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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Juice by Tim Winton $38
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism. [Now in paperback]
”A barnstorming, coruscating work of fiction, a heavyweight literary novel that sits squarely in the growing canon of ‘climate fiction’ and it feels to me to be an instant classic of that genre. I strongly recommend it.” —Emily H. Wilson, New Scientist 
”Juice, Winton has said, means ‘human resilience and moral courage’, and there is that in spades in this complex, riveting book already being hailed as a masterpiece..” —Sydney Morning Herald
”This is page-turning stuff, gripping and awfully gratifying. Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time.” —Rachel Seiffert, Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All your choices are good! Click through to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All your choices will be good. Click through to our website to secure your copies. Books can be sent by overnight courier or collected from our door.

Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo $38
”I must work on a ship as a man... Yes, I must seek a new life, more adventurous than that of my fellows on this desolate salt marsh. I must find freedom on the seas.” 1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick from a female perspective. As the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors in Polynesian harpooner, Kauri, and Taoist monk, Muzi, whose readings of the I-Ching guide their quest. Through the bloody male violence of whaling, and the unveiling of her feminine identity, Ishmaelle realises there is a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale, Moby Dick. Xiaolu Guo has crafted a feminist narrative that stands alongside the original while offering a powerful exploration of nature, gender and human purpose. [Paperback]
”A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick, ambitious, brave, and strange, from the imagination of this natural-born storyteller. There's a cinematic, global sweep to its motion, and an unbridled energy and poetry to its dramatic words.” —Philip Hoare
>>Write less in order to write stronger.

Unsettled Bliss: Whiteness in Aotearoa by Elizabeth Ann Cook $40
If you do not know the history of Aotearoa after the 1835 Declaration of Independence and Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840, Unsettled Bliss offers a clear explanation of settler occupation, its impact on indigenous land in Aotearoa, and the lasting consequences. However, it goes beyond that. This book enables you to understand what drove people to act as they did — and what continues to shape our society today. Unsettled Bliss challenges you to reflect on your place in the society of Aotearoa. It pulls no punches. For many, it will be an awakening — an unflinching look at how racism operates in our everyday lives, within our whānau, workplaces, and institutions. If you seek to deepen your understanding of social issues, wealth disparity, and political structures, this book is essential reading. A landmark comprehensive examination of the system and ideology of whiteness in Aotearoa. [Paperback]

Flesh by David Szalay $38
Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour — a married woman close to his mother's age — as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century's tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London's super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. [Paperback]
”Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a life.” —Samantha Harvey
”This is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer.” —Tessa Hadley
”In Istvan David Szalay has created a modern existential antihero in the grand tradition of Camus and Dostoevsky. Amid the random accidents and desultory decisions that shape his life, and come to feel like fate, he is at once a cool observer and a towering presence. Taut, spare and perfectly structured, Flesh reads like a gripping thriller which slowly gathers to itself the emotional power of classical tragedy.” —Carys Davies

Towards Modernism: The Walter Cook Collection at Te Papa by Justine Olsen $75
A treasure trove of design, The Walter C Cook Collection of Decorative Arts is one of the treasures of Te Papa. Built up over a twenty-five-year period by Walter Cook, a discerning and determined collector of modest means, its glass, ceramic and metal objects track the evolution of design from the Arts and Crafts movement through to the British and European modernism of the 1970s. The world's leading designers — William Morris, Christopher Dresser, Archibald Knox, William Moorcroft, Frank Brangwyn, Charles Noke, Gladys Rodgers, Truda Carter, Susie Cooper, Keith Murray, Stig Lindberg, Berte Jessen, Carl-Harry Stålhane and so many more — all feature in its pages. Illustrated with over 300 objects, from art pottery to Danish design, this book showcases the stars of the collection while offering an engaging short course in design history. [Flexibound with wrapper]
>>Look inside!

Sunbirth by An Yu $38
As the sun starts slowly disappearing, the residents of a remote town in the desert find themselves undergoing shocking transformations. In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps an apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends her family's pharmacy of traditional medicine. She has few customers, and even fewer visitors. Her father was found dead by the lake twelve years ago, in unexplained circumstances. Her elder sister, Dong Ji, works at a wellness parlour across town for those who can afford it — which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many. The town fell on hard times long before the sun began to shrink, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the inhabitants of the town realise that there is no way they can survive. But when the Beacons appear — ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns - the residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, Dong Ji and her sister will uncover a photograph which may offer a clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and finally help them learn what happened to their father. [Paperback]

38 Londres Street: On impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands $40
In the heart of Santiago, the infamous 38 Londres Street becomes the haunting backdrop for a riveting tale that intertwines the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London, the post-war life of senior SS officer Walther Rauff in Chilean Patagonia and the sinister connections between the two men. Rauff, responsible for the wartime horrors of mobile gas vans, flees justice after the war and finds an unlikely refuge in Chile. Settling in Punta Arenas, he manages a king crab cannery, seemingly far removed from his dark past. But as rumours swirl about Rauff's involvement with Pinochet's secret intelligence services and the disappearances that plagued Chile, a chilling narrative unfolds. In 1998, as Pinochet faces arrest in London, Philippe Sands is approached to advise the dictator but instead chooses to act as a barrister for Human Rights Watch. This decision leads to an eight-year exploration into Rauff's second life, his ties to Pinochet and his role in the atrocities at the heart of the London proceedings. Through a unique blend of memoir, detective story, courtroom drama and travelogue, drawing on interviews with key players and extensive research in archives worldwide, Sands unveils a hidden double story of mass murder and a disturbing link between the atrocities of the 1940s and those of our own times. [Paperback]
”Sands's achievement is to excavate a deeper intimacy between the cases of Rauff and Pinochet. He follows each twist in the double narrative with an impressive combination of moral clarity and judicious detachment. But it is Sands's expertise in international law, coupled with a natural storyteller's intuition for structure, that gives his latest book its understated power. His stories have all the more impact for their subtlety.” —Rafael Behr, Guardian
>>An efficient man.

Flavour Heroes: 15 modern pantry ingredients to amplify your cooking by Gurdeep Loyal $65
"Gurdeep makes things simple: he shows that with a well-stocked pantry and an open mind, ingredients can transport you anywhere you want to go. This book is full of flavour and practical ideas for every cook." —Yotam Ottolenghi
Flavour Heroes is a collection of clever, flavour-forward, sweet and savoury recipes that, thanks to a capsule of global pantry ingredients, will satisfy every craving. With the help of his 15 favourite pantry heroes, Gurdeep Loyal demonstrates how any home cook — of any ability — can elevate their daily cooking with minimal effort for maximum reward. Those essential ingredients are: harissa, pecorino Romano, gochujang, Thai green paste, yuzu koshō, tamarind, mango chutney, chipotle paste, toasted sesame oil, miso, ’nduja, Calabrian chilli paste, dark roasted peanut butter, instant espresso powder and dark maple syrup. Each of the 90 recipes shines a spotlight on the unlimited ways these pantry ingredients can be used. From including the smoky-heat of chipotle chilli paste in a Nacho Cauliflower Cheese, to using a spoonful of miso to add savoury-umami depth to Sticky Lemongrass-Miso Lamb Ribs, or even adding instant espresso powder to intensify the chocolatiness of Treacle-Mocha Brownies, Flavour Heroes showcases just how easy it can be, to pack any dish you make with flavour. In Flavour Heroes, Gurdeep revels in his new and liberating approach to playing with pantry ingredients; one where we can drop the supposed rules of how ingredients ought to be used, and instead lean into the full spectrum of flavours that every ingredient has the potential to produce. If you are looking for delicious dishes, that you and your loved ones will really want to eat every day, then this is the book for you. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Always Will Be: Stories of Goori sovereignty from the futures of the Tweed by Mykaela Saunders $38
A timely and resonant collection of speculative fiction imagining futures where Indigenous sovereignty is fully reasserted. In this inventive and thought-provoking collection, Mykaela Saunders poses the question — what might country, community and culture look like in New South Wales’s Tweed area if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty? Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty — reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric — while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates. This is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing — and becoming. [Paperback]
''Always Will Be is a unique and exciting collection that writes Aboriginal people, dreams, radical hope and love into the future. In these stories, Mykaela Saunders challenges dominant colonial ideologies and honours the wisdom of ancestors as forward thinkers. Astute, warm and affecting, this is a major contribution to First Nations literature.” —Natalie Harkin
”Mykaela writes First Nations futures as an extension of the possible, not the impossible, and in doing so contests and challenges the assumptions and expectations of settler binaries and deficit discourse that attempt to constrain and restrain what is possible for First Nations peoples and our futures.” —Jeanine Leane

Modern Nordic: Contemporary recipes from a Scandinavian kitchen by Simon Bajada $60
Modern Nordic celebrates contemporary Scandinavian cuisine with a focus on local recipes that can easily be recreated at home. Filled with dishes that typify the food of this vast geographical region, this book takes its influence from the traditional ingredients that can be found from Sweden to Finland and Denmark to Norway, and transforms them into modern everyday recipes that are hugely popular throughout Nordic homes. The book is split into chapters, based on different food groups including ingredients found 'from the forest', 'from the sea', 'from the land', and 'in the larder', along with a basics chapter that demystifies the process of smoking food and other classic Scandinavian cooking techniques such as pickling. At the end of the book there is also a glossary explaining substitutes and hard-to-find ingredients. Recipes concentrate on modern, everyday dishes that use the freshest of ingredients and are simple to create. Nicely photographed and presented. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross $28
The arts can deliver potent, accessible and proven solutions for the wellbeing of everyone. In this book, Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. This can be anything from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture and more — no matter your skill level. Your Brain on Art is an authoritative guide to how neuroaesthetics can help us transform traditional healing, build healthier communities and mend an aching planet. [Now in paperback]
”This book blew my mind! An authoritative yet practical guide to the neuroarts — a term that, if you haven't heard it before, is even more reason to join these brilliant co-authors on a romp through the latest science on how art transforms the brain and the body.” —Angela Duckworth
”Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, through extensive interviews and research, have created something beautiful and affirming with their book Your Brain on Art. Its pages provide proof for what so many of us have always known, that art, especially art in community, is transformative beyond measure.” —David Byrne

Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous tales by Soman Chainani, illustrated by Julia Iredale $28
You think you know these stories, don’t you? You are wrong. You don’t know them at all. Twelve tales, twelve dangerous tales of mystery, magic, and rebellious hearts. Each twists like a spindle to reveal truths full of warning and triumph, truths that free hearts long kept tame, truths that explore life . . . and death. A prince has a surprising awakening . . . A beauty fights like a beast . . . A boy refuses to become prey . . . A path to happiness is lost . . . then found again. Soman Chainani respins old stories into fresh fairy tales for a new era and creates a world like no other. These stories know you. They understand you. They reflect you. They are tales for our times. So read on, if you dare. [Paperback]
”Sly, subversive and full of teeth — Chainani's reimagining of classic fairytales is an unsettling homage that transports its readers through tales both horrifying and humorous, sweet and scary, and, of course...beastly and beautiful.” —Roshani Chokshi
>>Look inside.

Lula: A biography by Fernando Morais $47
The presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signals a new era in Brazilian political history. The only president in the country with a working-class background, combined with a party that was profoundly original in its roots, he exercised charismatic power and influence in a more lasting way than any other public figure in the republican period. Since 2011, Fernando Morais has gained direct, frank and frequent access to Lula. To these dozens of hours of testimonies, he has added a reporter's flair and captivating prose to compose a biography that paints a picture in all its grandeur and complexity. In a narrative that makes use of flashforwards and flashbacks to maintain an electrifying pace, Morais goes from Lula's childhood to the annulment of his convictions, in 2021 — passing through the new unionism, the ABC strikes, the foundation of the PT and the first election campaign. [Hardback]
”An affecting portrait which, while sympathetic — Morais repeatedly criticizes the elite distain, media bias and politically motivated lawfare Lula has suffered — feels emotionally true.” —Patrick Wilcken, Times Literary Supplement

Withstand winter with a book in your hand. Click through for your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Zombie Proust by Jérôme Prieur (translated from French by Nancy Kline) $42
“Marcel Proust passed away on the 18th of November. It was 1922. One day, I could no longer resist: I went in search of him. I prowled about, I visited the rooms where he had lived, I caught glimpses of abandoned châteaus and haunted places, I walked in his footsteps. I wanted to see what his eyes had seen. I looked at his photographs, I uncovered relics and little treasures. I tried to find out who he had been in life, what he had really been like. I interrogated those among the dead who could still reply: his friends, his confidants, those who had crossed paths with him. Who was he? The dandy who set out for salons as though on a foreign expedition? Or the invisible man who flinched from the light, the character in a thriller? The brilliant writer was concealing a doppelgänger, and I pursued him as though tracking down a missing relative.” — Jérôme Prieur
What is a writer’s life, and above all, what is left of it? This book is not a biography, but a quest; an expedition to unearth what remains of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. What was it like to be in his remarkable presence? What was it like to be inside his skin — especially during his final years of intense reclusive absorption in the writing of his great book? Haunted places and abandoned sets, rare photographs, tinpot relics, half-erased fingerprints, flashes of light, piles of little memories serve as talismans through which Jérôme Prieur materialises the eponymous writer’s body and spirit in short, vivid chapters which resemble prose poems. Rich in detail, wry humour and quirky erudition, Zombie Proust brings back to life the invisible being, recalling his image as one summons a ghost.
“Prieur has succeeded magnificently in bringing his portrait of Proust to life.” —Le Monde
“Prieur explores places, questions traces, lingers on moments of Proust's life, sentences from In Search of Lost Time, images - again and again - like those words, haloed in mystery, which open wide the doors of imagination.” —Télérama
Every page is shot through with the feeling of overwhelming, enthusiastic, affectionate gratitude that readers of In Search of Lost Time feel for Proust the writer and Proust the man.” —Le Matricule des anges
“Scarcely any other book on Proust evades with such effortless skill the classic dilemma of whether to relate everything to the work or to the man. Prieur resurrects them both as a single phantom, in the night time favoured by Proust, perfectly conjuring up scents and tastes, with a love which owes nothing to neurosis.”
—Journal du Dimanche

I Remember by Joe Brainard $30
I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic. Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each beginning with the refrain “I remember”: “I remember that little jerk you give just before you fall asleep. Like falling.” Recollections — jokes, confessions, daydreams and memories — were carefully, lovingly woven together. They were of family and friends; of movie stars; of early heterosexual fumblings and later gay life. Brainard's pared-back prose dodged both self-pity and judgement of others, and was written with an ear for musical cadence and an extraordinary painter's eye. The result is witty, incantatory, profound and wholly captivating. New edition with a new introduction by Olivia Laing as well as the original one by Paul Auster. [Paperback]
”A masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard’s modest little gem will endure.” —Paul Auster
 “A relentlessly specific time-capsule of a book, which bizarrely, movingly, seems to slip the confines of time.” —Daily Telegraph 
”Buy it, for everyone you know . I can’t think of a more original or lovely book.” —Olivia Laing
”Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.” —Siri Hustvedt
>>Read an extract.

Diary of an Ending by Lina Scheynius (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $45
Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home. Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This book is elegant, honest and compelling. Scheynius masterfully elevates the personal to the universal. The obsessive, internalised circularity of heartbreak is reworked until a portrait emerges of what it means to be human. Diary of an Ending is intimate, impersonal, passionate, detached, anxious, confident, logical, irrational, apprehensive and unflinching.” —Jack Self
”Diary of an Ending is an impressive and immersive composition of raw and unfiltered thinking alongside pages of careful reflection which ultimately demonstrates what grace, generosity and nuance can be found in unflinching vulnerability.” —Gemma Reeves
>>Read an extract!
>>Look inside.

Mātauranga Māori by Hirini Moko Mead $45
Hirini Moko Mead explores the Māori knowledge system and explains what mātauranga Māori is. He looks at how the knowledge system operates, the branches of knowledge, and the way knowledge is recorded and given expression in te reo Māori and through daily activities and formal ceremonies. Mātuaranga Māori is a companion publication to Hirini Moko Mead’s best-selling book Tikanga Māori. Mātauranga Māori is integrated into every activity people engage in. It touches the lives of people in whatever they do, in the way they act, in the way they think, in the way they learn and in the way their knowledge is shared with others. [Paperback]

176 Interruptions by Charles Boyle $35
There is gridlock on the M40 and a banana skin on every pavement. Lovers are disturbed in bed and my father becomes a rain god. Complacency is mocked. Death hovers. Shit happens. How the messiness of life is translated into fiction is considered and no conclusions are reached. Why, anyway, setting out from A, am I so sure that B is where I want to get to? Interruptions push back, disrupting the status quo or derailing progress. 176 Interruptions — a revised and expanded edition of 99 Interruptions, published in 2022 — attempts to take them in its stride. [Paperback]
”As a slim, hybrid collection of thoughts, memories, wisdom, 99 Interruptions may feel slight in the hand but it sits heavily in the heart. Boyle is able to resurrect his father in a way only writers can, allowing him to convey the strange, missing life of his father in unsentimental yet deeply affecting ways.” —Simon Low, Full Stop
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Other books by Charles Boyle.

In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles $25
"I lay strips of pale peach cotton and cloud-printed cloth side by side. Each becomes a strange, asymmetric quilt block. Each block like a sentence, each sentence an island, all the islands loosely touching." In her second book of poetry, Nina Mingya Powles threads together themes of belonging and material inheritance against a backdrop of verse, collage and textile. From shorelines in Aotearoa, the UK and across Asia, this collection moves through words and images to explore water and the body, sewing and artmaking, personal histories and multicultural identities. [Paperback with French flaps]

Wonderland by Tracy Farr $38
Te Motu Kairangi/Miramar Peninsula, Wellington 1912. Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters - seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna - have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets' curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie — famous for her work on radioactivity — comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder. [Paperback]

The Position of Spoons, And other intimacies by Deborah Levy $30
Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, Levy shares the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of her own. Each short essay draws upon Levy's life, encapsulating the precision and depth of her writing, as she shifts between questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is reveals a questioning self. [Now in paperback]
”Under the blowtorch of Levy's attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful. This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial.” —Guardian
>>Delight in the details.
>>Language is her plaything.

Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron (translated from French by Frank Wynne) $35
It is 1981. As a wave of puzzling medical cases sweeps across the US, a Parisian doctor is presented with a rare case of a disease long thought to be eradicated. It marks the beginning of a race on both sides of the Atlantic to make sense of a deadly virus that will define a generation. Miles away in rural France, Anthony Passeron’s family are dealing with a crisis of their own. Their small village is gripped by another epidemic — heroin addiction. Anthony’s uncle Désiré, once the pride of the family, has become one of its many ‘sleeping children’. Often found unconscious on street corners, he is a stranger to his family. As Désiré’s life descends into chaos, the thunder of the AIDS crisis grows closer. These two stories — one intimate, one global — are about to collide. Sleeping Children is a moving and eye-opening book about shame and the slow poisoning of a family by the secrets it keeps. Exploring the stories of the heroic few who fought for a cure for AIDs and for justice for a community abandoned, it is a radical vision of a history reshaped, retold and remembered. [Paperback]
”Without ever raising your voice, you have shattered the family silence that scabbed over tragedy and produced a work so powerful, so moving that it lingers long after reading. Magnificent!” —Annie Ernaux

Air-Borne: The hidden history of the life we breathe by Carl Zimmer $40
Every day we draw in nearly eight thousand litres of air — and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments, and meet NASA scientists who send balloons even higher, to search for life in the stratosphere. Zimmer chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of biological weapons designed to spread anthrax and smallpox. Air-Borne prompts us to look at the world with new eyes — as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind. Weaving together history with the latest reporting on airborne threats to global health, this masterwork makes visible an invisible world. [Paperback]
”A fish doesn't know it's wet. And we rarely recognize that we are bathed in air, air carrying multitudes of microbes. Air-Borne chronicles the history of this insight. With Zimmer's usual superb writing, it is filled with fascinating science, visionary scientists who were often completely wrong, and poignant moments reflecting the vast human suffering caused by such microbes. And throughout is the dread that makes Air-Borne a page-turner — the knowledge that the air eventually carried SARS-Cov2 and may yet bring something worse. Air-Borne is deeply important and unsettling.” —Robert Sapolsky

The Nile: History’s greatest river by Terje Tvedt $44
Terje Tvedt travels upstream along the river from its mouth to its sources. This book is a travelogue through 5000 years and 11 countries, from the Mediterranean to Central Africa. This is the fascinating story of the immense economic, political and mythical significance of the river. Brimming with accounts of central characters in the struggle for the Nile — from Caesar and Cleopatra, to Churchill and Mussolini — and on to the political leaders of today, The Nile is also the story of water as it nourished a civilisation. [Paperback]

Bear by Kiri Lightfoot $28
Jasper Robinson-Woods is not okay — his name is too long, his mum has an annoying boyfriend, he never sees his dad, and he can't sleep because of a terrifying nightmare! Oh, and to top it off, his goldfish is dying. Jasper is overwhelmed with bad thoughts. Are they a sign of disaster to come? The only place Jasper feels safe is in the tree in his front yard. But then the unimaginable happens: the nightmare he's been having comes to life and follows him to school. Bear is a moving, often laugh-out-loud funny story about a young man and his journey to confront his nightmare and what it represents, while learning that even when you hit rock bottom, you never know what, or who, is around the corner. [Paperback]
Finalist in the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
”I really enjoyed this story. I absolutely adored Jasper — what a great character and such a brilliant narrator — so smart and funny and flawed. This is such an important story and I hope it finds its way into the hands and hearts of so many young people. It is such a tender and wickedly humorous exploration of mental illness and grief and anger and how we define ourselves.” —Karen Foxlee

Revitalise your reading pile! Click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) $37
A young Vietnamese woman is invited to travel from Ho Chi Minh City to speak at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. On her arrival, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on 'Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism', she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town on the western side of the Berlin Wall. There she falls under a strange spell of domestic and sexual boredom with her abductor, until one night she manages to escape on a train to Moscow... but mistakenly arrives in Paris.
Alone, penniless, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) wanders the fringes of society, meeting a sex worker, another Vietnamese immigrant, a theatre troupe and other shadowy characters. But at the centre of her new life is Catherine Deneuve, the iconic film star whose films she loses herself in and who becomes the object of her obsessions. [Hardback]
''Tawada's prose is light on its feet, informal while still feeling deliberate, providing delicate and straightforward descriptions of events that are often complicated and bizarre.'' —New York Times
''Tawada disrupts our perception and reveals the terror and beauty of our world as we get lost in it, and regain our footing through reading her novels.'' —Kit Fan
''Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives new senses in return.'' —Madeleine Thien
''Reading Tawada is an immensely fun and occasionally bewildering experience. A blisteringly imaginative writer.'' —Guardian

Samuel Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’:
Molloy (with an introduction by Colm Tóibín) $25
Molloy, a sordid, bedridden vagrant, recalls a long bicycle ride in search of his mother. He describes sucking on stones, falling in love, getting arrested, killing a dog. Moran, a private detective, sets out to look for Molloy. But as Moran's physical and mental state deteriorate, his narrative starts to mirror Molloy's in mysterious ways. [Paperback]
Malone Dies (with an introduction by Claire-Louise Bennett) $25
Malone, a decrepit old man, lies naked in his bed, scrawling bitter observations in an exercise book. He is fed on a bed-table, his chamber pot is emptied, he hooks items with his stick, he looks out of the window. He tells the story of a man, looked after by nurses, taken for an ill-fated picnic on an island in the sea. As his mind disintegrates, so does the novel. [Paperback]
The Unnamable (with an introduction by Eimear McBride) $25
The Unnamable is a voice. Is it curled up inside an urn, on the point of being born, or is it about to die? Haunted by visitors, it weeps. The Unnamable sifts disjointed memories, grapples with the problem of existence and ultimately perpetuates itself through an endless stream of fragmented words. [Paperback]
>>Read Thomas’s review.
These three novels comprise one the great ‘pivots’ of the modern novel and contain within their rigours many new paths both for reading and for writing. Indispensable. Inexhaustible.

Elaine by Will Self $38
Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders ...Is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction. [Paperback]
”An extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20th-century misogyny, Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian
”In magnifying her voice so we too can hear her screams across the decades, Elaine is a son's spectacular attempt to give his mother the agency and freedom she was denied.” —Lucy Scholes, Telegraph
>>Just too heavy.
>>Spun into a novel.

The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the making of history by Selena Wisnom $80
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal's library to the ground — yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity's first civilisation: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe. [Hardback]
”Selena Wisnom's book is a great work of revelatory history, but I was also unexpectedly moved by its measured optimism about the future — for the preservation of the heritage of Mesopotamia, for the ways history rhymes across millennia, and for the library as the heart of any culture worth remembering.” —Emma Smith, author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers
”Fascinating and rich in detail, this book provides an excellent survey of Mesopotamian literary classics, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ways in which they influenced later cultures and texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. She also offers snippets of daily life, including an account of Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, getting into a panic because a mongoose had run under his chariot (was it a fatal omen?) and the actual agenda of a meeting.” —Bijan Omrani, Literary Review
”In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquity's great monuments to knowledge: the Library at Nineveh. As she surveys the clay tablets that were buried in a blaze millennia ago, a lost world of learning and literature comes back to life.” —Sophus Helle, author of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

The Shetland Way: Community and climate crisis on my father’s islands by Marianne Brown $48
This is one woman's story of how her quest to make peace with her father's death brought her straight to the heart of a challenging debate about how we save the planet. When Marianne Brown arrived in Voe, Shetland, to attend the funeral of her father, she had packed enough clothes to last a short trip. But this was February 2020, just weeks before the UK's first lockdown, and she would be unable to leave for another six months. Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and culture. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to export energy to mainland Scotland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side supports the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenges the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population. As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable energy that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward, and she soon finds herself on a transformative journey into the heart of a debate that mirrors global concerns about how we save the planet. [Hardback]
”A fascinating insight into a unique place that holds past and future in uneasy tension, written with clarity and rooted in deep affection - not only for the islands but for the broader land and elements on which we all depend.” —Observer
”As she weaves her clear love of Shetland lore and history with the clear-sightedness and functional gaze of a climate expert.” —The Times

The Forest of Noise by Mosab Aby Toha $28
Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid and lyrics about the poet's wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather's oranges and his daughter's joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination - even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering. [Hardback]
”A glimpse into life in a besieged Gaza and what it's like to survive and find care, even hope, under the most dire of conditions.” —New York Times
”If literature has any power to change the world or resist injustice, I think it must lie in the astounding poems of Mosab Abu Toha.” —Noreen Masud

Human/Nature: On living in a wild world by Jane Rawson $36
Everything we think about nature is deeply cultural. And much of what we imagine is based on outdated, irrelevant, or out-of-place beliefs. How are these ideas affecting the way we live in the world, and do we have any hope of changing them? If you've ever asked yourself whether humans are ruining nature, whether there's a better way for us to belong, or whether it's possible to love both the environment and your cat, you're not alone. This lyrical, contemplative book is for anyone who has ever wondered where they fit in the natural world. [Paperback]
”In this funny, provocative and profoundly moving book, Jane Rawson brilliantly unravels the myths about the boundaries of the human and the non-human, the natural and the unnatural, and love and death that shape our thinking about not just the environment, but our history and the future that is already overtaking us. Read it: it's utterly marvellous.” —James Bradley
”Idiosyncratic and wily, big-hearted and brave, Human/Nature is an exhilarating deep dive into what is deemed ‘nature’, what is worth saving, and who gets to decide. Part confessional, part philosophical inquiry, part lament, this book takes us on a rollicking ride.” —Jessie Cole
>>A book of questions.

The Living Stones: Cornwall by Ithell Colquhoun $28
British Surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun arrived in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So began a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore — and a place where everyday reality speaks to ‘the world beyond’. [Paperback]
”Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history.” —Art UK 
”Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you.” —Stewart Lee Painter
>>Between worlds.

Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s lost theory by Mike Davis $30
Mike Davis spent years working blue collar jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist. Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis's book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth and exploring Davis's thinking on history, labour, capitalism, and revolution — themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. In a time of ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites, Davis explores the question of revolutionary agency — what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order? — and the situation of the world's working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in classical socialist thought, such as clarifying ‘proletarian agency’, before turning to the urgent questions of our time: global warming, the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt, and the city's demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the end of history? [Paperback]

Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Lucy North) $25
”The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, and the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy and bright. The night had only just begun.” In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance. In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing. [Paperback]
”Slippery and unfamiliar places where logic is internal and surreal give the reader the strange sense of being led through a collection of dreams.” —Asymptote
>>Other books by Hiromi Kawakami.

Hineraukatauri me Te Aro Pūoro by Elizabeth Gray and Rehua Wilson $22
This story in te reo Māori charts the journey of Hineraukatauri: a cocoon/chrysalis who has entered a new realm, the human world, without their voice. It’s dark and wet, Ranginui and Papatūānuku have not yet separated or are in the process of having their offspring create space between the two. In visiting each of the offspring, they gift Hineraukaturi a different component or aspect of music, ultimately her voice, represented in the shape of the Pūtōrino. Renowned musician and composer, Hirini Melbourne happens across the shape, and his breath, in playing it, gives life to all the gifts as he makes beautiful music through this instrument. [Paperback]
Listed for the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
>>Look inside.

Salvage by Jennifer Mills $38
Two estranged sisters reconnect in the aftermath of ecological and social collapse, in this work of suspenseful, deeply human literary speculative fiction. They drift in their sleep, waiting for something. The end of the world, or another escape. But the world is still here. There's no escaping it. Jude's life has been about survival. She works on rebuilding — fixes roofs, trucks supplies, transports refugees. Tries to stay free from attachments and obligations. But Jude won't talk about her past. Or her sister Celeste, lost in the tragic failure of a space station that was supposed to save her, and the other ultra-rich, from the wreckage of a dying world. When an escape pod falls from the sky, its passenger near death, Jude knows her anonymous existence can't continue. As the fragile peace of her community is put at risk, Jude must re-examine the terms of her survival — and her exile. Salvage is a gripping novel of literary speculative fiction that asks: what does it mean to care for each other, after the end of the world? [Paperback]
>>A better way of living.

Granta 170: Winners edited by Thomas Meaney $37
It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. Any schoolchild can smell the rat in the adage. Everybody knows a game is not worth watching unless the players are trying to win — unless someone is willing to risk the high tackle, smash the serve, steal the base, or throw the knock-out punch. The winter issue of Granta explores how ideas about winning and competition suffuse modern society. We return to the magazine's tradition of sports writing. Articles include Nico Walker on the rise and fall of American football — from Jim Thorpe to Deion Sanders; Clare Bucknell on the history of tennis; and Declan Ryan's report from a boxing match between British heavyweights Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois. Fiction includes very short stories from Caryl Churchill and Kathryn Scanlan; two stories set in hospitals by Benjamin Nugent and K Patrick; Mircea Cartarescu on an archipelago infested with angels, and Edward Salem on nights out in the West Bank. Photography from the Israeli bombing of Beirut by Magnum photographer Myriam Boulos, from the Isle of Wight by Tereza Cervenov, and of the U.S. military's global adventures by veteran photographer An-My L. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.

New books for a new month! Take your pick, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi) $37
In these twelve stories, Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come. [New paperback edition]
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien $38
In ‘The Sea’, a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father. Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read--three volumes in a series about the lives of famous ‘voyagers’ of the past. Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share. These neighbours are Bento (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Baruch Spinoza), a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who was excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher (whose life mirrors Hannah Arendt), a philosopher whose academic promise in 1930s Germany became a quest to survive Nazi persecution; and Jupiter (or shades of Du Fu), a poet of Tang Dynasty China whose brilliance went unrecognised by the state, and whose dependence on fickle patrons barely sustained him while lesser artists thrived. As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends. But it is only when she is finally told her father's account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life. And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future. The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the importance and power of art and intellectual endeavour. [Paperback]
"Deeply humane. In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals. With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance. Try to read without weeping profusely." —New York Times Book Review

• Finding the many rooms.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy $37
Mary McCarthy, one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century, skewers her strict Catholic upbringing in this witty and compelling memoir, one of her major works. Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the 1920s, when she was orphaned into a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There was her Catholic grandmother who combined piousness with pugnacity, and her veiled Jewish grandmother who mourned the disastrous effects of a face-lift; there was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul, and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil, and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who inspired her engaging perception, her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous, and her witty, novelist's imagination. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a major work by one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century — witty, scathing, piercingly insightful and stylishly written. New edition, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. [Paperback with French flaps]
”When my friends and I were in our twenties in the 1950s, we read two writers — Colette and Mary McCarthy — as others read the Bible: to learn better who we were and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live.” —Vivian Gornick
”Published in 1957, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is considered by some to be the best of her two dozen books, including eight novels and several volumes of essays, reportage and criticism. Its superiority derives not only from the passionate sense of justice that imbues the depiction of her ghastly Cinderella childhood, but also the singular circumstances of its composition.” —J. Michael Lennon, TLS
”Superb. So heartbreaking that in comparison Jane Eyre seems to have got off lightly.” - Anita Brookner

Hollow Land: Israel’s architecture of occupation by Eyal Weizman $45
In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarised airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged.  Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualisation of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation. [Paperback]

• Other investigations of Forensic Architecture.

