —Anne Enright
”A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique — something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust. Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down.” —Lisa Hilton
”Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam — and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
”I raced through Frances Wilson's whip-smart Electric Spark.” —Ali Smith, Guardian
>>Odd things happened when she was around.
>>World-beating buster-upper.

A State of Siege by Janet Frame $37
After the death of her invalid mother, a retired art teacher leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerising exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live. SoS was first published in 1966, and is now back in print with an introduction by Chris Kraus. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Intensely personal, Frame’s writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'' —Hilary Mantel
>>Woman alone!
>>Wouldn’t you like to be normal?
>>The book was made into a film by Vincent Ward (1978).
>>Some other books by Janet Frame.

The Good Economy by Craig Renney $20
”The problems we face are a consequence of the economic model we have built up in Aotearoa over the past forty years. But that model is a choice — one that we can change if we wish to.” Aotearoa is grappling with tough economic challenges. The Good Economy asks what kind of economy we want – and who it should serve. Through sharp analysis that centres the experiences of New Zealanders, economist Craig Renney explores the values shaping our current system and asks what it would take to build a better one. Grounded, accessible and hopeful, this text invites readers to rethink the purpose of economic policy — and to imagine a future with wellbeing, fairness and opportunity at its core. [Paperback]
>>Other BWB Texts.

Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah $25
A critical examination providing clarity on the intertwined relationships of global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression, and challenges readers to rethink their understanding of Palestine. Dismantling the simplistic narratives that dominate mainstream discourse, Hanieh, Knox and Ziadah present a nuanced materialist analysis grounded in anti-imperialism. The authors argue that the Palestinian situation cannot be fully understood without considering the broader historical and regional dynamics of Western imperialism and capitalist accumulation. By integrating the roles of imperialism, fossil capitalism, and racialisation, this book offers a thorough critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project and the unwavering support it receives from Western powers. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>We teach life, sir.

Rock, Paper, Incisors (A ‘Skunk & Badger’ story) by Amy Timberlake, illustrated by Jon Klassen $28
Skunk’s and Badger’s life together has an easy rhythm — Skunk cooks! Badger cleans! — when they take in two orphaned rat pups, Zeno and Zephyr. Badger is working on an Important Rock Work article for Rock Hound Weekly and needs focus, focus, focus to write it. But how much trouble could two tiny rats really be? Some scheduling, a few strategically placed naps, and all will be well! But it's winter, and nothing goes to plan. Hibernation threatens every routine. Articles refuse to write themselves. And rats in the rock room? It will take a North Twist village to raise these rats! Featuring cosy drawings and full-colour pictures by bestselling artist Jon Klassen, Amy Timberlake's delightfully off-kilter adventure explores the complexity of friendship and the meaning of family in a wintery world where chickens wear parkas and Yard Sheep host spaghetti dinners. And wait! Is that a dinosaur? [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Read Stella’s reviews of the other ‘Skunk & Badger’ stories.

Legenda: The real women behind the myths that shaped Europe by Janina Ramirez $40
Ramirez peels back the layers of time to reveal how the identities of real women have been co-opted by those intent on crafting national identities. Their names are well known, and summaries of their achievements have been recited in classrooms for decades, but medieval women like Joan of Arc, Lady Godiva and Isabella of Castile have been misrepresented, their stories twisted and weaponised. Meanwhile, ground-breaking 18th and 19th-century women who blazed a trail through revolutionary Europe have been forgotten, their legacies too easily dismissed or ignored. Questioning established narratives and searching for the real women behind the legends, Ramirez interrogates what defines a nation and who gets to build it, shining a light on how history is so often hijacked to serve the ideological and political interests of the present. [Paperback]
"Janina Ramirez fearlessly deconstructs the dangerous historical myths and legends that have been shamelessly created to stoke division and hatred, finding complexity, truth and inspiration in this stunning — and shockingly relevant — new analysis of medieval history.” —Alice Roberts
”This is a history like no other, a top-down story of nationhood and mythology, a dazzling assessment of the past through the lens of the present and a rallying cry for the importance of history. Most of all, it's a plea to consider the real flesh-and-blood women who made the world rather than their sanitised, mythologised counterparts. A fabulous, invigorating and beguiling read.” —Kate Mosse

Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt $38
For the first time since university, James and Roland's paths through life — one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering — began to cross. James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he's still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him. Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but a knack for derailing his own attempts to get started in life. When a chance encounter in a pub reunites these old acquaintances, it sets them on an unpredictable course through the upheavals of the 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter. Drayton and Mackenzie is an immediately engaging and ultimately moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life. [Paperback]
"Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon's friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)." —The Financial Times
>>Tidal power.

The Transformations by Andrew Pippos $38
In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper-it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a poetic streak and a painful past, George is one of nature's loners. As George grapples with shifting newsroom dynamics, the legacy of clerical abuse at his childhood school resurfaces, and a late-night encounter with a journalist named Cassandra begins to unravel his carefully managed solitude. As his colleagues depart and the final decline of the paper plays out, George is obliged to navigate an affair, learn to care for a daughter who has only recently become part of his life, and reckon with his own childhood trauma. The Transformations is a witty, melancholic, and very human novel about the stories we tell of ourselves. With an anthropologist's eye for detail and a novelist's grasp of emotional complexity, he explores generational change, grief, guilt, and the strange intimacy of workplace life. [Paperback]
”Andrew Pippos is one of Australia's best novelists. The Transformations shows his perfect emotional pitch, his gift for folding big things into small baskets of domestic life in prose that goes straight to the heart. Who knew he could write another novel as good as Lucky's? Here it is.” — Malcolm Knox
”In this intelligent, disarming and capacious novel, Andrew Pippos pulls the covers back on the public and private self. As we follow the gloriously messy lives of George, Cassandra and Elektra, we're reminded that the antidote to solitude lies in what we long for or desire. With its mysterious undertow, its delight in human fallibility, its backdrop of momentous social and technological change, The Transformations is a searching, fate-filled epic for our times.” —Mireille Juchau
”A novel of great clarity, precision and feeling. Whenever I wasn't reading it I wished I was.” —Robbie Arnott

Sabzi: Fresh vegetarian recipes for every day by Yasmin Khan $57
Irresistible vegetarian and vegan recipes inspired by award-winning food writer Yasmin Khan s travels — and the cooking she does at home for family and friends. Lifting its name from the Persian word for herbs , Sabzi brings you more than 80 accessible plant-forward recipes that celebrate the best of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian flavours. From bountiful salads to fragrant soups, colourful mezze, and heart-warming mains, Khan invites home cooks to make delicious meals that are good for the health of both people and the planet, while staying connected to the traditional food cultures that make us who we are. With easy-to-make recipes that put vibrant vegetables at the heart of a meal, dishes in the book include- Halloumi Lasagne; Stuffed Aubergines with Pomegranates, Walnuts and Feta; Smoky Tofu Shakshuka; Sweet Potatoes with Pistachio and Mint Pesto; Rhubarb and Cardamom Tart... and many more. [Hardback]
“An invitation into Yasmin's treasure trove of a kitchen, Sabzi is a celebration of the life-affirming and nourishing power of plants. In the world of food, Yasmin Khan is a beacon of humanity and light. This generosity and kindness is represented on every page of Sabzi, resplendent with bountiful vegetable dishes that beg to be eaten and shared. There isn't a recipe that I don't want to devour!” —Hetty Lui McKinnon
”You need this book in your life. Yasmin Khan comes to our rescue with Sabzi, packed as it is with bright, fresh, faff-free recipes.” —Nigella Lawson
”Pure poetry and joy. When I ask people what they're cooking, Yasmin's name always comes up.” —Meera Sodha
>>Look inside.
>>Food is about connection.
>>Off to Sabzi school.

Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My adventures in neurodiversity by Robin Ince $40
A personal exploration of anxiety, ADHD and neurodiversity, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal reminds us all — no matter how weird we feel — that it’s OK to be a little different. We all are. What if being a bit weird is actually entirely normal? What if sharing our internal struggles wasn’t a sign of weakness, but strength? For over thirty years, broadcaster and comedian Robin Ince has entertained thousands in person and on air. But underneath the surface, a whirlwind was at play — a struggle with sadness, concentration, self-doubt and near-constant anxiety. But then he discovered he had all the hallmarks of ADHD and his stumbling blocks became stepping stones. In Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, Robin uses his own experiences to explore the neurodivergent experience and to ask what the point of ‘being normal’ really is. Packed with personal insights, intimate anecdotes and interviews with psychologists, neuroscientists and many neurodivergent people he has met along the way, this is a quirky and witty dive into the world of human behaviour. [Paperback]

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

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş $29
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love. [Paperback]
>>Building a bespoke culture.
>>The melancholic textures of feeling alive.

John Reynolds: The Lost Hours by Laurence Simmonds $85
The book frames and documents a series of paintings and collected associated writings from John Reynolds’s Lost Hours project. This idiosyncratic investigation delves into the mysterious 28-hour disappearance of Colin McCahon, a renowned New Zealand artist, in autumn 1984. The event occurred on the eve of McCahon’s major retrospective launch at the Sydney Biennale. The project not only pays homage to McCahon but also explores themes of time, memory, and the impact of dislocation on artistic consciousness. The book can be started either at the dark end or the bright end, with McCahon caught somehow in the pincers between the two. Impressive, beguiling, and nicely produced. [Wrappered paperback]
>>Look inside!

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry $40
”There was relief, and there was loss — it was the saddest thing we'd ever seen, and the best thing we had ever done.” This is the story of the last days of Sarah Perry's father-in-law David's life, and also in its way the story of all our lives, and what we have in common. David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man — he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses — but his disease progressed so quickly that often they were alone with him. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief — it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. [Paperback]
”What a luminously beautiful book, an instant classic. Every page is suffused with such honesty, tenderness and love. Few people have written about dying with such clear-eyed accuracy and immense humanity. Never flinching, never sugar-coating, Sarah has captured brilliantly how caring for someone you love in their final days can upend everything you thought you knew about living. Please read this book. It may very well change how you live.” —Rachel Clarke
”I have just sat and read Sarah's wonderful book, nodding and agreeing with so many tiny details that she has noticed and reflected on with a writer's eye and a loving daughter-in-law's heart. Just beautiful. I hope her luminous writing will console and encourage her readers, all of whom are mortals. This book is a slice of reality that comforts even as it confronts us. It is a book filled with love and human frailty, and I was spellbound.” —Kathryn Mannix

Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces $39
Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from - the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain. Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet. [Paperback]
>>Life and language split open.
>>Cascading generations.
>>Great expectations.
>>Metaphorical breakdown.
>>Caleb Klaces’s latest book, Mr Outside, is also remarkable.

Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix $38
Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; ponytails are chopped off; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure. Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists' slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their eminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island? Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. [Paperback]
>>Gleeful scorn on the pretensions of contemporary literary life.

Lost Evangeline (A ‘Norendy’ tale) by Kaye DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall $28
When a shoemaker discovers a tiny girl (as small as a mouse!) in his shop, he takes her in, names her Evangeline, and raises her as his own. The shoemaker’s wife, however, fears that Evangeline has bewitched her husband, so when an opportunity arises to rid herself of the girl, she takes it. Evangeline finds herself far from her adopted father and her home, a tiny girl lost in the wide world. But she is brave, and she is resourceful, and with the help of those she meets on her journey—including a disdainful and self-satisfied cat—she may just find her way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>The other Norendy tales (they are not a sequence; they can be read in any order!).
>>Read Stella’s review of The Puppets of Spelhorst.
>>Read Stella’s review of The Hotel Balzaar.

All Consuming: Why we eat the way we eat now by Ruby Tandoh $45
Being into food — following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it — is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, making sense of this electrifying new era by examining the social, economic, and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and absurdities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh's laser-sharp investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own? [Hardback]
”A fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” —Claudia Roden
”Endlessly inspirational.” —Nigel Slater
>>Endless hype queues.
>>Too many recipes already.
>>Digested food culture.

Building People by Craig Moller $48
Building People is a playful collection of Ngāti Haua architect Craig Moller's lockdown-era drawings, where buildings come to life with human and animal traits. Blending humour, warmth, and charm, Moller turns architecture into a personal, expressive art form — reminding us that buildings, like drawings, are ultimately about people. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>Cheese scones.

This Way Up: When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Forman $40
Packed with humour and fascinating facts, This Way Up takes a deep dive into the world’s most intriguing and baffling map blunders. From ancient miscalculations to modern mishaps, each chapter uncovers a unique tale of cartographic chaos and the people responsible for it. These aren’t just ordinary mistakes – they are spectacularly wrong maps that tell a story of adventure, error and unexpected humour, with each one offering a new piece to the puzzle of ‘What on earth happened there?’ [Paperback]
”The funniest book on geography ever written.” —Rufus Hound
>>Meet the Map Men.

Japan: An autobiography, II by Peter Shaw $48
Following the success of his first volume, Peter Shaw continues his entertaining musings in answer to the question why he goes to Japan so often. Both novice and seasoned travelers to Japan will find invaluable insights and information to guide them on their next journey. The author takes the reader into rural Japan in the footsteps of the much-travelled poet Basho (1644-1694). Ranging far beyond the usual tourist traps, he explores easily accessible temples and shrines, delights in Japan's unique regional cuisine and engages with interesting people. The nicely presented and illustrated book also considers topics such as the place of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japanese life and unexpected connections between Japanese and Māori culture all from a uniquely New Zealand perspective. It is punctuated with anecdotes, tips, and recipes. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Get the first volume, too!

