All your choices are good! Choose your next books from our selection of NEW RELEASES. Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies, and we will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Threshold and the Ledger by Tom McCarthy $32
Since her death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit — or boundary — state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann's centenary year, McCarthy's book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself. [Paperback]
”A dizzying invitation to explore the poetry and prose of German author Ingeborg Bachmann. McCarthy’s work is an invigorating and inspiring incantation: Readers will not only marvel at how the author reads but also at his ability to articulate that experience into something both erudite and accessible.” —Kirkus
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Style is also substance.
So in the Spruce Forest by Ali Smith $45
Then the voice from nowhere carried on talking about Munch, like my mother of all people knew about Munch, like she knew I was looking at a picture right now, like she knew about the power crisis and the international unrest and the climate ruination in a world she'd left thirty years ago. Like she knew it all.
In Ali Smith's So in the Spruce Forest, the author's deceased mother returns as a persistent voice, intent on sharing with her daughter insights into Edvard Munch's intense renderings of trees and stones charged with life. Through an imaginative essayistic format, Smith weaves together probing visual analyses, personal stories and reflections on ecology and politics, linking Munch's art to both the present moment and other realities. With 20 colour artworks by Edvard Munch. [Cloth-bound hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>So much more than ‘The Scream’.
Kings of this World by Elizabeth Knox $30
When Vex and her friends are kidnapped and held to ransom it sets off a terrifying chain of twists and turns as they struggle to survive and try to find a way to escape. Vex is used to people being afraid of her power, the ability to persuade others to do what she wants. But when she arrives at a new school, it is packed with people who have the same power, and who might even like her. There is her roommate Ronnie, a coolheaded high achiever; and Ronnie's friend Taye, who is recovering from a brain injury. There is witty, lordly Hannu, whose father happens to be a billionaire. And then there's Ari: troubled, blessed, honourable, terrifying Ari. Vex is enchanted by her new friends when, five weeks into term one, they are kidnapped. They find themselves chained in the basement of an abandoned factory, trying to figure out how to escape, all the while tormented by questions like: Why were they taken? Why do the kidnappers seem to hate Vex, and at the same time want to recruit her? Can Vex and her friends save themselves? And if they do, will they ever feel safe again? What kind of reckoning will they face afterwards? And will Vex once again feel responsible for all the bad things that happened? Knox’s gripping new YA novel is full of ideas, speculations and pivotal experiences. [Paperback]
”Elizabeth Knox's Kings of This World is at once a boarding school story, a crime thriller, and a complex fantasy, all shaped by the star-busting imagination of a singular mind. It's a brilliant return to the Southland of Dreamhunter and Mortal Fire, with both a new era and an expanded world, sure to attract a new generation of fans.” —Rachael King
”The world is lucky to have Elizabeth Knox. Once again she's given us an entirely unique, thrilling, deeply thoughtful book that is alive with P for precision. Kings of this World is a thrilling return to the world of Southland where questions of power are entangled with questions of volition, and questions of seclusion, and questions of fear. Knox's young adult characters are alive, electrifying and as nuanced and complex as their readers are. A punchy addition to the genre of dark academia: sleek, unwavering and unputdownable.” —Claire Mabey
”Any new Elizabeth Knox novel feels like breaking into the house of a great enchanter, only to hear the front door lock behind you, as you realise you have stumbled upon something much deeper and more dangerous than you bargained for. Kings of This World is magic at its deepest. A psychologically forensic campus thriller, which keeps you guessing until the very last page. P for perfection.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
>>Both dangerous and dreamy.
The Deserters by Mathias Énard (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell) $37
A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness — he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald.The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and — pulled together in Mathias Énard's enchanting, brilliant, erudite prose — time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the immense stakes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival. [Paperback with French flaps]
”All of Énard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age.” —Joshua Cohen
>>Walking on two legs.
>>The time of return.
Gertrude Stein: An afterlife by Francesca Wade $45
”Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,” wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding — and contested — writers of the twentieth century. In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography — a veritable celebrity. Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories — especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible. This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human. [Hardback]
"Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life." —Sheila Heti
"Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope." —Tom McCarthy
>>Devotion to the cut.
>>Charlatan or genius?
>>Not everyone got the joke.