Capitalism and Nothingness: Critical theory in uncertain times by Peter Fleming $44
Drawing on Marcuse, Adorno, Arendt and a variety of other critical social philosophers, this book introduces us to a familiar character amid the wreckage of the post-pandemic economy: no-dimensional man. A cousin of Marcuse's one-dimensional man, they are a figure so compressed by the unending present of capitalism that they have ceased to be genuinely present in any ethical or political sense. This is Peter Fleming's brilliant analysis of the psychological and institutional mechanisms that drive the demise of capitalist democracies. The scene is set in no-dimensional man's natural habitats — the modern office, the corporate suite, the government bureau and the corporate university. In these treacherous climes Fleming reveals the dark power relations currently shaping the post-industrial system. This deep dive into the post-industrial pit explains the failure of capitalism in terms of its most contagious symptoms, including micro-jobs, multinational spread, shadow banking, financial predation, the working poor, and government by algorithm. Beset by every malaise of modern economic institutions, from cognitive dissonance to bleak performance metrics and almost deliberate vacuity, no-dimensional man is a living mirror image of the new culture of nothingness characterising capitalism today. [Paperback]
”Splicing genres to brilliant effect, Peter Fleming's critically fuelled revolutionary pessimism delivers shards of humour in the midst of a world ruined by feckless managers and gormless agents of industry. Capitalism and Nothingness furnishes diagrams of scenario planning grafted to the shadow of the apocalypse.” —Ned Rossiter, Professor of Communication and Director of Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm $25
Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonisation and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this book, Andreas Malm argues that a true understanding of the present crisis requires a longue duree analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire. Returning to the British empire’s first use of steam-power in war, in which it destroyed the Palestinian city of Akka, Malm traces the development of Britain s fossil empire and shows how this enduring commitment to fossil energy continues to drive Western support for the destruction of Palestine today. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Malm's analysis, which concludes with the current genocide in Gaza and Palestinian resistance against colonialism, offers a new approach towards understanding the role imperialism plays in maintaining the Zionist colonial project and one that may be overlooked due to the more immediate focus on the depletion of Palestinian territory and the Palestinian people themselves.” —Ramona Wadi, Middle East Monitor

The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei $38
Singapore, 1996. Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. Gen and Arin grow up as sisters in Singapore: a place where insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice in the realms of imagination and play. As the sisters struggle toward individual redemption, their story reveals the fault lines of Singaporean society, our desperate need for acceptance, and our yearning to be loved. [Paperback]
”Fiery, funny, and incisive, The Original Daughter is at its core a ghost story. Once, invisibility was the hallmark of the working class, but Jemimah Wei knows in today's world, where an internet connection allows one to walk through walls, be seen, disappear, and haunt from beyond the analog grave, a soulless transparency is power. A societal privilege ironically afforded to most everyone. This novel adroitly, yet playfully, turns the ways we see cultural appropriation, nepotism, and identity upside down. What a wise and wonderful read.” —Paul Beatty

Sicily: Recipes from an Italian island by Enza Genovese $65
From the bustling streets of Palermo to the colourful markets of Cefalu, from arancini to cannoli, Sicily is home to some of the world's freshest, most delicious food. In this collection of recipes curated by Sicilian Enza Genovese, travel the entire island of Sicily in food, learning how to easily prepare the tastiest hallmark dishes of this Italian region, alongside some new favourites, at home. Chapters include: Antipasti: arancini, Nonna's eggplant parmigiana, Sicilian focaccia. Pasta: Casarecce alla Norma, spaghetti with ricotta and pistachios, sardine bucatini. Risotto and couscous: artichoke and pea risotto, Trapanese couscous, lobster risotto. Meat: meatballs in white sauce, pork ragu, vegetable polpettone. Fish: stuffed calamari, swordfish with capers and almonds, tuna millefoglie. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada (translated from Japanese by Cat Anderson) $28
Nanako Hanada's life has hit rock bottom. Separated from her husband, she's living between 4-hour capsule hostels and pokey internet cafes in Tokyo. Work is going no better as sales at her eccentric bookstore dwindle. Reading is the only thing keeping her alive. That's until Nanako downloads an app called Perfect Strangers which offers 30 minutes with someone you'll never see again. Introducing herself as a sexy bookseller, she recommends strangers 'the book that will change their life'. In the ensuing year, Nanako meets hundreds of people, some of whom want more than just a book. The Bookshop Woman offers a glimpse into the quirky side of Tokyo in this story about the beauty of free diving into a book and resurfacing on the last page, ready to breathe a different kind of air. [Paperback]

Abundance: How we build a better future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson $40
In Abundance, veteran journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson reveal the structural, economic and political forces that have led to the America, and much of the liberal world, of today: where scarcity and preservation drive the agenda, and we have forgotten how to deliver on big ideas. Decades of slashing immigration, off-shoring manufacture, preventing house-building and stalling ambitious infrastructure projects like high-speed rail means America has a shortage of workers, houses, innovative products and climate-change solutions. It's a story repeated across the Western World. To progress on the greatest challenges of our time, from housing to climate change, healthcare to infrastructure, progressives need a vision of abundance, and the ability and willingness to enact transformative strategies. Here, the authors lay out the barriers to consequential action, and how we can overcome them to actively build a better, more abundant future. [Paperback]

What Art Does: An unfinished theory by Brian Eno and Bette A. $37
Why do we need art?  What Art Does is an invitation to explore this vital question.  It is a chance to understand how art is made by all of us. How it creates communities, opens our worlds, and can transform us. Curious and playful, richly illustrated, full of ideas and life, it is an inspiring call to imagine a different future. This book can reshape our understanding of how art and our lives are intrinsically linked. These are planet-sized ideas in a pocket-sized package. [Illustrated hardback]
"Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s I wasn't afraid of Art even though my family was poor and undereducated and knew nothing about it. I was excited and wanted to join in, even to be part of contemporary art-making. I lost that confidence along the way. Became scared of Art, felt excluded by it. Reading What Art Does has helped me regain that confidence by reminding me we're all making art all the time. That Art is for us and by us." —Viv Albertine
"Remarkable for its ability to render sophisticated and sometimes slippery ideas in clear, accessible language. The most powerful ideas here present art as conduit to community, as a way to be vulnerable, to surrender. This is a beautiful book." —Peter Murphy, Irish Times

• Why do we like art?

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Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (translated from French by Eve Hill-Agnus) $38
A female captain in a male-dominated field, the unnamed narrator of Ultramarine has secured her success through strict adherence to protocol; she now manages a crew of twenty men and helms her own vessel. Uncharacteristically, one day, she allows her crew to cut the engines and swim in the deep open water. Returning from this moment of leisure, the crew of mariners no longer totals twenty men: now, they are twenty-one. Sparse and psychological, Ultramarine grips the reader in a tussle with reality, its rhythmic language mimicking the rocking of the boat. As instruments fail, weather reports contradict the senses, and the ship's navigation mechanisms break down, Navarro lulls her readers into accepting the unacceptable through deft, lyrical prose and pared-down dialogue. [Paperback]
"With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds." —Asymptote
"The burden of power, and how it might be exercised, is explored in Mariette Navarro's beguiling fiction." —The Irish Times 
"A taut exploration of how the imaginable confronts the unbelievable. And the novel's beauty rests in figuring out which is which." —Chicago Review of Books 

• “There are the living, the dead, and sailors.”

Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof (translated from Danish by Caroline Wright) $38
Maggie and Kurt are struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in an old farmhouse in Nyborg but somehow keep missing each other, unable to discuss the events that brought them together. Decades ago, a passenger ferry called the Scandinavian Star caught fire, killing 159 people. The event is still considered a national tragedy in Denmark and Norway. Years later, it was revealed not to be an accident, but the result of an insurance scam gone wrong. How is the Scandinavian Star disaster connected to Maggie and Kurt? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape? [Hardback]
”Nordenhof's writing crackles with indignation, conviction, ferocious wit, and savvy human insight. Startling, irresistible, and thoroughly enlivening, reading her words is not unlike looking at the entrancing flames of a tremendous fire.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”A comet in Scandinavian literature. Her sentences are like lightning, they hold great beauty and destruction. Funny, furious and masterful — Money to Burn is a declaration of war against capitalism.” —Olga Ravn

• The story of the Scandinavian Star.

Boustany: A celebration of vegetables from my Palestine by Sami Tamimi $65
Boustany translates from Arabic as 'My Garden', and the down-to-earth, relaxed and plentiful recipes are reflective of Sami's signature style and approach to food. Bold, inspiring and ever-evolving, Boustany picks up where Falastin left off, with flavour-packed, colourful and simple vegetable- and grain-led dishes; this is how Sami grew up eating — platters of aubergine and chickpeas with a spicy green lemon sauce and fragrant lentil fatteh that always tasted better the next day. These are the dishes he has known, loved, cooked and shared with friends. With over 100 recipes, Tamimi offers recipes for breakfast, sharing plates, big celebrations, simple breads, moreish sweet treats, easy dinners and more. It's an approach that's strongly present in Palestinian cuisine, from building your mooneh, or pantry, by preserving seasonal vegetables and herbs to lining the dinner table with a variety of salads and condiments reflective of a love for fresh and vibrant food. Nicely presented. [Hardback]
”I have known Sami for over 25 years now and have always loved his food and his personal modern take on classics from our region. In this book, he applies that same inspired take on vegetarian and vegan dishes from his tragic homeland, making this collection of recipes and stories even more invaluable given the systematic erasure of both Palestine and Palestinians.” —Anissa Helou
”This is my dream cookbook. It's full of heart, soul and Sami's very delicious food. I have a library of cookbooks, but Sami's are one of the only ones I genuinely cook from.” —Meera Sodha
”I love Sami Tamimi's wonderful Boustany. It is thrilling and also moving to see what a great chef has done with the flavourful home cooking of a people with a rich and diverse culinary tradition and a deep connection with the land.” —Claudia Roden

• Look inside!

• Tamimi brought us the Jerusalem cookbook with Yotam Ottolenghi, and Falastin with Tara Wigley — both also excellent.

Embers of the Hands: Hidden histories of the Viking age by Eleanor Barraclough $55
A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child. From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world. Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate. [Hardback]
”Eleanor Barraclough's splendid new book offers an introduction to the ordinary people of a time best known for its kings and warlords, getting up close and personal with the things that mattered to them. In lively prose she ranges from Greenland to Baghdad, showing us bar-rooms and bedrooms, daydreaming children at their lessons, gossiping neighbours, the scars of war, and much more besides. An intimate portrait of the Viking Age that is thoughtful, vivid and warm, while ignoring none of its hardships — highly recommended.” —Neil Price, author of  The Children of Ash and Elm

The North Pole: The history of an obsession by Erling Kagge $55
Throughout recorded human time, few places on Earth have inspired as much fascination as the North Pole. This is an otherworldly place where the sun rises and stays aloft for six whole months before setting, plunging the expanse of ice and water into darkness for half a year. Foot-stepping alongside Erling Kagge, who ventured to the North Pole in the spring of 1990, we hear the story of the North Pole as never told before. From Herodotus who first wondered what the northernmost point of our planet might be like, to the intrepid early cartographers who mapped the world, and the legendary expeditions led by Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary - the first polar explorer global celebrities - who were in the grip of a dangerous obsession to get to the North Pole first. What emerges is a new history of the world, spanning thousands of years, as seen from the 'silver-shining vacantness' of the North Pole. Blending memories from Kagge's own 1990 trip with this epic history, The North Pole is an adventure story, a book about enacting hidden human dreams, about difficult fathers and their difficult sons, and a psychological record of what it means to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity. It is for anyone who's gazed out at the horizon - and wondered what happens if you just keep walking.   [Hardback]
”Erling Kagge is a deeply thoughtful writer. The North Pole proves to be the perfect subject for him>” —Michael Palin
”The book of a lifetime, from a rare writer-adventurer whose obsession and passion for his subject know no bounds.” —Elif Shafak

Remembering Peasants: A personal history of a vanished world by Patrick Joyce $30
A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the nineteenth century to the present day. Into this passionate history, written with exquisite care, Joyce weaves remarkable individual stories, including those of his own Irish family, and looks at how peasant life has been remembered — and misremembered — in contemporary culture. This is a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history. Yet for Joyce, we are all the children of peasants, who must respect the experience of our ancestors. This is particularly pressing when our knowledge of the land is being lost to climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely and vital, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on our history and our future remains profoundly relevant. [Paperback]
 “A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book. Anyone who has ever tried to unravel the intertwined skeins of ancestry, sociology, music, geography and history will gape at Joyce's skill. On almost every page the reader gets a jolt, a palpable sensation of immersion in the disappeared world of peasantry. A central part of the book is Joyce's own family's peasant past. I too, like many people, am only two generations and one language away from these ancestors. Because the time of the peasants is still palpable there are clues and messages here for every fortunate reader who picks up this book.” —Annie Proulx
”Joyce is the modern historian of uncharted lives and the landscapes of post-industry and post-agriculture. Like all the Joyces, he writes with extraordinary precision and grace.” —Colm Toibin

• Outside the capitalist world.

Audition by Katie Kitamura $38
An exhilarating, destabilising Mobius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young — young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day — partner, parent, creator, muse — and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. [Hardback]
”You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art and selfhood — and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world's a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.” —Hernan Diaz
”Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly skilled writer, whose fictions always seem to manage two contradictory effects: a supple seductive surface, under which the chaos of minds and repressed realities roil. She's an original, building an entire metier of her own.” —Rachel Kushner

Clara and the Man with Books in His Window by Maria Teresa Andruetto and Martina Trach $35
So begins Clara and the Man With Books in His Window. In this beautifully illustrated book, set in rural 1920s Argentina, Hans Christian Andersen Award-winning author Mara Teresa Andruetto shares the true story of how her mother, Clara, the daughter of a poor laundress, meets Juan, a wealthy and bookish recluse who never leaves his house because he is afraid society will not accept who he really is. A powerful tale about friendship and about the world available to us when we open a book, but also when we have the courage to be our true selves. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift $40
In the aftermath of the Second World War Private Joseph Caan, a young Jewish soldier stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members; in the 1960s a father focuses on his daughter’s wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world to the brink of disaster; in 2001, while planes fly into the Twin Towers, a maid working for US Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination shaped her life; and at the height of a pandemic lockdown, Dr. Cole, a retired specialist in respiratory disease, returns to work and recalls a formative childhood encounter with illness and much more. These are just a few of the challenged characters we meet in Graham Swift’s Twelve Post-war Tales. Tender, humane, funny and moving, Swift’s latest work of fiction displays his quietly commanding ability to set the personal and the ordinary against the harsh sweep of history. [Hardback]

Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer $38
When the ‘Southern Reach Trilogy’ was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature. And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast — before Area X was called Area X — had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem? Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time. [Paperback]

Time’s Echo: Memory, music, and the Second World War by Jeremy Eichler $28
A stirring account of how music acts as a witness to history and a medium of cultural memory in the post-Holocaust world. When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers — Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich — lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music, scores that carry forward the echoes of lost time. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the possibilities of art in our lives today. [Now in paperback]
”Profoundly moving.” —Edmund de Waal
”A most rare book: extraordinarily powerful — magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.” —Philippe Sands

40 Maps that Will Change the Way You See the World by Alastair Bonnett $45
Turn the pages of this thought-provoking book and discover maps that challenge conventional wisdom, confront social and political norms and offer fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. This meticulously curated selection of 40 maps spans the ages, from ancient parchment scrolls to cutting-edge digital creations. Each map is a window into a different facet of our world, shedding light on the complex interplay of geography, geopolitics, art, history, science and society. Maps have always held the power to transport us, not just from one place to another, but from one state of mind to another. Beyond their utilitarian function, maps have an extraordinary ability to tell stories, reveal truths and inspire revolutions. They are not mere drawings of geographic boundaries, but gateways to the collective wisdom of humanity. You'll encounter maps that dissect the intricate tapestry of human migration, maps that unveil the secrets of the cosmos and maps that expose the stark realities of our changing climate. [Hardback]

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The Assault by Harry Mulisch (translated from Dutch by Claire Nicholas White) $28
In the bitter final months of the Second World War, the body of a Dutch Nazi collaborator is found on the doorstep of an ordinary family home. The repercussions are complex and terrible: the family is killed and the house burned to the ground; only the twelve-year-old son, Anton, survives. Following Anton as he reckons with this trauma through his life, The Assault is a powerful excavation of resistance and the collateral damage wrought on innocent people in times of war. [Paperback]
”Harry Mulisch belongs to the first rank of Dutch novelists of his generation.” —J. M. Coetzee

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler $30
The groundbreaking thinker whose book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on ‘gender’ that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed ‘anti-gender ideology movements’ that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization — and even ‘man’ himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence. The aim of Who's Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how ‘gender’ has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their new book, Butler illuminates the ways that this phantasm of ‘gender’ collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of ‘critical race theory’ and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonises struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. [Now in paperback]

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Fair: The life-art of translation by Jen Calleja $42
A satirical, refreshing and brilliantly playful book about learning the art of translation, being a book-worker in the publishing industry, growing up, family, and class. Loosely set in an imagined book fair/art fair/fun fair, in which every stall or ride imitates a real-world scenario or dilemma which must be observed and negotiated, the book moves between personal memories and larger questions about the role of the literary translator in publishing, about fairness and hard work, about the ways we define success, and what it means — and whether it is possible — to make a living as an artist. Fair is also interested in questions of upbringing, background, support, how different people function in the workplace, and the ways in which people are excluded or made invisible in different cultural and creative industries. It connects literary translation to its siblings in other creative arts to show how creative and subjective a practice it is while upholding the ethics and politics at play when we translate someone else’s work. Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction, satire and polemic, Fair is a singularly inventive and illuminating book. [Paperback]
”With the singular brilliance, generosity and commitment to formal innovation that characterise her expansive body of work, Jen Calleja has gifted us a wholly indispensable fairground tour. Essential reading for anyone interested in translation, translations and the working conditions of those who write them.” —Kate Briggs
”Fair is both a unique exploration into the role of the translator and a profound meditation on language, nationality, and class. It’s also very funny. Reading it reminded me that a wealth of creativity lies within us all regardless of upbringing or (lack of) societal expectations. Truly inspiring work.” —Susan Finlay
”It is no mean feat to build a fair as inventive, as informative, as inclusive to everyone along the translation experience spectrum, and yes, I’ll say it, as goddamn FUN as this one, but Jen Calleja has gone and done it. Cue the cockroach confetti, cue the very-not-invisible fireworks, and roll up for the multilingual rollercoaster ride of the year!” —Polly Barton
”Jen Calleja has turned the odd life of a literary translator into a startlingly real work of art, as exquisitely and playfully constructed as a novel by Georges Perec. I feel like I’ve just been to an actual fair!” – Anton Hur
”There is no profession in the cultural sphere that is more underappreciated than that of the literary translator. Calleja, more than anyone I know, is working to change that.” —Gregor Hens

• Transmission.

Joss: A history by Grace Yee $33
In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand 'chinamen' lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were from the Canton region in south China. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and NSW, and Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a hybrid work of poetry and history. The poems and archival extracts respond to longstanding colonialist prejudices that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss pays tribute to the poet's ancestors, illuminating how they survived and thrived amid 'life's implacably white horizons'. It is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present. [Paperback]

• Chinese Fish took the poetry award at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong $40
In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she's been promised - except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences, with whom a series of seemingly mundane encounters provides her with a hint of what she might be looking for — a hidden meaning to all that surrounds her. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her. She yearns, and continues to endeavour to shape her experiences and environment — a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, the underwhelming men she meets on Tinder, a Mitski song, the dreams she has of Luke's ex-girlfriend — she narrates all as she grapples with questions of embodiment and subjectivity. Set in an unnamed campus in the early 2020s, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one's experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman's sense of self and her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable. [Paperback with French flaps]
”'The book gradually flowers into something extraordinary: a feminist statement of mental unravelling, which is also a plea for the life of the mind. This is marvellously realised as the novel unfolds into a study of interiority and narrative, both an embrace of and a resistance against nihilism. Armstrong has created a form away from such debasing tropes and genres as ‘sad girl’ lit. Armstrong’s work seems both new and utterly timeless.” —The Observer
”To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is the rarest debut: a heart-wrenching literary work that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body. This novel is written in gold — every line is marvellous and perfect.” —Luke B. Goebel
”Armstrong's prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness that keeps you hooked from the first sentence. This is — in its absolute specificity of detail, era, and embodiment — a timeless story of love, yearning and despair. It's rare to read a novel so smart and self-aware which is also so powerfully vulnerable and candid. It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn't dare. In fact I don't think I've ever felt for a character so deeply as the narrator of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies because I don't think I've ever encountered a character so radically and vividly honest.” —Luke Kennard

• Simultaneously becoming and unbecoming.