Behind the Hill by Robin Robilliard $40
Behind The Hill is a social history, recording people’s lives from interviews, from one end of Golden Bay to the other. Every portrayal has something to say about the values and norms of the time. The book follows the revolutionary changes that affected one of New Zealand’s most isolated areas over succeeding decades — with the arrival of hippies, worldly foreigners, IT specialists, retired professionals and bearded environmentalists. Robilliard identifies the advantage to children brought up in the pre-digital age, with little money, but with the freedom to run wild and take risks, to develop character and survival skills. Equally important, life behind the physical and psychological barrier of the Tākaka Hill, has forced residents to become resilient and develop leadership ability, that might not, in easier circumstances, and larger populations, have been discovered. From the author of Hard Country. [Paperback]

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

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan (translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwoord) $30
Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort — Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous — and much younger — boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot. Awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary prize. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Stuns and illuminates. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world.” —Bryan Washington
”A brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. A wondrous book.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
>>”Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel.”

TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker $33
”Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract? After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves. As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic tour-de-force that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth. [Paperback]
”Brilliantly over-the-top. Barker is known for experiment and brainy whimsy. There could be no better person to write a comedy about art and its discontents. It's a rollercoaster kind of excess, where the best part is that it's too much. Barker seems incapable of putting a foot wrong. This is satire that sees right through you, but forgives you and teaches you to forgive yourself. It's that rare thing, a serious work of art that is also a giddy confection: a vehicle of pure delight.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>We are all weirdos.

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing $38
It is September 1974 and two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova, and a youthful — and beautiful — apprentice is just what he needs. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini's horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising political tensions of Italy's 'Years of Lead', he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn't intend. [Paperback]
”Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet.” —Philip Hoare
”The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn't an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative.” —Celia Paul
”Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end.” —Nigel Slater
”A truly wonderful book.” —Edmund de Waal
”An enchanted tale of an accursed era. In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecitta when its creative masters were at their peak. The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning.” —Lucy Sante
>>Dark mysteries and glittery illusions.
>>Fictionalising a murder.

Significant Others: A collection of texts by frank r. jagoe $45
The world is always speaking to you. Held together by a shared language, all beings are constantly, endlessly chatting away, saying something or other. What this language constitutes may vary, but all matter is alive, and it always has something to say. Significant Others is not a world of magical realism, but a different means of describing the existing world. It offers an opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Other beings feature as metaphors, or omens, but also as fleshly, agential creatures. Often the encounters are erotically charged, using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life. In one story, the protagonist attempts to figure out how to have sex with a bathroom mirror; in another, a catfish drags itself through Piccadilly Circus tube station with an uncomfortable level of intimacy with all the surfaces they come into contact with; a person births a stone from their rectum; a lump of topaz in someone’s brain triggers their depression; a human tries to talk to a limestone cliff using touch; a swan drinks the bathwater of their human lover. This book is a collection of different fictionalised narratives, but across them they chart, somewhat anachronistically, a journey from total withdrawal to reimmersion in the ebb and flow of living, alongside a growing recognition that isolation is never truly possible. Life insists. frank r jagoe’s work is a reclamation of madness and monstrosity in opposition to the exclusionary category of the human. Often it explores communication with other-than-humans: in recognition that we are in community with each other; in acknowledgement of the personhood of other-than-human beings; and in order to displace a western hierarchy that claims humanity as the highest form of existence. They are particularly drawn to considering how madness and monstrosity are defined in relation to language usage, and in opposition to rationality, coherence, and ‘reason’. Highlighting forms of communication beyond words, beyond class-based language, beyond human forms of speech, feels an urgent imperative. Throughout they want to consider whose language is respected, whose language is engaged with, and believed, or even acknowledged. Influenced by medieval lapidary texts, jagoe’s most recent focus has been finding kinship with rocks, and trying to think through how we can communicate across vastly different experiences of time.[Paperback]
”Significant Others is a fully grown and highly original manuscript. It is a remarkable and beautiful piece of writing which forges a new language of material aesthetics to think and write beyond the human. There is a fluency and elasticity of invention here, resonating with the processes of artistic creation and encounter. Exciting, passionate and surprising.” —Bhanu Kapil, Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Price, judges of the 2024 Prototype Prize

Art on My Mind: Visual politics by bell hooks $30
”If one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonisation, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of reclamation.” In a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting and criticizing art and aesthetics in a world increasingly concerned with identity politics. hooks shares her own experience of the transformative power of art whilst exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. She positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be empowering within the Black community. Speaking with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Alison Saar, and examining the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Art on My Mind is a generous and expansive body of work that has become increasingly relevant since it was first published in 1995. [Paperback]

Privatisation and Plunder: Neoliberalism — causes, costs, and alternatives edited by Chris Werry and Richard Werry $30
Privatisation & Plunder lays bare how forty years of neoliberalism reshaped Aotearoa New Zealand more radically than almost any other nation. Privatisation, deregulation and austerity tore through public life, deepening inequality and fuelling today’s crises in housing, work and the cost of living. Bringing together leading voices from academia and activism, this powerful collection exposes the real legacy of the ‘New Zealand Experiment’ — and offers bold, practical alternatives: universal basic income, public ownership, democratic renewal and economic justice. Accessible, provocative and essential, Privatisation & Plunder is both a wake-up call and a vision for a fairer, more hopeful Aotearoa. Contributors: Geoff Bertram, Brett Christophers, Brian Easton, Max Harris, Jane Kelsey, Bill Mitchell, Jacqueline Paul, John Quiggin, Max Rashbrooke, Bill Rosenberg, Guy Standing, Chris Werry, Richard Werry. [Paperback]

Homework by Geoff Dyer $45
In Homework, Geoff Dyer reflects on his childhood and what it means to come of age in England in the 60s and 70s, in a country shaped by the aftermath of the Second World War but accelerating towards change. He was born in Cheltenham in the late fifties, the only child of a dinner lady and a planning engineer. Raised in a working-class area, Geoff and his mates found much joy recreating battles with their beloved Tommy guns, kicking a beachball around until its untimely death, and collecting anything and everything they could find; football cards, conkers and Action Man figures. When Geoff passes his 11-plus exams he gets in to a Cheltenham Grammar School, a school which drastically changes the trajectory of his life. [Hardback]
 “Homework is wonderful Geoff-Dyer writing, which we've all learned to crave; something to delight and to move us and to edify us on every page. I find him an irresistible writer.” —Richard Ford
”Moving, atmospheric, truthful, perceptive and hilariously funny — I loved it: a piece of our English history, the story of a vanished time, which feels close at hand but thoroughly gone. What a story. What a great story.” — Tessa Hadley
”Geoff Dyer and I nearly share a name and a birth year. We were born in different countries, however, under different circumstances. No matter. Every page of this exquisite, witty memoir brought back a flood of memories and emotions that seemed to be my own, so lovingly and precisely does Dyer articulate them. A heartfelt book by a supremely intelligent writer.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
>>Catching up.
>>Giving up.