That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi (translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney) $28
Nineteen-year-old Lea is from a village that is out of time, out of jobs and out of hope. She and her friends, however, are vivid and electric with life. They yearn, they dance, they fuck, they fight. And around them, a world that isn't quite our own vibrates with strangeness and threat. Now Lea is here, sitting on a bench, telling a silent stranger her life story. Because yesterday, change was finally unavoidable. A novel of rural entrapment and coming of age, Elisa Levi's That's All I Know bears the traces of Beckett and Lorca, rings with the echo of folktales and has a fierce, unapologetic vitality at its heart. Startlingly odd and deeply moving, it is the work of a profound and singular talent. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Funny and strange, quirky and heartbreaking, voice-driven and philosophical, magical and very real. As Little Lea tells her tale of family, home, and the end of the world, she casts a quiet spell over me.” —Rebekah Bergman
”A brilliant feat of authorial control; Elisa Levi has created a devastating delight.” —Maya Binyam
”A book about the inability to leave the place where you were born. It reminded me of Miguel Delibes's The Way and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. it is very beautiful.” —Miqui Otero
The Possession by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Anna Moschovakis) $25
”The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city — the whole world — with a person you may never have met.” These first words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of her need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved's life. Ernaux's writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive. Being numb is worse than being in agony.” —Genevieve Gaunt, The Spectator
”The most intimate human experiences — grief, greed, fear, sickness and lust, along with other kinds of private ‘primordial savagery’ — are laid bare throughout the prolific French author's works, sometimes in shudderingly explicit detail, and The Possession is no exception. Far from seeming dated, this tiny tome is even more pertinent in our digital age, capturing the exact feeling brought on by a social media algorithm producing the precise thing you want to ignore.” —Ceci Browning, The Times
”Raw and resonant, Annie Ernaux's newly translated novella The Possession offers up a stream of fixations and divulgences that the narrator treats with utmost openness. Ernaux creates a voyeuristic world that briefly but totally immerses readers and shares a piece of herself through the primary emotion that drives this book: jealousy. Through a stream of confessions and recollections, Ernaux weaves experiences of obsession, addiction and insecurity into the human fabric of being.” —Maria Farsoon, The Skinny
>>Other remarkable books by Ernaux.
Mad World: The politics of mental health by Micha Frazer-Carroll $31
Mental health affects us all, and yet it remains elusive as a concept. Does getting a diagnosis help or hinder? How is mental wellbeing, which is often incredibly personal, driven by widespread societal suffering? Can it be a social construct and real at the same time? These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be a political issue that needs deeper understanding beyond today's 'awareness raising' campaigns. Exploring the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability and broader liberation movements; alternative models of care; the relationship between art and mental health; law and the decarceration of mental health, Mad World is a radical and hopeful antidote to pathologisation, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination. [Paperback]
”Wow! An honest, urgent and lovingly researched invitation to rethink our assumptions about madness. Mad World is an invaluable toolkit, not just for dismantling oppressive health structures, but for building the systems of care we desperately need. This book is a gift and that gift is hope.” — Aisha Mirza
”An urgent introduction to a new radical politics of mental health which embraces the messy, unruly nature of our collective vulnerability and interdependence. Frazer-Carroll exposes the underlying truth that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with our wellbeing. Mad World teaches us how to transform the ways we understand madness, illness, and disability to build a better world.” —Beatrice Adler-Bolton
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A lot of baggage.
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to dismantle systems of oppression to protect people + planet by Leah Thomas $28
We cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard. Leah Thomas coined the term 'intersectional environmentalism' to describe the inextricable link between climate change, activism, racism and privilege. The fight for the planet should go hand in hand with the fight for civil rights. In fact, one cannot exist without the other. This book is a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all and a pledge to work toward the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet — an indispensable primer for activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive and sustainable change. Driven by Leah Thomas's expert voice and complemented by the words of young activists from around the globe, it is essential reading on the issue — and the movement — that will define a generation.
[New paperback edition]
Mohua Gold: The history of the Golden Bay goldfields, 1864—1880 by Mike Johnston $100
Mohua Gold is the second of the planned three volumes providing a comprehensive account of the history of the western Nelson goldfields. This volume documents the small-scale diggings in both the Aorere and Takaka valleys. It also covers the advent of reef mining, a largely speculative boom with several promising leads but ultimately mostly proved to yield disappointing returns. The on-going exploration of the rugged hinterland is well outlined, with much of this being the search for a new goldfield. The better fortunes of gold seekers in the Maori-owned Te Tai Tapu, particularly at the Golden Ridge Mine, are documented. This enterprise was developed by the miners themselves rather than by companies based in Nelson or further afield. Other chapters detail the efforts to find a payable coalfield in the western bay, which culminated in the formation of the Parapara Iron and Coal Company and their ambitious plans to create a major industrial complex. This work is the product of over 25 years research and writing, and is generously illustrated with both old black and white and contemporary colour photographs, along with colour paintings, drawings and a wide range of maps. [Paperback with French flaps]
The Kerfuffle by Clotilde Perrin $33
A picture book in which flaps and die-cuts tell a story about getting on together. Kitty and Pup were happy living next door until a misunderstanding caused a real kerfuffle! Now they can't stand each other any longer so start to build a wall between their gardens. The wall goes up and up and up. One day a funny rabbit pops its head over. But whose garden will this new friend play in? Here’s another cause for chaos between neighbors! Finally a better idea for how to use the bricks finds three happy friends sharing the garden after all — until some pigs move in next door… [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other fun books by Clotilde Perrin.