A Guide to Rocks | He Taonga te Toka by Josh Morgan and Sasha Cotter (te reo Māori translation by Kawata Teepa) $20 | $20
Lately, things have been getting Charlie down. It’s like he’s got a big rock that just won’t go away. He talks to Dad about it, and Dad brings out a dusty old book with a lot of tough rules. The first rule is you don’t talk about rocks (feelings). But the rules make things worse — Charlie’s ‘rock’ gets bigger, and everything feels dark and scary. They need some new rules — fast. [Paperback]

• Look inside!

Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal (translated from German by Elisabeth Lauffer) $40
How do power and beauty join forces to determine who is considered ugly? What role does that ugliness play in fomenting hatred? Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan-born author and artist who lives in Germany, has written a touching, intimate, and highly political book. Dense body hair, crooked teeth, and big noses: Hilal uses a broad cultural lens to question norms of appearance — ostensibly her own, but in fact everyone's. She writes about beauty salons in Kabul as a backdrop to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Darwin's theory of evolution, Kim Kardashian, and a utopian place in the shadow of her nose. With a profound mix of essay, poetry, her own drawings, and cultural and social history of the body, Hilal explores notions of repulsion and attraction, taking the reader into the most personal of realms to put self-image to the test. Why are we afraid of ugliness? [Paperback]
"A thoughtful, provocative, playful, and truly original exploration of bodily aesthetics and the factors that define them. A wondrous and important book." —Melissa Febos
"Moshtari Hilal's brilliant (and perfectly illustrated) Ugliness has finally appeared in English. Her rumination on what makes us think that we are ugly, that we don't fit in, that all stare at us or indeed avoid looking at us, provides personal and historical insights into our fantasies about ourselves." —Sander Gilman
"Hilal has managed to distort beauty and to beautify ugliness with her probing narrative and astute gaze. This is a profound, political, engrossing work." —Aysegul Savas

• Look inside.

• Who exists behind the nose?

• (Un)favourite bits.

Speaking in Tongues by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos $35
Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe- which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues — taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos — explores questions that have constantly plagued writers and translators, now more than ever. Among them — How can a translator liberate meanings imprisoned in the language of a text? Why is the masculine form dominant in gendered languages while the feminine is treated as a deviation? How should we counter the spread of monolingualism? Should a translator censor racist or misogynistic language? Does mathematics tell the truth about everything? In the tradition of Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'The Task of the Translator', Speaking in Tongues emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time. [Hardback]

The Invention of Amsterdam: A history of Europe’s greatest city in ten walks by Ben Coates $37
When Ben Coates injures his leg and needs to rebuild his strength by walking, he finds himself presented with an exciting opportunity — to rediscover the city he has been working in for over a decade, at a slower pace. He devised ten walks, each demonstrating a different chapter of Amsterdam's history, from its humble beginnings in the early 1200s as a small fishing community through two Golden Ages, fuelled by the growth of the Dutch colonial empire, two world wars, and countless reinventions.  Join Coates as he meanders past beautiful townhouses and glittering canals, dances at Pride celebrations, witnesses the King's apology at Keti Koti, attends a WW2 memorial, gets high at a coffee shop, walks through the red-light district, and gazes in awe at Rembrandt paintings, all the while illuminating modern Amsterdam by explaining its past. Blending travelogue and quirky history, The Invention of Amsterdam is an entertaining and sharply observed portrait of a fascinating and complicated city. [Paperback]

Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola $30
A poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform — across oceans and within relationships — told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens. Intimate and erotic, ecological and philosophical, the poems in Strange Beach illuminate the body as a porous landscape across which existential dramas, filial fractures, and sexual reckonings occur. The collection ventures across the same 'Atlantic Ocean' as Claudia Rankine's 'Citizen', which is the same 'Atlantic Ocean' in Lowell's 'Life Studies', to reveal a queer consciousness deeply steeped in poetic traditions of nuanced confession and moving abstraction. Strange Beach is geological in its accumulation of images, emotions and landscapes that stack, revolve and eschew. The resulting work transmutes messages to the mind of the reader with a feeling of cosmic intuitiveness, as emotion and intellect grapple and become forged. “No one can follow you here / not having to become something else,” observes one speaker in this collection that reimagines how we love, grow, travel, and most of all, change. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What do we mean when we read a book and feel that we trust the writer? What I mean when I say that I trust Oluwaseun Olayiwola is that the poems in Strange Beach are as sure in their storytelling as centuries-old myths. These poems explain the world to me, rebuild it in front of my eyes with polysensory images that don't stop moving. And so I stand in the middle of Olayiwola's violent universe — where the sun's arms are broken, where the corpses of sunflowers litter the fields, where 'snow is a skin. Inside it, / violence...' — and watch this incredible journey of survival. This world is like an ocean, erasing Olayiwola's name from the sand with each approach; these poems are Olayiwola's finger, rewriting his name again and again whenever the tide recedes.” —Taylor Byas

• When does a poem begin?

• Oluwaseun Olayiwola is also a choreographer.

Saxophone (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Mollie Hawkins $23
The saxophone is a contradictory instrument that has rooted itself in the soil of pop culture. It's the ‘devil's horn’, it's the voice of jazz an extension of the player's soul it is a character trait of U.S. Presidents, YouTube sensations, and cartoon characters. It has both enhanced and ruined songs, it is sensuous yet abrasive, and it is the only instrument widely excluded from symphonies and orchestras, never quite being taken seriously. As an object that is symbolic of living on the margins of society, the saxophone has never been kind to its players. Blending research, cultural criticism, and personal narrative about her saxophonist father, who lived on the margins until his unexpected death, Mollie Hawkins explores more than just the history of this expressive instrument. She illuminates the dark paths that our passions can lead us down. Saxophone turns the lens around to ask us all — what does it mean to devote your life to such an object even if it kills you? Can music hold such power over us? [Paperback with French flaps]

Sunny Days, Taco Nights by Enrique Olvera and Alondo Ruvalcaba $70
Enrique Olvera is known for the sophisticated Mexican cuisine he serves at his globally renowned restaurants, including the iconic Pujol, in Mexico City. However, his true passion is the everyday taco, which he regards as the most democratic of foods. In Sunny Days, Taco Nights, Olvera presents an in-depth exploration of the taco s history and many different styles, ingredients, and accompaniments, and much more. Equal parts culinary history and cookbook, the book features 100 recipes designed for home cooks, arranged into two main chapters: Classics, which features street tacos; and Originals, which explores Olvera s contemporary reinventions of well-known originals. Classic recipes include Fish Tacos from northwest Mexico; Chicharron Tacos from Monterrey; Chorizo Tacos with spinach; and Steak Tacos common at street vendor tricycles in Mexico City. Contemporary reinventions include Brussels Sprouts Tacos with spicy peanut butter; Ceviche Tacos; Pork Belly Tacos with smoked beans; and Eggs & Green Bean Tacos inspired by Olvera s childhood breakfasts. Visually stunning, with vivid food photography and a palette inspired by native corn in Mexico, Sunny Days, Taco Nights is the definitive book on one of the world s most beloved foods. [Flexibound]

• Look inside.

The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb $40
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness. As he counts down the weeks, months, and years of his incarceration, he develops elemental kinships with a tenderhearted cellmate, a troubled teen desperate for a role model, and a prison librarian who sees and nurtures his light. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves? [Paperback]
”Bravo, Wally Lamb. Not that you needed another masterpiece to demonstrate your unerring eye, ear, and signature heart, but may I say The River is Waiting might crown them all." —Elinor Lipman

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie $38
Europe stares into the abyss. Plague and famine stalk the land, monsters lurk in every shadow and greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions. Only one thing is certain: the elves will come again, and they will eat everyone. Sometimes, only the darkest paths lead towards the light. Paths on which the righteous will not dare to tread . . . And so, buried beneath the sacred splendour of the Celestial Palace, is the secret Chapel of the Holy Expediency. For its congregation of convicted monsters there are no sins that have not been committed, no lines that will not be crossed, and no mission that cannot be turned into a disastrous bloodbath. Now the hapless Brother Diaz must somehow bind the worst of the worst to a higher cause: to put a thief on the throne of Troy, and unite the sundered church against the coming apocalypse. When you're headed through hell, you need the devils on your side. [Paperback]
”The Devils is Joe Abercrombie at his best: exciting, witty, vicious. History buffs (like me!) will love the fantasy-historical setting overflowing with brilliant little details.” —Django Wexler"
”Joe Abercrombie is, to me, the undisputed master of creating deep, distinct characters that leap off the page, and never more so than in The Devils. This book is hilarious, profound, tragic, and so thrillingly paced one scarcely has time to breathe between one calamitous adventure and the next. I loved every page, and can't wait to see where the story goes from here. Straight to hell, I hopefully suspect!” —Nicholas Eames

New books for a new season! Click through to secure your copies. We can have your books delivered by overnight courier or ready to collect from our door.

Terrier, Worrier: A poem in five parts by Anna Jackson $25
"If sometimes I think of thoughts as being behind the eyes, sometimes I think of them more as floating, in a kind of cloud around the outside of my head." Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as thought. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Terrier, Worrier is a remarkable and playful book on language, anxiety, poetry and the strangeness of being a person. I loved its short length especially, as well as its fragmentary form falling somewhere between a diary and a collection of poetic essays. I wish more of my favourite poets wrote these kinds of books.” —Nina Mingya Powles
”Terrier, Worrier is extraordinary, in both concept and form. It joins the conversations of great writers and thinkers, past and present, who analyse how we function aesthetically in our little lives.” —Anne Kennedy

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane $65
Is a River Alive? is a joyous exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Powered by Macfarlane's dazzling prose and lit throughout by other voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has. [Hardback]
”Macfarlane is a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler." —Holly Morris, New York Times
”A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.” —Elif Shafak
”This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea: that rivers are living participants in a living world. Robert Macfarlane's astonishing telling of the lives of three rivers reveals how these vital flow forms have the power not only to shape and reshape the planet, but also our thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. Is a River Alive? is a breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation.” —Merlin Sheldrake
”This book is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get onboard and float through the rapids of encounters with places and people, the eddies of ideas, to navigate the resurgence of Indigenous worldviews through three extraordinary journeys recounted with a vividness that lifts readers out of themselves and into these waterscapes. Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways.” —Rebecca Solnit

• How Robert Macfarlane came to his senses.

• Can personhood rescue a river?

Ripeness by Sarah Moss $38
It is the 60s and, just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth, and then make a phone call which will seal this baby's fate, and his mother's. Decades later, happily divorced and newly energised, Edith is living a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Maebh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Maebh must decide if she will meet him, and she asks Edith for help. Ripeness is a novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong. [Paperback]
”Sex and childbirth, emigrant and exile, the present and the past: Sarah Moss's ambidextrous talent is evident on every page of this elegant novel. It is intelligent, but never disembodied; evocative, but never sentimental; honest, but never cruel. Ripeness is a book of tart and lasting pleasures.” —Eleanor Catton
”This book felt to me like I was reading the achievement of a lifetime, written by one of the best writers alive. Moving, unexpected, masterful, it is a story of stories, of belonging, of exits and entrances, and everything in between. Moss's understanding of who her characters are is also her understanding of all of us. A beautiful, powerful read that echoed for me long after.” —Jessie Burton

Short | Poto: The big book of small stories | Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero edited by Michelle Elvey and Kiri Piahana-Wong $37
Short short stories, sometimes known as flash fiction or microfictions, are one of the trickiest forms to write. Create a resonant world in fewer than 300 words? Not so easy! In this collection of 100 stories, a range of New Zealand writers, both well known and emerging, deliver emotionally charged stories that punch well above their weight and length. And there's more! Each of the stories has either been translated into te reo Māori from English or translated into English from te reo Māori by some of this country's most experienced translators, making this book a valuable contributor to our literary landscape that rewards repeated readings. [Paperback]

1985: A novel by Dominic Hoey $38
It's 1985 and Obi is on the cusp of teenagehood, after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime and street violence. His father is delusional, his mother is dying, the Rainbow Warrior is bombed, and it's time for Obi to grow up and get out of the arcade. When he and his best mate Al discover a map leading to unknown riches, Obi wonders if this windfall could be the thing that turns his family's fortunes around. Instead, he's thrown into a quest very different from the games he loves. A novel about life in a multi-cultural, counter-cultural part of Auckland pre-gentrification. 1985 is an adventure story with a local flavour, a coming-of-age story for the underdogs, the disenfranchised, and the dreamers. [Paperback]

• Adults through a child’s eyes.

• Some things just mostly stay the same for ever.

A Different Kind of Power: A memoir by Jacinda Ardern $60
What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be. When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate yet powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift and sweeping gun control laws, that demonstrated her remarkable leadership. She guided her country through unprecedented challenges—a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity incursion, and a global pandemic—while advancing visionary new polices to address climate change, reduce child poverty, and secure historic international trade deals. She did all this while juggling first-time motherhood in the public eye. Ardern exemplifies a new kind of leadership—proving that leaders can be caring, empathetic, and effective. She has become a global icon, and now she is ready to share her story, from the struggles to the surprises, including for the first time the full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as Prime Minister. [Hardback]

• Jacinda, the first review.

• Empathy is a kind of strength.

Killing Time by Alan Bennett $25
”We have a choir and on special occasions a glass of dry sherry. It's less of a home and more of a club and very much a community.” Presided over by the lofty Mrs McBryde, Hill Topp House is a superior council home for the elderly. Among the unforgettable cast of staff and residents there's Mr Peckover the deluded archaeologist, Phyllis the knitter, Mr Cresswell the ex-cruise ship hairdresser, the enterprising Mrs Foss and Mr Jimson the chiropodist. Covid is the cause of fatalities and the source of darkly comic confusion, but it's also the key to liberation. As staff are hospitalised, protocol breaks down. Miss Rathbone reveals a lifelong secret, and the surviving residents seize their moment, arthritis allowing, to scamper freely in the warmth of the summer sun. “'Violet? She'll be having a little lie-down,' said Mrs McBryde. 'She likes to give her pacemaker a rest. I'll rout her out.'“ [Hardback]
”A mini-masterpiece.” —The Times
”Full of wit and style.” —Observer
”A geriatric Lord of the Flies.” —Spectator

How to Kill a Witch: A guide for the patriarchy (The witches of Scotland) by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi $40
As a woman, if you lived in Scotland in the 1500s, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch. Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women's fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning. Inspired to correct this historic injustice, campaigners and writers Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree. In order to understand why it happened, they have broken down the entire horrifying process, step-by-step, from identification of individuals, to their accusation, 'pricking', torture, confessions, execution and beyond. With characteristically sharp wit and a sense of outrage, they attempt to inhabit the minds of the persecutors, often men, revealing the inner workings of exactly why the Patriarchy went to such extraordinary lengths to silence women, and how this legally sanctioned victimisation proliferated in Scotland and around the world. With testimony from a small army of experts, pen portraits of the women accused, trial transcripts, witness accounts and the documents that set the legal grounds for the hunts, How to Kill A Witch builds to form a rich patchwork of tragic stories, helping us comprehend the underlying reasons for this terrible injustice, and raises the serious question — could it ever happen again? [Paperback]

Pathemata, Or, The story of my mouth by Maggie Nelson $35
As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.  Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator's tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss — the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.  With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving time in our shared history. An experiment in interiority by the author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as a meditation on love, affliction and resilience. [Hardback]
”Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation” —Olivia Laing
”One of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Always brilliant.” —Geoff Dyer
”Her words come as though from a great distance and strike incredibly close.” —Anne Enright
”Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating.” —Eula Biss

• Breadcrumbs backwards.