The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the birth of the Anglo-Saxon state, AD 630—918 by Max Adams $55
The eighth century has long been a neglected backwater in English history- a shadowland between the death of Bede and the triumphs of lfred. But before the hegemony of Wessex, the kingdom of Mercia — spread across a broad swathe of central England — was the dynamic heart of a kingship that discovered the means to exercise central political authority for the first time since the Roman empire. That authority was used to construct trading networks and markets; develop economic and cultural links with the Continent, and lay the foundations for a system of co-ordinated defence that lfred would reinvent at the end of the ninth century. Two kings, Thelbald (716-757) and Offa (757-796) dominate the political landscape of the rising power of Mercia. During their reigns, monasteries became powerhouses of royal patronage, economic enterprise and trade. Offa constructed his grandiose dyke along the borders of the warlike Welsh kingdoms and, more subtly, spread his message of political superiority through coinage bearing his image. But thelbald and Offa between them built something with an even more substantial legacy — a geography of medieval England. And they engineered a set of tensions between kingship, landholding and church that were to play out dramatically at the dawn of the Viking Age. [Hardback]
”In this this remarkable book, Max Adams breathes new life into the royal families of the largely forgotten Saxon Kingdom of Mercia, which we can now see played a crucially important role in the foundation of the emerging kingdom of England.” —Francis Pryor

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti, and David Mazzucchelli $45
From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his beloved series, The New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction. In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics. Now the wait is over. The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass, an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist's downfall. And in The Locked Room, another author is experiencing writer's block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel. Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art-directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster's sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Service by John Tottenham $38
In his late forties, John, a failed journalist and failing novelist, finds himself working at a bookshop in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighbourhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances. In between chasing noisy cell-phone users around the shop and wrapping books he hates for wealthy mums he hates even more, John reflects on his fraught relationship with service as an unrepentant outsider in an age of conformity. With dry wit, John Tottenham's debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. [Paperback]
”So heartfelt that we find ourselves howling with laughter because, despite his best efforts, John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity and re-creates himself in the guise of an unforgettable character in fiction.” —Colm Toibin
”The weariest bohemian, with a Keatsian death-drive he somehow keeps outliving, John Tottenham is my favourite nihilistic romantic.” —Rachel Kushner
”Hilarious, refreshingly mean-spirited and often brilliant.” —Washington Post

Anything by Rebecca Stead, illustrated by Gracey Zhang $40
Anything paints a tender picture of a father and daughter moving into a new home. Dad brings a birthday cake for the new apartment to celebrate their new beginning and tells his daughter she can wish for anything (or, more precisely, "three Anythings"). Over the course of the day, she wishes for some of her favorite things, including a rainbow and "the biggest slice of pizza in the whole world”. But she keeps some of her wishes inside. Because what she really wants is to go back home to their old apartment, with its big blue bathtub and space in the closet for hide-and-seek. When she finally admits this last wish, her dad takes her on a journey, and by the book's final pages, she is home . . . in every way that matters. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

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

Ngā Mōteatea : The Songs (Volumes 1—4) edited and translated by Apirana Ngata, Pei Te Hurinui Jones, and Hirini Moko Mead $270
This is a new edition of the classic work Ngā Mōteatea, the annotated collection of waiata made over 40 years ago by the distinguished Māori leader and scholar Apirana Ngata. This completely redesigned and reset edition, published in association with the Polynesian Society, preserves the integrity of Ngata's text and Jones's translations and their commentary but adds further notes from contemporary Māori scholars and modernises the typography by the inclusion of macrons. It also includes two CDs of waiata drawn from the archive of Māori and Pacific Music at the University of Auckland. An essential text for anyone interested in te ao Māori. It is good to have this important work back in print. [Four hardback volumes. Also available separately at $75 each.]

The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus $40
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.  No one knows why they did it. At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut. Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is a piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge. [Paperback]
”It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written.” —Gary Indiana
”The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare — at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus's masterpiece.  It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer — she is just one of the greatest American writers, one who is able to tell us what's wrong with the world and transform our stupor into thinking.” —Constance Debre
"The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable. I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too." —Rachel Kushner
>>Writing about all of it.

In the Circle of Ancient Trees: Our oldest trees and the stories they tell edited by Valerie Trouet, illustrated by Blaze Cyan $70
In the growth rings of every tree are ingrained and encrypted the stories of the tree, its environment and the changes through which it has lived. Growing archives of tree-ring samples allow us to read and decode these natural timelines in ever greater detail. In the Circle of Ancient Trees narrates the stories of ten ancient trees, considering why they grew where they grew; how they reflect their habitat; and the events to which they bore witness. Valerie Trouet curates chapter essays by ecologists with specialist knowledge of each tree, exploring how human and environmental history share common roots, while drilling down into the ecology, persistence and resilience of each species. Illustrated with commissioned wood- engravings and tree-ring infographics that visualise each tree's chronology and geography, In the Circle of Ancient Trees uses circular narratives — beginning and ending with the tree's relationship to its location and environment — that consider what lessons for our future might be discovered in our planet's past. Includes a section on the Kauri, by Gretel Boswijk. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard $26
What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach? In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse, this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow. The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness. [Paperback]

Storm Pegs: A life made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield $28
In her late twenties, celebrated poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetland archipelago to make her life anew. A scattering of islands at the northernmost point of the United Kingdom, frequently cut off from the mainland by storms, Shetland is a place of Vikings and myths, of ancient languages and old customs, of breathtaking landscapes and violent weather. It has long fascinated travellers seeking the edge of the world. On these islands known for their isolation and drama, Hadfield found something more: a place teeming with life, where rare seabirds blow in on Atlantic gales, seals and dolphins visit its beaches, and wild folk festivals carry the residents through long, dark winters. She found a close-knit community, too, of neighbours always willing to lend a boat or build a creel, of women wild-swimming together in the star-spangled winter seas. Over seventeen years, as bright summer nights gave way to storm-lashed winters, she learned new ways to live. In prose as rich and magical as Shetland itself, Storm Pegs transports us to the islands as a local; introducing us to the remote and beautiful archipelago where Hadfield has made her home, and shows us new ways of living at the edge. [Paperback]
”Storm Pegs is rich, attentive and beautifully written. Hadfield writes vividly about the tides, the Shaetlan language, and shows a great appreciation for the people and modern life of Shetland. This book has been my friend. I really loved it and I recommend it.” —Amy Liptrot
”Storm Pegs is a deeply thoughtful and beautifully written account of a life centred on making art in a lively island community. Hadfield writes with rare nuance about choosing and building a new life in a place that calls to many of us.” —Sarah Moss
”Delightful: at once intricate and effortless, playful and deeply felt. A heartfelt paean to a coldwater Eden.” —Cal Flyn
”What a wonderful book. Jen Hadfield just has to turn her languaged gaze to the world and it fizzes to life on the page. One of the most intensely realised accounts of a place — and time in a place — I have read.” —Philip Marsden
”A gorgeous portrait of a fascinating, ever-changing place, as well as very many other things: friendship, community, creation and self-creation, the cycle of the seasons and the toil and triumph of the elements. I adored it.” —Sara Baume