The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir (translated from French by Lauren Elkin) $38
Laurence lives what appears to be an ideal existence. Her life features all the trappings of 1960s Parisian bourgeoisie- money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy whilst she's at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. But Laurence is a woman whose happiness was relegated long ago by the expectation of perfection. Relentlessly torn by the competing needs of her family, it is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence resists. [Hardback]

The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa (translated from Japanese by Hiro Arikawa (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) $38
Famously scenic, the Hankyu commuter train trundles daily through changing landscape unaware of the heartaches of the passengers it carries. On the outward journey we are introduced to the emotional dilemmas of five characters as we puzzle out how they will unravel; on the return journey six months later, we watch them resolve: a man meets the woman who always happens to borrow a library book just before he can take it out himself — a woman in a white bridal dress boards looking inexplicably sad — a university student leaves his hometown for the first time — a girl prepares to leave her abusive boyfriend — a widow discusses adopting the Dachshund she has always wanted with her granddaughter. As the season and the landscapes change, passengers jostle and connect, holding and releasing their dreams and desires, as this famous little train carries them ever forward towards the person each intends to become. From the author of The Travelling Cat Chronicles. [Hardback]

Lawn (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Giovanni Aloi $23
A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilisers, weed-killers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement. Lawn untangles the colonial-capitalist threads that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we'd be better off without it. The lawn is aesthetically and ideologically versatile. From museums and hospitals to corporate headquarters and university campuses, it has become the verdant lingua franca of institutions of all kinds. Its formal homogeneity and neatness imply reliability, constancy, and solicit our trust. But beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological issues that over time have come to define our conception of nature. [Paperback with French flaps]

Against the Odds: New Zealand’s first women doctors by Cynthia Farquhar and Michaela Selway $55
In 2025, the year in which the Otago medical school celebrates 150 years, 50% of graduates are women. Back in 1891 when Emily Seideberg, who would go on to become the school's first woman graduate, applied for entrance it was not at all clear that it would be granted. There was active hostility in many quarters to the very idea that women could be doctors. This book traces the paths of the women who, between the 1880s and 1967 (when the Auckland medical school opened), battled indifference and chauvinism and, later, many of the other challenges that faced women in the professions, to become New Zealand's first women doctors. Their stories are often remarkable and the contribution to research, medical breakthroughs and improved patient care is to be honoured. [Paperback]

Peter Cleverley: Between Transience and Eternity by Alistair Fox $60
This heavily illustrated book traces Peter Cleverley's formation and evolution as an artist, identifying the influences that aroused in him a sense of the transience of human life and the paradoxical complexity of the human condition. The portrait that results shows how Cleverley's sense of the human condition has driven him to convey it symbolically in a way that simultaneously captures not only the fragility of human life, but also its joys. His art communicates an appreciation of the beauty of this world and the gift of being alive, together with the value of art as a means of transcending mutability. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

NHOJ: A memoir that started backwards by John Lazenby $50
With an eye for peculiar detail and meticulous research, John Lazenby takes us on an evocative visit to the Britain of the 1960s, when, aged nine, he saw the Beatles play live in London before he could even hope to read, or write down, the lyrics from their iconic songbook. Along the way, we meet the warm and eccentric family who never gave up on him — and the array of severe teachers and tutors who did. We are reminded that it takes only one person to change a life for the better and, having been sent away to boarding school at the age of seven, John's young life pivoted on the miracle discovery of that person, a teacher who finally understood the boy that no one else could teach. NHOJ: A Memoir That Started Backwards is the story of his progress from seven-year-old who could write only one word — his own name, spelt backwards — to journalist and author who built a career around the very words that had initially been so elusive. [Hardback]

• A lifetime of living with dyslexia and ADHD.

The Three Robbers by Tomi Ungerer $35

An old favourite (first published in 1962), ready for a new generation. The book tells the story of three fierce black-clad robbers who terrorise the countryside, scaring everyone they meet. One robber stops carriage horses with his pepper spray, the second destroys the wheels of the carriage with his axe, and the third robs the passengers by holding them up with his blunderbuss. One day the robbers stop a carriage only to find a small orphan girl called Tiffany inside. On her way to live with a strange aunt, Tiffany is delighted to meet the robbers, who take her back to their cave instead of their usual haul of money, gold and jewels. The next day, Tiffany sees the treasures the robbers have amassed and asks what they plan to do with their riches.The men are baffled, as they had never thought about spending their money. So they decide to buy a castle and welcome all the lost, unhappy and abandoned children they can find. The robbers dress them in tall hats and long capes, just like the ones they wear themselves, only in red instead of black. Years later, when they are grown up, the children build a village near the castle, full of people wearing red hats and red capes. They also build three tall towers, in honour of the three robbers. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Mānawatia a Matariki $5
This beautifully designed booklet contains karakia for each of the nine stars of Matariki to celebrate and educate readers about the traditions and cultural importance of Matariki.

• Some other books on Matariki.

Ease into the season with new books to get you through. Click through to our website to secure your copies — or just email us or phone us. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

The Abyss by Fernando Callejo (translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert) $40
A memorably caustic autobiographical novel about the demise of a crumbling house in Medellín, Colombia. Fernando, a writer, visits his brother Darío, who is dying of AIDS. Recounting their wild philandering and trying to come to terms with his beloved brother's inevitable death, Fernando rants against the political forces that cause so much suffering. Vallejo is the heir to Céline, Thomas Paine, and Machado de Assis. He hurls vitriolic, savagely funny insults at his country and at his mother who has given birth to him and his many siblings. Within this firestorm of pain, Fernando manages to get across much beauty and truth: that all love is painful and washed in pure sorrow. He loves his sick brother and the family's Santa Anita farm (the lost paradise of his childhood where azaleas bloomed); and he even loves his country, now torn to shreds. Always, in this savage novel about loss — as if in the eye of Vallejo's hurricane of talent — we are in the curiously comforting workings of memory and of the writing process itself, as, recollecting time, it offers immortality. [Paperback]
"Proof that people in Colombia don't read is that Vallejo hasn't been shot yet." —Juan Gabriel Vasquez
"Vallejo inserts the violence battering his country into the very language of his text where words are no mere reflection, they are the violence that startles and overwhelms the reader." —Juan Goytisolo
"Vallejo's novel is about how to care for oneself and others, human and nonhuman beings, when everything seems doomed." —Bruno Franco, Full Stop

• Read an extract.

• Dying in time to escape global warming.

The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia $36
The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, presenting gender-fluid, trans and androgynous African immigrants, and insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are. Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories, colonial trauma, and the realities of the UK asylum system and its impact on young refugees. Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. [Paperback]
”The Seers is an incandescent howl of anti-colonial rage and insatiable desire; a powerful and taboo-breaking love letter to a London made of stories, and a scathing indictment of the UK asylum system’s ability to break hearts and bodies to pieces again and again.” —Preti Taneja

• Writing without fear.

• Should politicians be listening to writers?

• Dancing on the page.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes) $40
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life — and the life of Berlin itself — begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same." Perfection is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late? [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
"Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation's 'identical struggle for a different life': globalisation, homogenisation, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) 'about' Berlin and the 'creative professional' expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonised, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can't recommend it highly enough." —Lauren Oyler
"Perfection gave me the gift of being able to hold a long span of time — in a relationship, in a city — and the experience of being young, and the experience of being not so young — all in my head at once. I could hold it there the way you hold a parable or fable, but with all these tiny details, too. It also functioned like a kind of murder mystery: what killed the magic? Was it their values, was it aging, was it... was it...? It's such a beautiful, thoughtful, impeccably crafted book." —Sheila Heti
"Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vincenzo Latronico is the finest of writers." —Lauren Groff

• Rewriting Georges Perec.

• The age of aimless aspiration.

• Read an extract.

• An interview with the author and the translator.

• A reading.

The Honditsch Cross: A tale from 1813 by Ingeborg Bachmann (translated from German by Tess Lewis) $40
An early novel from the author of the wholly remarkable Malina, translated into English for the first time. In the final days of the Napoleonic occupation of Austria in 1813, a young theology student, returning from Vienna to his family home in Carinthia, finds the invading troops stationed there, led by a despotic officer who has been exploiting and terrorising his family and friends. He is immediately thrown into the centre of the conflict, torn between defending his homeland, the pull of physical desire, and the pursuit of his theological studies. In this work, Bachmann begins to explore themes that will pre-occupy her for the rest of her writing career: complex notions of nationality and patriotism, the roles and rights of women in patriarchal societies, the meaningless destruction of war and its aftermath, and the bitter moments of disillusionment that lead to intellectual maturity. [Paperback]
”A quietly furious work, bitterly conscious of the ideological threads that tie the blithe nationalism of the 19th century to its 20th century apotheosis. Bachmann’s father was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, and all her work is astoundingly clear-eyed about ambiguities, ambivalences and nostalgic rationalisations of fascism.” —The Berliner
"Equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett." —The New York Times Book Review
"Bachmann's vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet." —The Guardian

• Read Thomas’s review of Malina.

Gilgamesh: A new translation of the ancient epic by Sophus Helle $29
Gilgamesh is a Babylonian story about love between men; loss and grief; the confrontation with death; the destruction of nature; insomnia and restlessness; finding peace in one's community; the voice of women; the folly of gods, heroes, and monsters — and more. Translating directly from the Akkadian, Sophus Helle offers a literary translation that reproduces the original epic's poetic effects, including its succinct clarity and enchanting cadence. Millennia after its composition, Gilgamesh continues to speak to us in myriad ways. [Paperback]
"Looks to be the last word on this Babylonian masterpiece." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"Lively, earthy, and scrupulous in its scholarship." —Robert Macfarlane, New York Review of Books
"Sophus Helle's Gilgamesh is woven of earthly, muscular language that breathes an epic of gutsy dreams and ancient knowhow. In Helle's rendition, this scholar truly translates rhythm and movement until Gilgamesh breathes anew." —Yusef Komunyakaa
"The translation is elegant and eloquent. The essays and elucidations are learned, lively, and hugely illuminating. Sophus Helle is a poet, a scholar, and, if truth be told, a genius." —Marshall Brown, University of Washington
"Helle's new translation reminds us just what a miracle it is that Gilgamesh has survived, an emblem of mortality available only in fragments, yet speaking to our mortal loves and fears with undying force." —Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

• Prismatic Gilgamesh.

• Working with fragments.

• Challenges.

Natalja’s Stories by Inger Christensen (translated from Danish by Denise Newman) $36
modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron, takes an usual approach to the theme of migration by focusing on the shifting ground of meaning itself. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother — about her mother, "abducted" by a Russian from Copenhagen: taken to Russia, she tries to flee the Revolution; she dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. But the story is told and retold in marvelous ways, digressing playfully (often hilariously), and involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. Natalja's Stories springs surprise after surprise and, instead of a conventional heartbreaking story of loss and disaster, the book appears as a tantalising account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else — offering, in fact, a deconstruction of the usual take on migrant fate as a tragic narrative. [Paperback]
 "Her luminous prose confirms what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the 20th century." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whom I will read and reread again and again." —Siri Hustvedt

• Read an extract!

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman $80
Maira Kalman's most autobiographical and intimate work to date, Still Life with Remorse is a beautiful, four-color collection combining deeply personal stories and 50 striking full-color paintings. Tracing her family's story from her grandfather's birth in Belarus and emigration to Tel Aviv — where she was born — Maira considers her unique family history, illuminating the complex relationship between recollection, regret, happiness, and heritage. The vibrant original art accompanying these autobiographical pieces are mostly still lifes and interiors which serve as counterpoints to her powerful words. In addition to vignettes exploring her Jewish roots, Kalman includes short stories about other great artists, writers, and composers, including Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Robert Schumann. Through these narratives, Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

• Read Stella’s review.

• On walking and looking as a way of life.

• Women Holding Things.

Landfall 249: Aotearoa New Zealand arts and letters edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
For almost 80 years, Landfall has been a dedicated space for writers, artists and reviewers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Published twice a year, each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews and essays. Bringing together a range of voices and perspectives, from established practitioners to emerging talents, Landfall is always an exciting anthology with a finger on the pulse of innovation and creativity in Aotearoa today. Landfall 249: Autumn 2025 also announces the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Prize, an annual competition that encourages up-and-coming writers to explore the world around them through words. Landfall 249 will feature the winning essay, alongside the judge’s report from Landfall editor, Lynley Edmeades. [Paperback]

• The contributors to this issue.

• Look inside.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica (translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses) $33
In the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, the unworthy live in fear of the Superior Sister's whip. Seething with resentment, they plot against each other and await who will ascend to the level of the Enlightened - and who will suffer the next exemplary punishment. Risking her life, one of the unworthy keeps a diary in secret. Slowly, memories surface from a time before the world collapsed, before the Sacred Sisterhood became the only refuge. Then Luca arrives. She, too, is unworthy — but she is different. And her arrival brings a single spark of hope to a world of darkness. [Paperback]
”Barbaric, brutal and utterly beautiful. The Unworthy is a searing haunt of a novel that I will never forget.” —Lucy Rose
”Brutal and aching. A perfect fever dream of a book.” —Heather Darwent
”Unflinching, uncompromising, and unforgettable. Agustina Bazterrica shines a light at the end of the brutal and bleak path we are on so that maybe, just maybe, we can turn around and forge a new one.” —Paul Tremblay

• The author’s experience at a Catholic school was the foundation of this book.

Japan: An autobiography by Peter Shaw $50
Peter Shaw first went almost unwillingly to Japan 25 years ago, staying in Tokyo for only two days. Surprised at how little he knew or understood he was, however, smitten. In the following years he returned many times searching for answers about the country’s culture: its art, architecture, food, religion, history and people. Accompanied by many of his own photographs this book conveys a New Zealand writer’s feelings and thoughts about a unique culture. A nicely designed and produced volume with photographs throughout. [Paperback with French flaps]

• Look inside!

Carbon: The book of life by Paul Hawken $40
Carbon animates the entirety of the living world. Though it comprises only a tiny fraction of Earth's composition, our planet would be lifeless without it. From the intricate microscopic networks of fungi in the Earth's soils to the tallest trees of the forests to every cell in every animal, the very fabric of life on Earth is shaped by carbon. Though it is much maligned as a driver of climate change, blamed for the possible demise of civilisation, that is only one part of its story. In this stirring, hopeful and deeply humane book, Paul Hawken illuminates the omnipresence of this life-giving element and the possibilities it provides for the future of human endeavour, inviting us to see nature, carbon and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined and inseparably connected. [Paperback]
”Carbon is an enormously hopeful book — hopeful about the creatures we live among and about our innate human capacities.” —Elizabeth Kolbert
”A book you'll find yourself quoting and reading aloud to anyone who will listen. Hawken tells the beautiful story of carbon's role in our world-as our lifeblood, our synthesis with all living things, our planet's protector-with the grace and fluency of a deep, compassionate thinker. A masterful, urgent, powerful book.” —Isabella Tree

The Story of Scandinavia: From the Vikings to social democracy by Stein Ringen $30
1,200 years of drama, economic rise and fall, crises, kings and queens, war, peace, language and culture! Scandinavian history has been one of dramatic discontinuities of collapse and restarts, from the Viking Age to the Age of Perpetual War to the modern age today. For a thousand years, the Scandinavian countries were kingdoms of repression where monarchs played at the game of being European powers, at the expense of their own populations. The brand we now know as ‘Scandinavia’ is a recent invention. During most of its history, Denmark and Sweden, and to some degree Norway, were bloody enemies. These sentiments of enmity have not been fully settled. Under the surface of collaboration remain undercurrents of hatred, envy, contempt and pity. What does it mean today to be Scandinavian? For the author, whose identity is Scandinavian but his life European, this masterly history is a personal exploration as well as a narrative of compelling scope. [Paperback]

The Light of Asia: A history of Western fascination with the East by Christopher Harding $32
From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. The Light of Asia is a history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. [Paperback]

The Green Kingdom by Cornelia Funke $21
Caspia's summer is transformed when she discovers a bundle of letters containing ten botanical riddles in this enchanting adventure. Twelve-year-old Caspia hates big cities, especially one as busy as New York. So she isn't thrilled by the news that her parents are taking her to stay in Brooklyn. It's summer-devouring bad luck! But everything changes when Caspia discovers a bundle of letters, hidden in an old chest of drawers. They belonged to two sisters who lived there long ago. Each letter contains a 'green' riddle, with clues leading to a different plant. Caspia sets out to solve the riddles and, as she does, she meets friends she could never have imagined and discovers that anywhere can feel like home, if you are just brave enough to put down new roots. [Paperback]

Looking at Women Looking at War: A war and justice diary by Victoria Amelina $40
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country's literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children's book author. Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book. On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. [Paperback]
”Rare, powerful and affecting, a work of principle and courage by a truly brilliant and inspiring writer.” —Philippe Sands

Ten Little Rabbits by Maurice Sendak $21

The magician pulls ten rabbits out of a hat — and then puts them back in! Acounting book up to ten and back again. [Board book]

• Look inside!

There’s still a week of autumn left to squirrel away your store of books for the winter. Click through to our website to place your orders. Your books can be sent to you by overnight courier or collected from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Cry When the Baby Cries by Becky Barnicoat $60
A glorious antidote to parenting books, this darkly humorous, candid and insightful graphic memoir brings the early years of parenthood to life — in all their chaos, wonder and delirium. Intimate, relatable and very funny, Becky Barnicoat explores everything from the anatomy of the hospital bag to the frantic obsession with putting your baby down drowsy but awake, to the tyranny of gentle parenting. From pregnancy to the feral toddler years, Barnicoat extends a sticky hand to all new parents grappling with the impossible but joyous jigsaw puzzle of their lives. Barnicoat gives us permission to cry when the baby cries — and also laugh, snort, lie on the floor naked, drool and generally revel in a deeply strange new world ruled by a tyrannical tiny leader, growing bigger and more loved by the day. [Hardback]
”This book is a perfect testament to the wild ride of early parenting. It's tender, moving, beautifully drawn and also, extremely hilarious. Parents everywhere: you will feel very very seen.” —Isabel Greenberg

• Blood, sweat, tears, and body shaming.

• On turning motherhood into cartoons.

• The antidote to all that striving.

• Look inside!

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (translated from French by Natasha Lehrer) $40
"Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers." —Annie Ernaux
Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno started a new life in Mexico. Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, Sinno explores the different facets of memory — her own, her mother's, as well as her abusive stepfather's; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others. Sad Tiger — the title inspired by William Blake's poem ‘The Tyger’ — is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern — how to protect others from what the author herself endured? [Paperback]
"An achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath. Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse." —Lauren Christensen, New York Times
"Sad Tiger is not what you'd expect from a memoir about sexual abuse and trauma. Unlike Vanessa Springora's 2020 international bestseller Consent, say, which was also translated by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger is not a taut narrative of devastation and reclamation. At times Sinno writes with the essayistic force of Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory, at others with the vividness of Edouard Louis's novels. She shares Annie Ernaux's will to self-excavation and proclivity for experimentation. Sinno refuses to be hamstrung by genre, choosing a balletic approach, as if only a choreographed dance around her subject, again and again, will properly encapsulate its blast radius." —Elias Altman, Bookforum

• The atrocious memory palace.

An Uncommon Land: From an ancestral past of enclosure towards a regenerative future by Catherine Knight $50
A story of enclosure, dispossession, colonisation and — ultimately — hope for a better future. Through the lens of her ancestors’ stories, Catherine Knight throws light on the genesis and evolution of the commons, its erosion through enclosure and the ascendency of private property in parallel with the rise of capitalism — a history that has indelibly shaped New Zealand society and its landscape. Like other European settlers, the lives and future prosperity of the author’s ancestors had their foundations in war, land appropriation and environmental destruction — but in their histories lie glimmerings of the potentiality of commons: tantalising hints of an alternative path to a re-commoned, regenerative future. From a past of enclosure, resource exploitation and exponential growth, this book shines light on the potentiality of a different future, taking inspiration from our collective history. [Paperback]
”A highly original, intriguing and excellent work of scholarship, An Uncommon Land looks to the past to provide a pathway to a sustainable and fairer future. Weaving family histories of migration brilliantly into broader themes of colonisation, the commodification of land and climate change, Knight suggests we look to the concept of the commons as a way of managing finite environmental resources for the benefit of all. A timely, topical and essential read.” —Vincent O'Malley

I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s war, 1868—1869 by James Belich $40
"You were made a Pakeha, and the name of England was given to you for your tribe. I was made a Maori, and New Zealand was the name given to me. You forgot that there was a space fixed between us of great extent — the sea. You, forgetting that, jumped over from that place to this. I did not jump over from this place to that. Move off from my places to your own places in the midst of the sea." —Titokowaru.
Straddling the Maori and European worlds of the 1860s, Titokowaru was one of New Zealand's greatest leaders. A brilliant strategist, he used every device to save the Taranaki people from European invasion. When peaceful negotiation failed, he embarked on a stunning military campaign against government forces. His victories were many, before the battle he lost. Although he was 'forgotten by the Pakeha as a child forgets a nightmare', his vision was one that would endure. Titokowaru (Ngati Ruanui) was born in South Taranaki in 1823. Converting to Christianity (and pacifism) at 20, he later became disillusioned with Christianity and joined the bitter fighting of the period — protesting against continual land loss and the erosion of his people's rights. Leading a strong intertribal force, Titokowaru nearly succeeded in repelling the colonial forces in the Taranaki wars of 1868-69. But at the final hour his people deserted him, in circumstances that remain unclear. [Paperback]

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (translated from German by Daiel Bowles) $30
Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka. Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. [Paperback]
Long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
”Eurotrash is the auto-fictional account of a writer contemplating his unpleasant and abusive childhood, his morally repugnant ancestry and his toxic financial inheritance as he drives his crotchety, alcoholic, senile mother through the landscape outside Zurich. This doesn’t sound like much fun! But this book is one of the most entertaining and ultimately moving stories we read. It is brilliantly, bitterly funny, even as it documents a vicious and tarnished emotional universe. This book is immaculately and wittily translated; on every page its sentences sparkle and surprise like guilty-legacy gold.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Whether he's fictionalising history in order to question the validity of history, or fictionalising himself in order to question the validity of self, it is by now apparent to me and to his many readers that Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation.” —Joshua Cohen
”Christian Kracht is a master of the well-formed sentence, the elegance of which conceals horror. His novels involve Germany, ghosts, war and madness, and every conceivable fright, but they are also full of melancholy comedy, and they all hide a secret that one never quite fathoms.” —Daniel Kehlmann

Air by John Boyne $35
Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it's an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn't expecting them. Unsettled by his past, and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together, or tear them further apart. In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, John Boyne gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives. This novella completes ‘The Elements’ quartet. [Hardback]

Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw $40
The Bookseller at the End of the World described the first part of Ruth Shaw's tumultuous life, touching readers in powerful ways. It became an international bestseller, translated into eleven languages. Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World picks up Ruth's story with more charming, heartbreaking, brave and funny tales. Having found the love of her life, Lance, she tells of their sailing adventures together, world travels, conservation efforts and their wee bookshops. Life has never been easy for Ruth but, despite that, her book is chock full of extraordinary people and situations, many of them laugh-out-loud funny. Tales from the bookshops are interwoven with Ruth's story, along with expert book recommendations. Written in Ruth's characteristic style, this absorbing memoir traverses the highs and lows of a life lived to the full. [Hardback]

• Ruth Shaw (and a few other author-booksellers) interviewed.

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the time of Stalin by Michel Krielaas $55
When Stalin came to power, making music in Russia became dangerous. Composers now had to create work that served the state, and all artistic production was scrutinised for potential subversion. In The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars depicts Soviet musicians and composers struggling to create art in a climate of risk, suspicion and fear. Some successfully toed the ideological line, diluting their work in the process; others ended up facing the Gulag or even death. While some, like Sergei Prokofiev, achieved lasting fame, others were consigned to oblivion, their work still hard to find. As Krielaars traces the twists and turns of these artists' fortunes, he paints a fascinating and disturbing portrait of the absurdity of Soviet musical life. [Hardback]

Mythica: A new history of Homer’s world, through the women written out of it by Emily Hauser $40
Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece's greatest legends — and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men. In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world's greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer's epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women — queens, mothers, warriors, slaves — were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not - until now) remembered them. A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer's epics charted entirely by women — from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope — Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologised women of Greece's greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it. [Paperback]

The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems by Fiona Kidman $40
The Midnight Plane comes in to land exactly half a century after the 1975 publication of Kidman’s debut book, the poetry collection Honey and Bitters and contains poems from each of her six published collections as well as new sequences. There’s a sense in which The Midnight Plane works like an alternative memoir, offering a poet’s immediacy of vision and gift of linguistic precision on a life unfolding in real time. The Midnight Plane speaks to human relationships, to connection and disconnection, to the mystery and the majesty of life, to seasons of loss and cycles of renewal. Each of these poems is, in its own way, a midnight plane, flying in the dark, navigating for home in sometimes perilous conditions. [Hardback]

The Eyes of Gaza: A diary of resilience by Plestia Alaqad $35
In early October 2023, Palestinian Plestia Alaqad was a recent graduate with dreams of becoming a successful journalist. By the end of November, she would be internationally known as the 'Eyes of Gaza'.  Millions of people would be moved by her social media posts depicting daily life in Gaza amid Israel's deadly invasion and bombardment. Written as a series of diary extracts, The Eyes of Gaza shares the horrors of her experiences while showcasing the indomitable spirit of the men, women and children that share Plestia's communities. From the epicentre of turmoil, while bombs rained around her and devastation gripped her people, she witnessed their emotions, their gentle acts of quiet, necessary heroism, and the moments of unexpected tenderness and vulnerability amid the chaos. Through the raw honesty and vulnerability of a normal 22-year-old woman trying to make her way through a human tragedy, The Eyes of Gaza is a powerful call for peace. It recounts a harrowing experience, but it is not a heart-breaking lamentation. Rather, it is a manifesto for hope, advocating for a better future for Gaza, the Middle East, and our divided world. [Paperback]

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent $40
In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavík Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter. That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to write Burial Rites, the haunting story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland. The novel will go on to launch the author's stellar literary career and capture the hearts of readers across the globe. Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent's love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the power of creativity. [Hardback]

Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth by Ingrid Robeyns $30
An expert in inequality makes the case for a hard limit on personal wealth.  We all notice when the poor get poorer — when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this game-changing intervention, leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all — the rich included. In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear alternative — limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism — and the opportunity for a vastly better world — lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. [Paperback]
”Powerful — a must-read.” —Thomas Piketty
”Effortlessly navigating between ethics, political theory, economics and public policy, Ingrid Robeyns's nuanced and persuasive defence of limitarianism is also a much-needed manifesto for reimagining political institutions.” —Lea Ypi

A View from the Stars: Stories and essays by Cixin Liu $25
”We re mysterious aliens in the crowd. We jump like fleas from future to past and back again, and float like clouds of gas between nebulae; in a flash, we can reach the edge of the universe, or tunnel into a quark, or swim within a star-core. We re as unassuming as fireflies, yet our numbers grow like grass in spring. We sci-fi fans are people from the future.” —Cixin Liu, from the essay 'Sci-Fi Fans'
A View from the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years. [Paperback]
”His stories are filled with a sense of wonder as they push ideas about the future of humanity to their extremes, and the personal essays offer a rare glimpse into attitudes towards science fiction in China and how the genre has changed. A fascinating collection.” —Guardian

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The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey $38
In a sinisterly skewed version of England in 1979, thirteen-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a New Forest home, part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme. Each day the boys must take medicine to protect themselves from a mysterious illness to which many of their friends have succumbed. Children who survive are allowed to move to the Big House in Margate, a destination of mythical proportions, desired by every Sycamore child. Meanwhile, in Exeter, Nancy lives a secluded life with her parents, who never let her leave the house. As the government looks to shut down the Sycamore homes and place their residents into the community, the triplets’ lives begin to intersect with Nancy’s, culminating in revelations that will rock the children to the core. Gradually surrendering its dark secrets, The Book of Guilt is a spellbinding and profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others. [Paperback]

• The author introduces the book.

• Alarm bell.

• Monsters.

• Every beat feels right.

• Read the first chapter!

• Why 1979, specifically?

• Other books by Catherine Chidgey.

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman $38
Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit, and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before surrealism and a conceptual artist before conceptual art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demimonde to the artistic avant-garde, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century’s worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.” — Lucy Sante
”Ian Penman – critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of sentences like they’re snakes – is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.” —Brian Dillon

• The radical lord of light entertainment.

• Gymnopédies & Gnossiennes.

In the Rhododendrons: A memoir with appearances by Virginia Woolf by Heather Christle $60
When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with. On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Christle's mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager. Her private, British mother's revelation — a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship — propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England's sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's 'birthday hill' in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother's story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences. Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives. [Hardback]
”Christle's exacting rigour and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: ‘There is a difference between bones and a book,’ she writes, ‘but both have at their center a spine.’ What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners.” —Kaveh Akbar
”Stunning. I saw her working in a shaft of light, dusting layer after layer off her own life.” —Patricia Lockwood

• Back to the motherland.

• The body made metaphoric.

• Unaskable questions.

The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson $26
History is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing, ritual shouts. From whom? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes. From antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, this book charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood. [Paperback]

This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makereti $40
In her first book of nonfiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment. Included are frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have shown her many ways of being a Māori woman, the pain and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. What if we could transform the events that made us who we are? What if there were a way back to the beginning? [Paperback]

An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: Writing systems on the verge of vanishing by Tim Brookes $70
If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing — not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years — sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people — is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us — and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely. [Hardback]

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The Anatomy of Sand by Mikaela Nyman $30
the first poetry collection written in English by the Finnish–New Zealand poet Mikaela Nyman. In an expansive new collection encompassing myths and science, the political and personal, the local and global, lyrical and technical language, from outer space to the microscopic, Nyman ask us to pay attention to how our present-day actions will impact future ecological events. These poems listen to the creaking of space and wash of oceans, document the methane dunes on Pluto and eroding runes at Back Beach, and search the Finnish Kalevala mythology for answers. [Paperback]
”Like the tide, The Anatomy of Sand returns to the shoreline as a haven and a lens to examine our relationship with nature and environmental loss. Nyman is fascinated by the ways we insist on artificially replicating what nature has already abundantly provided, and reminds us that we do not sit outside of our environment. This book is urgent and timely, rich and lively.” —Helen Heath
”This is a book with flashes of humour, a querying of everything, and minute observation. There is a lovely mental toughness, an evolution in the poet herself, in a collection that is absolutely contemporary.” —Elizabeth Smither

The Origins on an Experimental Society: New Zealand 1769—1860 by Erik Olssen $65
a new account of the origins of New Zealand: how Pakeha settlers - nurtured on Enlightenment thought and evangelical humanitarianism — encountered Maori, and how the two peoples together developed a distinctively experimental society. With James Cook's arrival in 1769 and the subsequent colonisation, New Zealand became one of the few post-Enlightenment experiments in creating a new nation anywhere in the world. The Europeans who settled these islands brought with them a belief in the power of reason and experience to improve peoples and societies. Encounters between Maori and these new arrivals profoundly shaped the thoughts and behaviours of both peoples. Olssen argues that the people who settled New Zealand planned two experiments in making a better society. They hoped that, in contrast to earlier colonial projects, the indigenous New Zealanders would not be driven to extinction but eventually take their place as equals in a modern commercial society. And they aimed to create a society that was fairer and more just than the one they had left behind; a 'Better Britain'. While both experiments were first conceived by savants and philosophers, they gained ongoing support, by lodging in the hearts and minds of the settlers: whalers and missionaries, mothers and farmers. In turn, Maori adapted these new ideas to their own ends, giving up slavery and inter-tribal warfare, and adapting the institutions of the colonisers in ways that would re-define the experiments. This then is an ethnography of 'tangata Pakeha', a people of European descent changed by their encounters with 'tangata Maori' and their land — just as Maori were themselves changed — and the story of the society they built together. Ranging across intellectual and cultural history, from the beach at Paihia to the coffee houses of Paris, Olssen enables us to understand the origins of New Zealand anew. [Hardback]
”Erik Olssen's book is remarkably lucid and insightful on a broad front of historical scholarship; it is informed profoundly on philosophical, political and scientific thinking of the period, and overall a quite astonishing intellectual achievement.” - Atholl Anderson (Ngai Tahu)
”This new history argues that New Zealand was a series of ‘experiments’ in settling a country. The author tracks the ideas, philosophies and values which were carried in settlers' baggage, the early inter-connectedness between Maori and the newcomers that reshaped those experiments, and the profound significance of these decades for the future of the country and its peoples.” —Claudia Orange
”I found this book stunning, breathtaking even, in its scope and detail. It revisits and explores the origins, themes and complex patchwork of ideas that came together to underpin the founding years of Aotearoa New Zealand. Our early engagement with the intellectual and physical manifestations of global colonisation, as related by Olssen, is especially interesting. This is not an easy book but steady application to its contents leads to immeasurable rewards.” —Buddy Mikaere (Ngati Pukenga, Ngati Ranginui, Ngati Pikiao, Tuhoe)

Luminous by Silvia Park $37
In a fictional near-future Korea, robots have integrated seamlessly into society. They are housekeepers and policemen, teachers and bus drivers. They are our lovers. They are even our children. Siblings Jun and Morgan Cho haven t spoken to each other in several years. The children of a celebrated robot designer, both are still grieving the loss of their brother Yoyo, the earliest prototype for what humanoid robots have now become — nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. But Yoyo was always bound for a darker purpose, and his absence has left a chasm in the siblings lives. When a strange disappearance thrusts the siblings back together, neither of them realises that the investigation will not only force them to confront their fractured family’s past, but will also bring them back to Yoyo himself. [Paperback]
“Utterly beautiful.” —Raven Lailani
"With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death.” —Publishers Weekly

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki (translated from Japanese by Helen O’Horan) $27
A young woman named Izumi details her turbulent twenties in thirteen disarmingly candid vignettes set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo. Seamlessly delivering ennui alongside snark, and tragedy nose-to-nose with apathy, Set My Heart on Fire is singular representation of young womanhood, missteps and miscommunication, and music, men and meds. With chapters titled for tracks by The Zombies, The Supremes and the Rolling Stones, as well as songs by underground Japanese bands of the time, the music of the 1960s and 1970s permeates the story.  There are distinct traces of the fraught tenderness in Marguerite Duras's The Lover, and the raw, decadent post-war generational dissolution of Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue.  But Suzuki's novel is carried by her own singular charm and wit, which will be readily recognised and enjoyed by readers of her short stories. [Paperback]

The Incredible Insects of Aotearoa by Phil Sirvid and Simon Pollard $35
What do you call a grasshopper dressed as a gladiator? Why are sandfly bites so itchy? What links insects and Māori whakairo (carving)? How does a glow worm glow? Why does this book include sorcerers, vampires and dragons? What makes insects in Aotearoa so special? From our backyards to high in the mountains, through forests, along coastlines, and in the darkness of caves, award-winning science writer Simon Pollard and Te Papa insect expert Phil Sirvid answer these questions and more. Share in the secrets and marvels of our natural world through stunning close-up photographs, mātauranga Māori, insightful explanations, and meet-the-expert profiles. [Paperback]

• Look inside!

Private Revolutions: Coming of age in a new China by Yuan Yang $39
This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, dreaming of better futures. It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor. It is about June, who at fifteen sets what her family thinks is an impossible goal — to attend university rather than raise pigs. It is about Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong. And it is about Sam, who becomes convinced that the only way to change her country is to become an activist even as the authorities slowly take her peers from the streets. With unprecedented access to the lives, hopes, homes, dreams and diaries of four ordinary women over a period of six years, Private Revolutions gives a voice to those whose stories go untold. At a time of rising state censorship and suppression, it unearths the identity of modern Chinese society and, through the telling, something of our own. [Paperback]
”An engrossing book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women. What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart is the speed and magnitude of this upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time.” —Mythili Rao, Guardian

Disaster Nationalism: The downfall of liberal civilisation by Richard Seymour $47
The rise of the new far-right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte, the true peril lies elsewhere. They are but the political manifestations of a potent force — disaster nationalism. This mass cultural phenomenon, propelled through the vast networks of social media and fueled by far-right influencers, emerges from a reservoir of societal despair, fear, and isolation. At its core, disaster nationalism fixates on images of catastrophe — the 'Great Replacement,' Satanic 'cabals' — as explanations for its discontent. It yearns for an 'end of days,' a reckoning, a 'storm' as the QAnon faithful call it, to bring an end to its suffering. This yearning is only heightened by the relentless onslaught of real-world disasters — from economic recessions to global pandemics and ecological collapse. Within this seething cauldron, we witness not only the surge of far-right political movements but also the sparks of individual and collective violence against perceived enemies, from 'lone wolf' killers to terrifying pogroms. Should a new fascism emerge, it will coalesce from these very elements. This is disaster nationalism. In Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour delves deep into this alarming phenomenon, dissecting its roots, its influencers, and the threats it poses. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, this book offers a stark warning and a call to action. [Hardback]
”What thinker would you bring to an earth on fire? You would not want to leave Richard Seymour at home: he is essential company for an age of compound catastrophes.” —Andreas Malm
”One of the most consistently brilliant and lyrical thinkers writing today.” —China Mieville

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami $37
In a world without privacy, what is the cost of freedom? Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport and inform her that she will commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she presents an imminent risk to the person she loves most, and must now be transferred to a retention centre for twenty-one days to lower her risk score . But when Sara arrives at Madison to be observed alongside other dangerous dreamers, it soon becomes clear that getting home to her family is going to cost more than just three weeks of good behaviour. And as every minor misdemeanour, every slight deviation from the rules, adds time to her stay, she begins to wonder if there might be more here than first meets the eye. Then, one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and setting off a chain of events that lead Sara on a collision course with the companies that have deprived her of her freedom. [Paperback]
”A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future. An elegant meditation on identity, motherhood, and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience.” —Jennifer Egan

Wellness by Nathan Hill $28
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the 90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other. [Paperback]
”American storytelling at its era-spanning best. An immersive, multi-layered portrait of a marriage, Nathan Hill's follow-up to The Nix is a work of quiet genius, tackling a few big questions: What is truth? What is love? And therefore, inevitably, what is true love?” —Observer

Will This Home Do? by Sophie Gilmore $30
Apologising is hard, especially when you’re feeling mad, so when an older sister gets into a fight with her younger sister, she sets off to find a new home. First she tries the dog house — Will this home do? No, it’s too small! What about the large leafy tree — Will this home do? No, because soon it starts to rain. The shed is too dark; the loft is full of moths. Could the very best home be with her little sister after all? A story that begins with the breaking of a toy and ends with the mending of a relationship.