The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black woman in the Romantic archive by Mathelinda Nabugodi $50
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own. "Freedom, liberty, autonomy are the period's favorite words," Nabugodi writes. Romantic poets sought truth in the depth of their souls and in the mind's unbounded regions. Ideals of free speech and human rights were being forged. And yet the period was defined by a relentless commitment to the displacement and stolen labour of millions. Romanticism, she argues, can no longer be discussed without the racial violence with which it was complicit. Still, rather than using this idea to rehash Black pain and subjugation, she mines the archives for instances of resistance, beauty, and joy. Nabugodi moves effortlessly between the past and present. She takes us into the physical archives, and unpacks her relationships with them: what they are and should be; who built them; how they are entwined with an industry that was the antithesis of freedom; and how she feels holding the materials needed to write this book, as a someone whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers. The Trembling Hand presents a new way of reading the past. This transfixing, evocative book reframes not only the lives of the legendary Romantics, but also their poetry and the very era in which they lived. It is a reckoning with art, archives, and academia. [Hardback]
”Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter.” —Colm Toibin
”Mathelinda Nabugodi reveals the racial wounds behind the pristine face of British Romanticism. Her journey — part scholarly excavation, part personal pilgrimage — takes readers through abandoned archives and hallowed homes, where she confronts not just history but her own complex relationship with poets whose words shaped her life even as their era sought to erase people who looked like her. Nabugodi shows us how to hold two truths at once: beautiful craft and painful context, literary genius and racial violence. Her reckoning is a love letter written in disquiet, a map for those seeking the unvarnished truth of our literary inheritance, and a gift for anyone who values personal storytelling that illuminates our shared past.” —Professor DJ Lee

The Book of Lives: A memoir of sorts by Margaret Atwood $75
”Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.” Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents — entomologist father, dietician mother — Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: “It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.”), but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat's Eye to divided 1980s Berlin where she began The Handmaid's Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel. As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art — and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations. [Hardback]

The Haunted Wood: A history of childhood reading by Sam Leith $55
Do you remember the first time you fell in love with a book? Maybe you tumbled down a rabbit hole, flew out of your bedroom window, or found the key to a secret garden. And in the silence of that moment, your whole life changed forever. The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past — collective and individual, remembered and imagined — and invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of the children's literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations. [Hardback]
”Sam Leith has been encyclopedic and forensic in this journey through children's books. It's a joy for anyone who cares or wonders why we have children's literature.” —Michael Rosen
”One of the best surveys of children's literature I've read. It takes a particular sort of sensibility to look at children's literature with all the informed knowledge of a lifetime's reading of 'proper' books, and neither patronise (terribly good for a children's book) nor solemnly over-praise. Sam Leith hits the right spot again and again. The Haunted Wood is a marvel, and I hope it becomes a standard text for anyone interested in literature of any sort.” —Philip Pullman

Dead or Alive by Zadie Smith $40
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith takes a close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tar, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic — and the meaning of 'the commons' in all our lives. [Paperback]

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon $38
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he's been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there's no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement - and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he's supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can't see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it's the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he's a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question. Much anticipated. [Paperback]

Hard-Case Heroes: Stories from the Abel Tasman by Gerard Hindmarsh $40
Building on the success of his Kahurangi backcountry trilogy, Gerard Hindmarsh’s new book, Hard-case Heroes, focuses on some of the quirky and largely untold characters associated with the Abel Tasman coast and its uplands: early settlers and park rangers; an island hermit and defiant squatters; graziers and a limestone miner. Hard-Case Heroes is a highly readable and engaging book about a remarkable corner of New Zealand, written by a local with a love of the area and a nose for a good story. These largely untold and gritty stories from our social history will interest anyone who has experienced the Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand’s smallest and most visited national park, arguably our most beautiful too. [Paperback]
And back in print: Swamp Fever  |  Kahurangi Calling  |  Kahurangi Stories | Kahurangi Out West
And reprinting now: the popular d'Urville Island story, Angelina.

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

The Paris Trilogy by Colombe Schneck (translated from French by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer) $33
Writing in response to Annie Ernaux and in conversation with Elena Ferrante, Colombe Schneck's three semi-autobiographical takes on a woman's life form an elegant, powerful exploration of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, loss and renewal. Colombe is seventeen in 1984 and carefree, busy discovering sex and studying for her baccalauréat. When she becomes pregnant her choice to have an abortion is never in question. Yet suddenly she must grapple with the body that has brought the precarity of her freedom into focus. Colombe and Héloïse are two little Parisian liberals, friends since the age of eleven. They look alike, have similar upbringings and for years they follow parallel paths: university, love affairs, work, marriage, children, divorce, more love affairs. They are the most enduring witnesses to each other's lives, until illness betrays them. Colombe reconnects with Gabriel in her fifties; their relationship is passionate and transformative. As it unfolds, Colombe discovers many things about herself, including a newfound appreciation for swimming, and the euphoria and strength of a body learning when to push and when to let go. [Paperback]
”This is valuable writing. It has immense vitality. You will encounter a female narrator whose direct and bright-eyed stare at the world, and her self, is without shame or faux modesty. At the same time, it is also a deep study of existence, at various ages and stages in life.” —Deborah Levy
”The 'movements' of The Paris Trilogy thrum with life, sparkle with insight. It was an exhilarating read. I've never encountered a more perfect depiction of how the world shrinks when you understand that you're a 'girl', rather than a 'person'.” —Natasha Brown
”'Seventeen’ mines a trauma all too common for women and is published at a time when France has just enshrined abortion rights in their constitution. I found it a tale of frank retrospection, a mature woman looking back on her naive self with love and respect. It is immensely readable and still sadly relevant. Give it to every young woman you know.” —Monique Roffey
>>Not writing with no affect.
>>Paris and swimming.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li $45
"There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." There is no good way to say this — because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now." [Hardback]
”To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it at the same time as desperately wishing that it had never needed to be written at all.” —Observer
”A book unlike any I've read, that brims with rare clarity and intelligence, with love and care. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Cecile Pin
>>A new alphabet, a new vocabulary.