• Look inside!

The Tear Bottle: A graphic story of love and things by Annemarie Jutel $40
In a series of simple line drawings, Jutel tells the story of a family heirloom that is not quite what she and her sisters remembered. Via the comedy of family dynamics, and with the backdrop of history, she delves into serious issues of death, grief and forgiveness. This is a book about the objects families covet as a way of holding on to their past. It is told by bickering sisters trying to find out the truth about a family heirloom with a surprising twist. A graphic memoir with serious intent, its simple and colourful drawings invite readers to think about their own family histories. Is it really our heirlooms, or the stories we tell about them that help us to understand ourselves, our whānau and what matters to us?

• Look inside.

Another England: How to reclaim our national story by Caroline Lucas $35
The right have hijacked ‘Englishness’. Can it be reclaimed? With the UK more divided than ever, ‘England’ has re-emerged as a potent force in culture and politics. But today the dominant story told about the country serves solely the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of Englishness are cheerleaders for Brexit, exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia. Yet there are other stories, equally compelling, about who the English are: about the English people's radical inclusivity, their deep-rooted commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. These stories put the Chartists, the Diggers and the Suffragettes in their rightful place alongside Nelson and Churchill. They draw on the medieval writers and Romantic poets who reflect a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. And they include the diverse voices exploring the shared challenges of identity and equality today. Caroline Lucas delves into literary heritage to explore what it can teach us about the most pressing issues of our time: whether the toxic legacy of Empire, the struggle for constitutional reform, or the accelerating climate emergency. And she sketches out an alternative Englishness: one that all can embrace to build a greener, fairer future. [Paperback]
”Not just an inspiring, nuanced and deeply literate book, but that rarest of things — a necessary one.” —Jonathan Coe
”Cleverly deploys Elizabeth Gaskell, John Clare and Charles Dickens to demonstrate that a culture can be diverse and coherent, innovative and rooted; many stories told in one beautiful language.” —Telegraph
”Tells a new story about England and Englishness, and sets out the possibility for a progressive politics of land, place and nation. This is vital reading.” —Robert Macfarlane

New books for a new month! Autumn is the season for gathering enough books to see you through the reading months ahead. Click through to our website to secure your copies. We can have your books dispatched by overnight courier or ready to collect from our door.

On the Calculation of Volume: I by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland) $30
”It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate.” Tara Selter has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.") Balle is hypnotic in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume's gravitational pull — a force inverse to its constriction — has the effect of a strong tranquiliser, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is intoxicating. [Paperback with French flaps]
“On the Calculation of Volume I takes a potentially familiar narrative trope — a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day — and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator. This book presses its mood, its singular time signature and its philosophical depth into the reader. You feel you are in it, which is sometimes unnerving, sometimes soothing, and this effect lingers long after the book is finished.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Read Thomas’s review.

• Find out more about the book.

• Volume II uniform with this edition.

• Or choose this other edition!

• Other books on the 2025 International Booker Prize short list.

Slowing the Sun: Essays by Nadine Hura $40
”Hope is a shovel and will give you blisters.” Overwhelmed and often unmoved by the scientific and political jargon of climate change, Nadine Hura sets out to find a language to connect more deeply to the environmental crisis. But what begins as a journalistic quest takes an abrupt and introspective turn following the death of her brother. In the midst of grief, Hura works through science, pūrākau, poetry and back again. Seeking to understand climate change in relation to whenua and people, she asks: how should we respond to what has been lost? Her many-sided essays explore environmental degradation, social disconnection and Indigenous reclamation, insisting that any meaningful response must be grounded in Te Tiriti and anti-colonialism. Slowing the Sun is a karanga to those who have passed on, as well as to the living, to hold on to ancestral knowledge for future generations. [Paperback]
”Nadine’s writing can make us feel seen, less alone, more hopeful, more enlightened. He kaiwhakairo i te kupu, he­kaituhi­ ngā kokonga ngākau – a carver of words, a ­writer ­for all corners of the heart.” —Stacey Morrison (Ngāi Tahu, Te Arawa, Pākehā)

• How did Māui know when enough was enough?

• Narrating the seasons of grief.

• Standing shoulder to shoulder.

• More truth than my chest could hold.

• On the parallel worlds of climate change storytelling.

• Those riding shotgun.

• Raupatu.

The Covid Response: A scientist’s account of New Zealand’s pandemic and what happens next by Shaun Hendy $40
New Zealand’s pandemic response delivered one of the lowest Covid-19 health burdens in the world, thanks to early elimination and high vaccination rates. While border controls and early lockdowns were strict, domestic freedoms ultimately exceeded those in other advanced economies, making the country a global case study. Yet, these successes came at a cost — financial strain, social isolation and unequal access to support. How did we get here, and how did science shape decisions in real time? In The Covid Response, physicist Professor Shaun Hendy offers an insider’s perspective on New Zealand’s unique approach to the pandemic. He takes readers behind the scenes of the country’s science-driven response, sharing firsthand experiences as a key member of the advisory team at Te Pūnaha Matatini. Through this engaging narrative, Hendy unpacks the science behind critical decisions — ranging from lockdowns to the strategic use of genomic sequencing and data modelling. This book examines high-stakes decisions made in real time, their impact on New Zealand, and the lessons they offer for the future. [Paperback]

• A model response?

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) $30
While Tove Ditlevsen is now famous around the world as an extraordinary prose writer, in Denmark she has also long been celebrated as a poet. She published her first collection in her early twenties, and continued writing and publishing poetry until the end of her life. This new selection offers English readers a chance to explore her brilliant, surprising verse across nearly four decades of writing. In this playful, mournful, witty collection, little girls stand tip-toe inside adult bodies, achievements in literature and lethargy are unflinchingly listed, and lovers come and go like the seasons. With an introduction by Olga Ravn. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Meet the finest (and darkest) poet you've never read. Her poems read, at their best, like illuminations, transfiguring her life again and again” —Telegraph

The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by Adrian Duncan $30
The contemplative and moving third novel from Irish author Adrian Duncan, exploring love, grief and their representations in art. John Molloy, an Irish restorative sculptor meets an Italian sociologist Bernadette Basagni while working on a contemporary-art project in the Alpine city of I_. As he falls in love, a distressing moment from his youth rises into view — when his mother, Sandra, while one night praying alone at a country grotto, has a holy vision that leads to his family's ostracisation and disintegration. The disastrous outfall of this has resonated unchecked through his life. The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a novel told in two parts, a decade apart: the first is told in fragments or 'blinks' that lead John to Bologna and Bernadette; the second opens with a letter from home asking him to pray for the speedy death of an dying friend, which sets in motion a day-long odyssey through the ancient streets and churches of Bologna, where John must confront not just his present and his past but also the bedrock of his psyche. [Paperback with French flaps]
”One of the most important and intriguing writers working now.” —Niamh Campbell
”Uncanny, strange and exquisite, akin to the fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai.” —Financial Times
”The kind of work that makes you remember why you read.” —Sunday Business Post
”A deliberative and delicate reading experience, revelatory in the truest sense of that word.” —Guardian

• Between repose and movement.

• Art, writing, film.

The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A graphic biography by Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg $50
Through vivid artwork and compelling narrative, readers are invited to journey alongside Jane Austen as she navigates the challenges and triumphs that shaped her works. Told in three parts (Budding Writer 1796-1797; Struggling Artist 1801-1809; Published Author 1809-1817), the gritty circumstances of Austen's own genteel poverty and the small daily injustices so often borne by creative women at this time, are shown against the backdrop of Georgian England and reflect many of the plots and characters woven into Austen's greatest works. All the settings and scenarios presented are based upon the historical record, including the clothing, architecture, decor and Regency locations. Sprinkled throughout, the Easter eggs and witty references to popular screen adaptations of Austen's novels will satisfy the casual and avid Austen fan alike. [Hardback]
”Where does wonderful literature come from? This exciting and thoughtful book explores this wondrous mystery for those who love the work of Jane Austen and for those who find her name only vaguely familiar. My hat is off to the terrific Janine Barchas and the terrific Isabel Greenberg. I wonder how they do it.” —Daniel Handler
”Truly delightful and charming; so fresh, informative and funny. Even the most devoted ‘Janeite’ will learn something new. The graphics are sensational. All in all, a truly magical way to learn about the life and works of Jane Austen.” —Paula Byrne

• Look inside!

Alive: An alternative anatomy by Gabriel Weston $40
What does it mean to live in a body? For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn't help us navigate the reality of living in one. As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Weston found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience. In this captivating exploration of the body, Weston dissolves the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are. Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives, a fuller and more human picture of our bodies emerges — more fragile, frightening and miraculous than we could have imagined. [Paperback]
”An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy she redefines the genre. Alive is a tour of human life and bodies, but she also brings her own body, in the context of her own life, into an absolutely compelling narrative; sex, pregnancy, asylum seekers, breast implants and hearts — especially the author's own heart, in every sense. It is essential reading if you own a body and should be mandatory for all those who study them.” —Chris van Tulleken
”As Gabriel Weston demonstrates in this remarkable book, each organ of our body is a miracle of evolutionary imagination, performing tasks that are outlandishly creative and brilliant. An unusually compelling and illuminating book.” —Misha Glenny

• Custard yellow.

Universality by Natasha Brown $33
Words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency. On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral long-read exposé raises more questions than it answers. Universality is a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. Through a voyeuristic lens, it focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. A compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language. [Paperback]
”Universality is a precise dissection of class, wealth and power, written with a spareness that elevates and electrifies her prose. It's both intelligent and very entertaining.” —Elizabeth Day
”I emerged from this novel with the conviction that the murder victim Brown is here to avenge is discourse itself. Original, vital, and unputdownable.” —Tess Gunty

• The power of perspective.

Pub (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Philip Howell $23
The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In this unique book, Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of "time." But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Erudite, quirky, and amusing.” —Sebastian Faulks
”I never expected to read a philosophically alert book on British pubs. Philip Howell breathes life into this well-known but poorly understood object.” —Graham Harman

Mere by Danielle Giles $38
Norfolk, 990 AD. Deep in the Fens, isolated by a vast and treacherous mere, an order of holy sisters make their home. Under the steely guidance of Abbess Sigeburg they follow God's path, looking to their infirmarian, Hilda, to provide what comfort and cures she can. But when the mere takes a young servant boy, Sigeburg's grip falters and Hilda quickly realizes this place holds secrets darker and more unholy than she can fathom.  Then proud Sister Wulfrun, a recent arrival to the convent, has a vision: a curse is upon them and change must be brought. Is she saint or serpent? To Hilda, Wulfrun is a signal bolder and brighter than any fire set — one she cannot help but follow . [Paperback]
”It is rare for an author to fully recreate the strangeness of the past, but Danielle Giles has done exactly that.” —Costanza Casati

Wild Fictions by Amitav Ghosh $40
Wild Fictions is a collection of essays written over the past 25 years or so and published in various journals and periodicals. The essays can be clubbed under the broad headings of writings on literature and language, climate change and environment, human lives, travel and discoveries, and opinions and conversations. They focus on the abiding concerns that are reflected in Ghosh's works of fiction and non-fiction: colonisation, colonialism and its effects; the complex and delicate link between humans and nature; the ways in which we understand and interact with the world we live in; the importance of history and (re)discovery; how we tell stories, how we use language; and the importance of speaking and writing on issues and events that are key to our times. [Paperback]
”We owe a great debt to Ghosh's brilliant mind, avenging pen, and huge soul.” —Naomi Klein

Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko $30
This remarkable Australian novel features two extraordinary Indigenous stories set five generations apart. When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence collide with white justice. Two centuries later, fiery activist Winona meets Dr Johnny. Together they care for obstinate centenarian Granny Eddie, and sparks fly, but not always in the right direction. What nobody knows is how far the legacies of the past will reach into their modern lives. In this brilliant epic novel, Melissa Lucashenko torches Queensland's colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future. [Paperback]
”Lucashenko is an exhilarating writer, and this generous book is her most remarkable to date.” —Michelle de Kretser

Everything is Tuberculosis: The history and persistence of our deadliest infection by John Green $45
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticised as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year. In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry's story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

Your Face Belongs to Us: The secretive start-up that is dismantling your privacy by Kashmir Hill $39
When Kashmir Hill stumbled upon Clearview AI, a mysterious startup selling an app that claimed it could identify anyone using just a snapshot of their face, the implications were terrifying. The app could use the photo to find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family – even your home address. But this was just the start of a story more shocking than she could have imagined. Launched by computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and politician Richard Schwartz, and assisted by a cast of controversial characters on the alt-right, Clearview AI would quickly rise to the top, sharing its app with billionaires and law enforcement. In this riveting feat of reporting Hill weaves the story of Clearview AI with an exploration of how facial recognition technology is reshaping our lives, from its use by governments and companies like Google and Facebook (who decided it was too radical to release) to the consequences of racial and gender biases baked into the AI. Soon it could expand the reach of policing — as it has in China and Russia — and lead us into a dystopian future. Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story. It illuminates our tortured relationship with technology, the way it entertains us even as it exploits us, and it presents a powerful warning that in the absence of regulation, this technology will spell the end of our anonymity. 
”The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Whether you like it or not, your face has already been scraped from the internet, stored in a giant database, and made available to law enforcement agencies, private corporations, and authoritarian governments to track and surveil you. Kashmir Hill's fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.” —John Carreyrou

• NZ Police access controversial online facial recognition website.

Unforgetting by Belinda Robinson $40
Good Friday, 1962. Belinda, who's just turned thirteen, is driving with her mother, obstetrician Diana Mason, to the country home of her family friends for the Easter break. As they bump along a dusty coastal road, Belinda tells her mother a shocking story of abuse she has kept secret for nearly eight years. At the same time, her younger brother Julian reveals the secret to their father, playwright Bruce Mason, as they converge on their friends' house from a different direction. It will take more than sixty years for Belinda to reveal the details of this story publicly. Who was going to believe her? Her parents were well known and respected, and not just in literary and medical circles. But finally, triggered by Julian's sudden death and inspired by one of New Zealand's finest writers, Belinda tackles the process of 'unforgetting', reviewing her traumatic past and coming to terms with its consequences.

Pranzo: Sicilian(ish) recipes and stories by Guy Mirabella $70
In Pranzo Guy Mirabella delves into his Sicilian heritage. Here you will find the gusto of Italian pastas and sauces, alongside herbs and spices, and ingredients like kolhrabi and prickly pear. Seasonal and sumptuous, Mirabella conveys his zest for food, art, and life in the pages of Pranzo. Designed with a playful eye, the book is a treat and the recipes infused with nourishment and pleasure.

• Look inside!

• Browse our cookbooks.

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks $38
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz — just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy — collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street. After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf. Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death. [Hardback]

The End of Capitalism: Why growth and climate protection are incompatible — and how we will live in the future by Ulrike Herrmann $46
Capitalism has brought about many positive things. At the same time, however, it is ruining the climate and the environment, so that humanity's very existence is now at risk. 'Green growth' is supposed to be the saviour, but economics expert and bestselling author Ulrike Herrmann disagrees. In this book, she explains in a clear and razor-sharp manner why we need 'green shrinkage' instead. Greenhouse gases are increasing dramatically and unchecked. This failure is no coincidence, because the climate crisis goes to the heart of capitalism. Prosperity and growth are only possible if technology is used and energy is utilised. Unfortunately, however, green energy from the sun and wind will never be enough to fuel global growth. The industrialised countries must therefore bid farewell to capitalism and strive for a circular economy in which only what can be recycled is consumed. Herrmann makes a convincing argument that we won't get anywhere without personal restrictions and government planning. Her example for a solution is the British war economy of the 1940s. This is not a utopian scenario, but a comprehensive example of the restrictions and government-led plans needed now and in the future. [Paperback]

The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa (translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai) $25
Thirteen-year-old Nanami Kosaki loves reading. The local library is a home from home and books have become her best friends. When Nanami notices books disappearing from the library shelves, she’s particularly curious about a suspicious man in a grey suit whose furtive behaviour doesn’t feel right. Should she follow him to see what he’s up to?  When a talking tabby cat called Tiger appears to warn her about how dangerous that would be, together they’re brave enough to follow the frightening trail to find out where all the books have gone. Will Nanami and Tiger overcome the challenges of the adventure ahead?