This Moment, Every Moment: Collected poems by Ruth Dallas (edited by Nicola Cummins) $50
Ruth Dallas's voice is unique within the Aotearoa New Zealand literary canon. Her poetry is characterised by a profound connection to nature and seasonal rhythms. It is deeply grounded in place — often to locations in Otago and Southland, where she spent most of her life — yet universal in its reach. The clarity, elegance and apparent simplicity of her style owe much to her interest in classical Chinese poetry and thought. This Moment, Every Moment demonstrates the majesty of Dallas's craft across her lifetime of poetic work. Time spent in contemplation of even a single Dallas poem is always time richly rewarded; how much more so with this complete collection. This new volume brings together previously uncollected poems written in Dallas's youth, alongside all her published collections — from her arrival in 1953 as a significant voice in the New Zealand literary landscape with Country Road and Other Poems, 1947-52, to her final book, The Joy of a Ming Vase, published in 2006. [Nice hardback with cover art by Kushana Bush]
”No other poems written in this country move & haunt me as Ruth's do.” —Charles Brasch.

Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life by Diana Morrow $45
Ruth Dallas (1919-2008) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most distinctive, respected and influential literary voices. Yet despite her international success and her enduring presence as one of the country's most anthologised poets, the full extent of her contribution to New Zealand literature has been relatively unexamined and under-appreciated. This comprehensive biography redresses this imbalance, and gives this outwardly reserved South Islander her (over)due place in the spotlight as a significant poet, fiction writer and children's author. Drawing on Dallas's 1991 autobiography, Curved Horizon, her writing notebooks and journals, and letters and interviews, Morrow shows how the girl whose first published work appeared in the children's pages of the Southland Daily News grew up to become the internationally acclaimed author of nine poetry collections, a book of short stories and eight children's books. Ruth Dallas: A writer's life illuminates Dallas's personal and professional relationships, describes major formative episodes in her life — including the traumatic loss of an eye as a teenager — and investigates her inspirations and creative process. Morrow brilliantly captures the inter-regional jousting of the post-war New Zealand literary scene, and Dallas's independent-minded and highly respected presence within it. An early and regular contributor to Landfall, Dallas became both a friend and a trusted literary advisor to the journal's founding editor, Charles Brasch, working for a time as Landfall's 'secretary' — a role perhaps more justly described as co-editor. As well as Brasch, Dallas's circle of friends and colleagues included James K. Baxter, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Roderick Finlayson, Janet Frame and Basil Dowling. In this generously illustrated biography, Morrow gives us the Ruth Dallas that her family and friends knew and loved: a private person with a lively outlook on life; a serious and informed writer with an impish sense of humour; and a writer of clarity and insight. [Paperback]

The Emotion Dealer by Jack Remiel Cotterell $30
Jack Remiel Cottrell's short fiction ushers the reader into a liminal world of grief and dreams. Stories of heartbreak and betrayal jostle with incisive cautionary tales about self-aware A.I., deranged algorithms, memory transplants and bionic enhancements. The Emotion Dealer is a kaleidoscopic exploration of technology, art, cities, capitalism, disinformation, loneliness and greed. It is a guide for our troubled moment and a book that will make you wonder what — if anything — we are leaving for those who come after us. [Paperback]
“The Emotion Dealer is constantly surprising, deeply incisive, and finely attuned to the way people interact with each other. Cottrell is already a master of the short story form.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam
“Inventive and full of feeling, this is fiction that gets into your blood, changes you. Cottrell is an alchemist of language, a mad scientist of story, transmuting essential ideas and moments into fascinating and faceted prose formations – you’ll be dazzled and moved by even the briefest of these glistering creations. In this collection, you have just about everything you could ever want, right there with you.” —Anthony Lapwood
“The Emotion Dealer is astounding. This is a collection of urgent contrasts – gentle yet brutal, hopeful yet terrifying, dark yet so full of light. Jack takes us on a journey of what could be and is, leading us by the hand into a future as wicked and foreboding as it is radiant. Fears are brought to life and created in our image, and the result is absolutely captivating. The best works are those that make us feel, and The Emotion Dealer demands we do. The challenge is exhilarating. What a gift this collection is.” —Emily Writes

Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert $45
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love? In sixteen essays, Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and cliched, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them — chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. The whole becomes a love letter to literature and to life. [Paperback]
"A work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author's shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic: in place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet's perfected phrases and startling observations. Any Person Is the Only Self is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity." —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"Any Person is the Only Self is absolutely brilliant, full of clarity and mystery and light: Gabbert effs the ineffable, describes the impossible to describe — the state of reading, what it means to remember. I'm still thinking about these essays, by which I mean still thinking about Gabbert's own thoughts; I keep bringing them up in conversation. Elisa Gabbert is one of my favorite living writers." —Elizabeth McCracken
>>Memory, identity, and synchronicities.

Air and Love: A story of food, family, and belonging by Or Rosenboim $28
As a child, Or Rosenboim’s knowledge of her Jewish family’s history was based on the food her grandmothers cooked for her — round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, deep-pink stuffed quinces and herby green rice with a squeeze of lemon juice. It was only after reading their recipe books once they had both died that she began to understand their complicated past. Taking us from Samarkand and Riga to the Middle East, Air and Love is a deeply human retelling of some of the major moments of the twentieth century, and a family story of migration and belonging, suffused with recipes of the food made along the way. [Paperback]
'This is a moving memoir about how recipes are formed by migration, love and loss, even within a single family.” —Bee Wilson
”A fascinating book. ’Food of the road’: through memory, history, recipes — and love — a family, and an era’s, complex story is movingly traced.” —Judith Flanders

The Discovery of Britain: An accidental history by Graham Robb $60
Taking the reader on a time-travelling adventure around the "spindly, sea-wracked islands" known as Britain, this book is history that's both panoramic and intimate, poignant and shocking, seriously funny, and enlightening in the most surprising ways. Often from the unique vantage point of the author’s bicycle, we encounter an entertaining cast of characters foreign and homegrown, drop in on places and events, and dwell on the successes and catastrophes across British history. From ancient settlements swallowed up by the sea and the creation of Stonehenge to the advent of multiculturalism and recent political earthquakes, this is an enjoyably idiosyncratic take on place and history. With intriguing maps and illustrations throughout, The Discovery of Britain can be devoured whole or each chapter read in the time it takes to change a bicycle tyre or drink a cup of coffee. Enjoyable. [Hardback]
>>Books by Graham Robb.

The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the making of the Auckland Museum by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe $65
When Thomas Cheeseman arrived in Aotearoa in 1853 at the age of eight, the world outside knew little of this country's people, plants, animals and environment. Within weeks, he began a lifelong love of collecting and classifying, and by his early twenties he was making waves in colonial scientific circles. Appointed the director of the Auckland Museum when it was not much more than a shed of curiosities, by sheer force of dedication he developed it into one of New Zealand's leading museums and scientific institutions. Along the way he cultivated relationships with the leading scientists of the day, including Charles Darwin and directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, William and Joseph Hooker. And he collected many thousands of specimens and objects, making a vital contribution to our understanding of New Zealand's natural history. This handsome, richly illustrated book tells both his story and the story of the museum he founded. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel $38
The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems. And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home. A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice. [Paperback]
"Unlike any novel you will read this year, a story about millennial angst that is also a bewitching fable. Dwelling is social commentary wrapped into a delightful allegory about identity, work, ritual and tradecraft." —Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times
”A book of miracles masked by the mundane, an entertaining antidote to urban ennui that doubles as a survival guide for souls refusing to surrender to the superficiality of their surroundings." —Roberto Ontiveros, Dallas Morning News
"Dwelling, Emily Hunt Kivel's kooky, endearing fairy tale of a debut novel, is interested in the wobbly line between what's real and what's not — and on what could happen in a world that is deeply, invigoratingly made up. Allusions to myths, fables, and riffs on common idioms abound, many of them evocative and quite funny." —Lora Kelley, The New Yorker
>>A serious attempt to remain curious.

A Little Life (10th anniversary collectors’ edition) by Hanya Yanagihara $60
This exclusive 10th anniversary edition features cover artwork by RF. Alvarez and Linus Borgo, painted in response to the book, as well as an exclusive interview of the author by Neel Mukherjee.
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor. JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world. Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm. And withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself. By midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome — but that will define his life forever. [Hardback]
”This novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship.” —Dua Lipa

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

The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, loss, and kitchen objects by Bee Wilson $50
This strikingly original account from award-winning food writer Bee Wilson charts how everyday objects take on deeply personal meanings in all our lives. One ordinary day, the tin in which Bee Wilson baked her wedding cake fell to the ground at her feet. This should have been unremarkable, except that her marriage had just ended. Unsettled by her own feelings about the heart-shaped tin, Wilson begins a search for others who have attached strong and even magical meanings to kitchen objects. She meets people who deal with grief or pain by projecting emotions onto certain objects, whether it is a beloved parent’s salt shaker, a cracked pasta bowl or an inherited china dinner service. Remembering her own mother, a dementia sufferer, she explores the ways that both of them have been haunted by deciding which kitchen utensils to hold on to and which to get rid of when you think you are losing your mind. Looking to different continents, cultures and civilisations to investigate the full scope of this phenomenon, Wilson blends her own experiences with a series of touching personal stories that reflect the irrational and fundamentally human urge to keep mementos. Why would a man trapped in a concentration camp decide to make a spoon for himself? Why do some people hoard? What do gifts mean? How do we decide what is junk and what is treasure? We see firsthand how objects can contain hidden symbols, keep the past alive and even become powerful symbols of identity and resistance; from a child’s first plate to a refugee’s rescued vegetable corers. Thoughtful, tender and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a moving examination of love, loss, broken cups and the legacy of things we all leave behind. [Hardback]
”This beautifully written book about the deep significance of certain objects in our kitchen is nothing less than an intense, compassionate expression of the human condition. Both intimate and expansive, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a book I know I'll give, urgently and importantly, to those I love.” —Nigella Lawson
”Bee Wilson has changed the landscape of the kitchen by breathing life into ordinary objects. Through this remarkable book you will find yourself discovering meaning in plates, sadness in spoons, love in a measuring cup. I want to give this book to every cook I know.” —Ruth Reichl
>>Passing through different hands.
>>Look inside the book.

A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele del Giudice (translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel) $45
This haunting novel was championed by acclaimed Italian author Italo Calvino who called it a "very simple book, straightforward to read, but at the same time possessing great depth and extraordinary quality." First published in 1983 and never before translated into English, A Fictional Inquiry tells of an unnamed narrator visiting Trieste and London to retrace the footsteps of a fabled literary figure. The narrator is intrigued by the elusive, long dead man of letters whose career proved decisive to the culture of his native Italy despite his apparently never having written a line. There are encounters with those who once loved him, walks along the streets he frequented, and visits to his favored cafés, bookstores, and a library in search of an answer. Why did he leave no written trace? In the end, as Italo Calvino wrote when this book originally appeared in Italian, who the legendary author manqué actually was is beside the point. What really matters are the questions and the disquiet running through these luminous pages, the dialectic between literature and life playing out just below the surface. A Fictional Inquiry — which includes notes from both Calvino and translator Anne Milano Appel — is a gem of unparalleled writing appearing in English for the first time. [Paperback]
"The vague state between writing and not writing, between the books written and the parallel world where they're not, this is what consumes the narrator of A Fictional Inquiry, a metaphysical detective story and a modern Italian classic. A strange and ambiguous novel and a brilliant meditation on the mysteries that inform literature." —Mark Haber
"Explores the nature of perception while critiquing both writers and the writing life. Anglophones at last have an opportunity to engage with this intriguing and intellectually stimulating novel for the first time." —On the Seawall
"Constant movement places A Fictional Inquiry in a line of texts narrated by a walker, from modernists like Robert Walser and Fernando Pessoa to more contemporary writers like Sebald." —Full Stop
>>An investigation into the nature of fiction and reality.

Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington, street by street by Elizabeth Cox $90
In 1891, a remarkable map of Wellington was made by surveyor Thomas Ward. It recorded the footprint of every building, from Thorndon in the north and across the teeming, inner-city slums of Te Aro to Berhampore in the south. Updated regularly over the next 10 years, it detailed hotels, theatres, oyster saloons, brothels, shops, stables, Parliament, the remnants of Maori kainga, the Town Belt, the prisons, the 'lunatic asylum', the hospital and much more, in detail so particular that it went right down to the level of the street lights. Luxuriously packaged, cloth-bound with a fold-out wrapper, Mr Ward's Map uses this giant map and historic images to tell marvellous stories about a vital capital city, its neighbourhoods and its people at the turn of the twentieth century. Very nicely presented in large format and full of valuable historical detail. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Victorian Google street-view.
>>88 A1 sheets.
>>Struggling.

Dead Ends by Laura Borrowdale $30
In the dark, uncanny world of Dead Ends, our ghosts live alongside us, break-ups come with a grisly cost, and there really are monsters under the bed. Laura Borrowdale's short story collection is full of the horrors of domestic banality, parenting, relationships, and womanhood. With deft and exacting prose, Borrowdale's stories reflect our own lives back at us told slant, revealing where something sinister lives just beneath the surface. [Paperback]
”Weird, disturbing and dystopian, but also at times warm and comical, Dead Ends reaches back to a tradition of New Zealand gothic, and forwards to a nebulous future. There is discord between siblings, parents and children, and romantic partners, the threat of AI artbots, annoying ghosts, and the menace of authoritarianism. This collection is filled with what ifs — What if you had to physically lose a limb to be allowed a divorce? What if you were forced to give yourself full body tattoos? What if a potter puts too much of her soul into her work? What if a pregnant woman's thoughts literally shape her baby? What if the government turned Jonestown on the populace? Laura Borrowdale is a skilled and imaginative storyteller with a pitch-perfect approach to the short story form.” —Airini Beautrais

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, gender and Indigenous communism by Kevin B. Anderson $47
In his late writings, Marx traveled beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. In research notebooks, letters, and brief essays during the years 1869-82, he turns his attention to colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender. These texts, some of them only now being published, evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson’s book focuses on how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power. Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on India, Ireland, Algeria, and Latin America. This book will appeal to those concerned with the critique of Eurocentrism, racial domination, and gender subordination, but equally to those focusing on capital and class. For as Anderson shows, the late Marx transcended these boundaries as he elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities. In all these ways, the writings of the late Marx speak to us today. [Paperback]
”Imperialism persists in the 21st century. Marx's last endeavors to overcome his Eurocentrism give an invaluable lesson to today's struggles against ongoing settler colonialism.” —Kohei Saito
”After the Young Marx, a Hegelian philosopher and the mature Marx, a political economist, we can now see the late Marx grappling with colonialism, globalization, various forms of landed property, and gradually questioning his own earlier Eurocentrism. This Third Marx, while the least well-known, may be the closest to our modern sensibilities and interests.” —Branko Milanovic

Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohammed $30
In the cold Wellington winter, Omar’s grades are slipping, his mum is unwell and his best friend is growing distant. Two decades earlier in Mogadishu, Asha and Yasser are falling in love and starting to build a life together while a burgeoning war threatens to take it away. Before the Winter Ends explores the relationship between mother and son across Aotearoa New Zealand, Somalia and Egypt as they search for understanding and try to bridge the distance between them. Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel is a stark portrayal of how the past illuminates the present and how grief shapes a family. [Paperback]
>>That prickly feeling.
>>An interview with the author.

The Neverending Book by Naoki Matayoshi and Shinsuke Yoshitake $40
A book that makes the sound of turning pages fractionally too early, infuriating its readers; a diary shared by two children with painful secrets; a photo album left by a dying father for when his daughter gets married. An elderly book-loving king sends two subjects on a mission: to travel the world collecting stories about weird and wonderful books. Upon their return, they recount their stories for the king over the course of thirteen nights. From the comically irreverent to the heartrending to the heartwarming, The Neverending Book delves into all that a book can be, forming an enchanting compendium that reveals the ways in which we interact with books, and the importance they hold in our hearts — all told in words and pictures through the tale of two subjects gathering stories about books for their blind, book-loving king. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

The Traitors Circle: The rebels against the Nazis and the spy who betrayed them by Jonathan Freedland $40
The Traitors Circle tells the true, but scarcely known, story of a group of secret rebels against Hitler. Drawn from Berlin high society, they include army officers, government officials, two countesses, an ambassador's widow and a former model — meeting in the shadows, whether hiding and rescuing Jews or plotting for a Germany freed from Nazi rule. One day in September 1943 they gather for a tea party — unaware that one among them is about to betray them all to the Gestapo. But who is the betrayer of a circle themselves branded 'traitors'? [Paperback]
”A story of unlikely rebels who had much to lose from resisting the Nazi regime, which so many of their peers supported. What made them trade personal safety for moral rectitude? Freedland's answer is as tense as a thriller yet perceptive, thoughtful and thoroughly researched. It made me think long after I'd turned the last page.” —Katja Hoyer
>>The uses of a sofa bed.

Pox Romana: The plague the shook the Roman world by Colin Elliott $40
In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history's first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall. In Pox Romana, historian Colin Elliott offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of this pivotal moment in Roman history. Did a single disease its origins and diagnosis still a mystery bring Rome to its knees? Carefully examining all the available evidence, Elliott shows that Rome's problems were more insidious. Years before the pandemic, the thin veneer of Roman peace and prosperity had begun to crack: the economy was sluggish, the military found itself bogged down in the Balkans and the Middle East, food insecurity led to riots and mass migration, and persecution of Christians intensified. The pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of a doomed Empire. Arguing that the disease was both cause and effect of Rome's fall, Elliott describes the plague's 'preexisting conditions' (Rome's multiple economic, social, and environmental susceptibilities); recounts the history of the outbreak itself through the experiences of physician, victim, and political operator; and explores post-pandemic crises. The pandemic's most transformative power, Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived. Interesting. [Now in paperback]

The Bagpipes: A cultural history by Robert McLauchlan $45
A diverse history of the pipes from inspiring terror on battlefields to enriching cultures worldwide. In the early second century CE, someone was described as playing a pipe “with a bag tucked under his armpit”. That man, the first named piper in history, was the Roman Emperor Nero. Since then, this improbable conflation of bag and sticks has become one of the most beloved and contested instruments of all time. When another piping emperor, Tsar Peter the Great, watched his pet bear take its last breath, he decided the creature would live on as a bagpipe. This rich and vivid history tells the story of an instrument boasting over 130 varieties, yet commonly associated with just one form and one country: Scotland, and its familiar Great Highland Bagpipe. In fact, the pipes are played across the globe, and their story is a highly diverse one, which illuminates society in remarkable, unexpected ways. Richard McLauchlan charts the rise of women pipers; investigates how class, privilege and capitalism have shaped the world of piping; and explores how the meaning of a 'national instrument' can shift with the currents of a people's identity. The vibrancy and inventiveness characterising today's pipers still speak to the potency of this fabled and once feared instrument, to which McLauchlan is our surefooted guide. [Hardback]
”Historically insightful and full of character. Captures the essence and beauty of piping's vibrant culture with historical, musical and characterful insight.” —Finlay MacDonald
”Richly entertaining and perceptive. A revelation in how an instrument can transform culture.” —Alastair Campbell
>>Pibroch at Braemar.

The Monster in the Lake by Leo Timmers $30
In this larger-than-life picture book, Eric the duck is nervous to swim in the lake for fear a monster might live there, but he bravely follows his friends and discovers something spectacular indeed lives beneath the surface. Four ducks are tired of their small pond and set out for an adventure in the big lake. Walking at the back, Eric isn't sure. He’s heard there’s a monster in the lake, but his friends don’t believe a word of that old story! Eric reluctantly tags along, only to make a startling discovery and find himself in a wonderful underwater adventure. This large-format picture book features a detailed fold-out underwater world of mechanical marvels and sea creatures. The story of a nervous duck who finds courage and the overconfidence of groups will resonate with anyone who’s nervously dipped a toe in unknown waters. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!