Build an autumn store of books for the reading days ahead. We can send your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

House of Fury by Evelio Rosero (translated from Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft) $42
Taking place entirely on a single evening — Friday, April 10, 1970 — in a large Bogotá mansion, House of Fury tells a hair-raising story. Nacho Caiciedo, a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice, lives with his wife Alma and their six grown daughters. The Caiciedos have planned an enormous celebration in their home. But before the party has even started, the family is shocked by two pieces of news: their teenage daughter Italia is pregnant, and Alma's prodigal brother Jesús is expected at any moment. Guests from all levels of Bogotá society arrive, two earthquakes strike, and the party descends into debauchery; Nacho, out in the city streets, searching for Italia, is kidnapped by a ragtag militia, and its troops eventually invade the party and bring more chaos. House of Fury begins as a black comedy and unravels into a grim portent of the conflict that would rage across Colombia for fifty years. House of Fury is an indelible, fantastical work that with its unforgettable characters and unflinching, poetic, and humane voice, brings to light Colombia's violent history. [Paperback]
”Chekhov would've been mesmerized. In lieu of a single gun, Evelio Rosero sets up the contents of an entire armory. Building the intricate, involute procession of a single terrible night, the Colombian writer braids the many threads of his story with a candor and a knowingness that always hints towards the devastation to come. That House of Fury still manages to astound, then, is a testament to Rosero's finesse of the macabre, his merciless indictment of his nation's brutal history, and his utter disregard for narrative comforts.” —Xiao Yue Shan, Asymptote Journal

On the Clock by Claire Baglin (translated from French by Jordan Stamp) $38
In one strand, a young family bumps and scrapes through life. The hapless father balances demanding factory shiftwork, while the mother constantly prioritises the needs of others over her own. But there is also happiness: a trip to the seaside; sibling squabbles, games and laughter; tenderness and support. In another strand, a young woman describes her days working in a burger chain. It is exhausting, repetitive labour, too often peopled by tricky customers and even trickier managers. Hours pass. Days, weeks, years. It is an existence that marks the body and mind and governs a life. What emerges, alive with eloquent detail, is a compelling exploration of social inequality. Writing with nimble nuance, a sly, subtle wit, and a sharp ear, Claire Baglin marks her debut in On the Clock as a blazingly original talent. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A sophisticated new voice exploring the French working-class experience and the ways in which language may express its precarious specificities.” —Times Literary Supplement

• What does the literature of the working class look like?

The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel (translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey) $36
When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man's desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences. Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Guadalupe Nettel yet again walks into uncertain terrain with these mysterious stories. There are secrets everywhere, she says, especially in life's most intimate and familiar aspects. The Accidentals never loses its sense of things being out of joint, and Nettel explores these fears with calm and with beauty.” —Mariana Enriquez
”I adored this collection, it spread its roots out within me. Nettel is an extraordinary writer.'“ —Daisy Johnson
”The Accidentals is a striking and compelling collection that searches for the extraordinary within the ordinary. Each narrative veers seamlessly from the mundane to the existential; the writing is deft, and unsettling prose imbues the work with a profound resonance. I loved these stories, mad and controlled, and brilliant.” —Elaine Feeney
”Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature. I envy how naturally she makes use of language; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profound and penetrating knowledge of human nature.” —Valeria Luiselli

Visas Now! Aotearoa’s response to global refugee emergencies by Murdoch Stephens et al $30
This incisive study examines Aotearoa’s history of humanitarian immigrations and then zooms in on the high-stakes, one-off intakes of Syrians, Afghans and Ukrainians in the past decade. The book also includes nine people who share how their communities came together to seek emergency refugee intakes, including some whose calls went unanswered. Essential reading for anyone interested in humanitarian protection in a time of crisis. [Paperback]

• What’s inside.

• What happened to my friend.

Atlas of the New Zealand Wars, Volume 1: 1834—1864, Early Engagements to the Second Taranaki War edited by Derek Leask $90
This splendid and completely fascinating book will add new dimensions to your understanding of this pivotal period, and demonstrates the central place of cartography to the colonial project. In the Atlas of the New Zealand Wars, five decades of maps and plans from 1834 to 1884 provide remarkable new insight into the deep conflicts running through nineteenth-century Aotearoa. Beginning with early skirmishes off the Taranaki coast and at the Chathams, Volume One follows the tracks inland from the Bay of Islands towards the Hokianga in the Northern Wars; it reveals the web of Te Rauparaha's influence radiating out from Kapiti to Port Nicholson and across Cook Strait to the Wairau; it takes us inside the barracks and ramparts of the colony's new towns; and concludes as the brewing unrest around Waitara in Taranaki explodes into war. Through the maps, we meet the people: Hone Heke and FitzRoy, Te Rangitake and Pratt, warriors and missionaries; and we go where they went: from the flagpole at Kororareka to Kawiti's pa at Ruapekapeka, up the Hutt River to Boulcott's farm, across Taranaki from Waitara to Kaitake pa. Through both tangata and whenua we understand the conflicts and their consequences anew. Based on thirty years of research, the Atlas of the New Zealand Wars reveals a complex series of challenges and misunderstandings, skirmishes and negotiations, battles and wars that have profoundly shaped the lives of Māori and Pākeha on these islands ever since. [Hardback]
”Derek Leask’s Atlas is a magnificent labour of love. It adds a whole new — visual — dimension to our understanding of the New Zealand Wars.” — James Belich, Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History, University of Oxford

• Look inside!

Surplus Women by Michelle Duff $35
Survival, friendship, love, desire, pain, freedom. Jess is the only one in her group who hasn’t lost her virginity. Genevieve is being held captive in a dug-out with her gymnastics nemesis from 40 years ago. At night, Jade absorbs catcalls like Mario powering up on mushrooms. From heaven, the Dream Team data-analyses human destinies while worrying about their job security. As Whetū and Sia race to the hospital in the rain, Whetū remembers another night that changed everything. This is a collection of stories about women in past, present and future Aotearoa. Michelle Duff’s cast of hungry teenage girls, top detectives who forget to buy milk, frustrated archivists, duplicitous real estate agents, and ‘surplus women’ are all as vivid as wafts of Impulse from a backpack in the 90s. These stories move nimbly from realism to comic overdrive, from the outlandish to the simply true, with characters reappearing from new angles. As they meditate on power and patriarchy, love and bad decisions, these stories remind us of the sweet dreams we used to have and how it feels to wake up from them. [Paperback]
”Vibrant, eclectic, sharp as hell. We’re in the presence of a writer who is acutely aware of the way each story whispers to another — especially, crucially, around what girls and women leave chronically unsaid, the surplus silence in our lives.” —Tracey Slaughter
”The characters are unforgettable. This is a voice I am happy to spend time with, a voice that is offering something new.” —Tina Makereti

Zone by Mathias Énard (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell) $28
”Énard 's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the ‘Zone’), past and present. Énard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 496-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Énard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Énard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them.”  —Thomas. [New paperback edition]

Death Goddess Guide to Self Love by Carin Smeaton $30
Death Goddess sings loud, proud and offkey about the trauma, mess and gore of our awa atua, red river fox, our frenemy enemy ovaries! This goddess isn’t afraid of nothing. She’s not afraid to spill her moon sickness on the western line. She is not afraid to kick up a storm in colonial institutions. She’s not gonna wear their shame. Rather, this collection kicks these brutal systems high up into the whetu for a pulse check. She’s Carin Smeaton’s third full length collection of new original poetry, her unexpected baby, her new born freedom fighter! [Paperback]
"Carin’s kupu come sideways, they break the rules, they respect the kuia and the power of slang, her poems are a testament to staying sly and aware, her angles are always a beautiful surprise, she embraces the ordinary and the divine, and biting into her mahi is to experience both, like popping candy let loose in the cage of the waha." —Talia Marshall

Going Mainstream: Why extreme ideas are spreading, and what we can do about it by Julia Ebner $28
Incels. Anti Vaxxers. Conspiracy theorists. Neo-Nazis. Once, these groups all belonged on the fringes of the political spectrum. Today, accelerated by a pandemic, global conflict and rapid technological change, their ideas are becoming more widespread: QAnon proponents run for U.S. Congress, neo-fascists win elections in Europe, and celebrity influencers spread dangerous myths to millions. Going Mainstream asks the question: What is happening here? Going undercover online and in person, UK counter-extremism expert Julia Ebner reveals how, united by a shared sense of grievance and scepticism about institutions, radicalised individuals are influencing the mainstream as never before. Hidden from public scrutiny, they leverage social media to create alternative information ecosystems and build sophisticated networks funded by dark money. Ebner's candid conversations with extremists offer a nuanced and gripping insight into why people have turned to the fringes. She explores why outlandish ideas have taken hold and disinformation is spreading faster than ever. And she speaks to the activists and educators who are fighting to turn the tide. Going Mainstream is a dispatch from the darkest front of the culture wars, and a vital wake-up call. [Paperback]
''With unparalleled insight and urgency, Ebner reveals the dangerous spread of extremist beliefs. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the terrifying new reality we face.'' —Eliot Higgins, author of We Are Bellingcat

Powsels and Thrums: A tapestry of a creative life by Alan Garner $45
In this memoir, Garner traces the line of his life: from a working-class childhood in the landscape of Cheshire during World War II, through a grammar school education and on to the University of Oxford, and then home to see if he could become what he most desired: a writer. We see the serendipitous moments that drove his course, from coming-of-age in a period of great cultural change, to crossing paths with a famous mathematician while out long-distance running, to the fateful day he chanced across Blackden, the medieval hall, miraculously located next to the giant telescope at Jodrell Bank, that was to become his lasting home and the setting for Treacle Walker. As Garner tells us, a lifetime of working with a pen produces the powsels and thrums of research, imagination and story. These oddments can be shaped into something more than its parts: a vivid tapestry of a creative life that will inspire any reader. [Hardback]
”Who could resist such a title? The term derives from handloom weaving, Alan Garner's great-grandfather's trade, and refers to the scraps of cloth that weavers kept for themselves - an evocative metaphor for the writings collected herein. These snippets, produces on the same magical loom, together attain a mesmerizing wholeness, vibrating with life and curiosity.” —Observer
”A sequence of work collected from various sources across the years which offers a remarkable window into Garner's mind and heart. I use the word window advisedly, for Garner's prose is as clear as glass, perfectly conveying the precision of his thought. You don't have to know his work well to become immersed in this little book.” —Spectator

• Blackden and Jodrell Bank.

Colony by Annika Norlin (translated from Swedish by Alice E. Olsson) $38
One morning, Emelie can't get out of bed. Her therapist calls it burnout. Her neighbour calls it the tiny work death. She needs to get away from the brightness of the city lights, the noise of the people, the constant demands, so she goes to the woods, pitches her tent overlooking the lake, breathes. And that's where she sees them, the Colony- A man with a sad face. A tall, strong, older woman. A woman in her forties, squatting to examine an ant hill. Another woman in her forties, short, long hair, ample bosom, good posture - the leader? An extremely beautiful man. A slightly younger man, in a Helly Hansen jacket and trucker hat. And a teenage boy, standing a little way from the group. Who are they? What do they mean to each other? And why do they behave in such strange ways- thanking the fish they eat, sleeping under a tree, singing off key, dancing without music, never letting the boy fully in? As Emelie becomes more and more drawn to the Colony, she begins to re-evaluate her own lifestyle. Wouldn't it be nice to live as these seven do? Apart from society and its expectations. But groups always have their dynamics and roles. Which are you? And what if you want to change? [Paperback]

Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages edited by Michelle Elvy and Vaughan Rapatahana $30
This sparkling collection of stories brings more than 40 languages together, highlighting the complex realities of Aotearoa’s multicultural and multilingual society. Including microfictions and creative nonfictions, plus 12 essays from language practitioners and experts, Te Moana o Reo holds words to the light, examining, contemplating and declaring who we are. This is a 21st-century view of Aotearoa, a taonga for our world. Writers include: David Eggleton, Airana Ngarewa, Melanie Kwang, Karlo Mila, Ghazaleh Gol, James Norcliffe, Robert Sullivan, Lynn Jenner, Harry Ricketts, Jana Grohnert, Serie Barford, Lynn Davidson, Renee Liang, Hēmi Kelly. [Paperback]

Mozart in Italy: Coming of age in the land of opera by Jane Glover $28
At thirteen years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who had captured the hearts of northern Europe, but his father Leopold was now determined to conquer Italy. Together, they made three visits there, the last when Mozart was seventeen, all recounted here by conductor Jane Glover. Father and son travelled from the theatres and concert salons of Milan to the church-filled streets of Rome to Naples, poorer and more dangerous than the prosperous north, and to Venice, the carnivalesque birthplace of public opera. All the while Mozart was absorbing Italian culture, language, style and art, and honed his craft. He met the challenge of writing Italian opera for Italian singers and audiences, and provoked a variety of responses, from triumph and admiration to intrigue and hostility: in a way, these Italian years can be seen as a microcosm of his whole life. [Paperback]

Borderlines: A history of Europe told from the edges by Lewis Baston $40
Europe's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. In Borderlines, political historian Lewis Baston journeys along twenty-nine key borders from west to east Europe, examining how the map of the continent has been redrawn over the last century, with varying degrees of success. The fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but today's map of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945. To journey to the centre of the story of Europe, Baston takes us right to its edges, bringing to life the fascinating and often bizarre histories of these border zones. We visit Baarle, the town broken into thirty fragments by the Netherland-Belgium border, and stop in Ostritz, the eastern German town where Nazis held a rock festival. We meander the back lanes of rural Ireland, and soak up the atmosphere in the Viennese-style coffee houses of the elegant Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. Through these borderlands, Baston explores how places and people heal from the scars left by a Europe of ethnic cleansing and barbed wire fences, and he searches for a better European future — finding it in unexpected places. [Paperback]

Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the countryside — Finding home in an English garden by Marchelle Farrell $28
What is home? It's a question that has troubled Marchelle Farrell for her entire life. Years ago she left Trinidad and now, uprooted once again, she heads to the peaceful English countryside — and finds herself the only Black woman in her village. Drawn to her new garden, Marchelle begins to examine the complex and emotional question of home in the context of colonialism. As her relationship with the garden deepens, she discovers that her two conflicting identities are far more intertwined than she had realised. Winner of the Nan Shepherd Prize. [Paperback]

Clara and the Birds by Emma Simpson $35
For as long as she can remember, Clara has always been fascinated with birds--where they go, how they take flight, and the way they immediately fly away from her when she comes into contact with them. Like the birds she so admires, Clara is considered shy by those around her. She too feels the urge to flee the company of others, preferring the comforting bubble of solitude instead. Convinced that her desire to be alone is a weakness, she fails to find her voice or recognize her own inner strength. That is, until she has a chance encounter with a bird who doesn't immediately fly away. [Hardback]

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Pakistan: Recipes and stories from home kitchens, restaurants, and roadside stalls by Maryam Jillani $65
Thanks to shared borders with Afghanistan, China, India, and Iran, and a history of migration and trade, Pakistani dishes draw upon a marvelous array of flavours and ingredients that make food one of the country's finest qualities. With over 100 recipes for sauces, chutneys, aromatic curries and subtly spiced vegetables, Pakistan is a perfect introduction to readers new to the cuisine and a welcome reminder of favorites to those already familiar. A few of the recipes that await: Spiced Chicken Dumplings, Lentil Fritters in Yogurt, Tangy Potato Curry, Slow-Cooked Lamb, Saffron-Infused Flatbread, and Parsi Wedding Custard. Along with essays profiling each of the country's regions, abundant and dramatic photography, and a show-stopping package, Pakistan is a cookbook to be read, savoured, and cooked from. [Hardback]

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These books are all keen to sit on the top of your reading pile. Which will you choose? We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Phantom Limb by Chris Koehler $45
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. [Hardback]
”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

The Ways of Paradise: Notes from a lost manuscript by Peter Cornell (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $28
A book at the intersection of fiction and essay, on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history. In his foreword, Peter Cornell presents this so-called found manuscript as the work of a now-deceased, obscure researcher who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden working on his magnum opus. Upon his death, no trace of this work remains aside from this set of footnotes notes and fragments which form an enigmatic set of texts. Ranging from the Crusades to Ruskin, Freud to surrealism, cubism, automatic writing, Duchamp, the Manhattan Project, Pollock and Smithson, this cult book, first published in Sweden in 1987, is now translated into English for the first time. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Like a collision between the fantastical libraries of Borges, David Markson’s art obsessed micronarratives and Iain Sinclair’s occult strain of psychogeography. The Ways of Paradise is a labyrinth I never wanted to escape.” —Chris Power
”Who could have imagined that a set of imaginary orphaned footnotes could yield so much pleasure and fascination? More than a study of the labyrinth motif, The Ways of Paradise is itself a labyrinth, an apparently slim volume pulsing with infinite, overlapping worlds, an intricate meditation on the abysses of reality and illusion.” —Joshua Cohen
”The Ways of Paradise is the story of a lost manuscript and the labyrinth of enigmas through which its obscure author wandered, a book that pleasurably situates the reader at the centre of the idea of fiction, a place of everything and nothing from which ever-widening circles of mystery and meaning spread out.” —David Hayden
”Just as any person tracking a spiral or walking a labyrinth will find their sense of space and time collapsed, viewing moments in the past and future of their journey from vividly altered perspectives as they make their way, so the reader of this remarkable ‘manuscript’ will be similarly enlightened. Open, allusive, constantly expanding its appreciation of the covert relations between culture and history, place and belief, The Ways of Paradise embodies its own utopian premise. Assembled with a lightness of touch and a precision in detail, profound in its accumulative insights, it understands that any book aspiring to the fullest incarnation of its potential remains in process more than it offers an arrival. No longer are fragments deployed only formally; rather they serve as waymarkers on a quest passage to the interior, the final labyrinth of human imagination, and the mind’s own mysterious corridors. The spaces between entries are where the doors to this charged site lie. Each traveller will find their own entrance, and each will surely be entranced.’ —Gareth Evans

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Mark Adams: A survey — He kohinga whakaahu by Sarah Farrar $80
Photographer Mark Adams is known for his focus on Samoan tatau, Māori–Pākehā interactions in Rotorua, carved meeting houses, locations of significance for Ngāi Tahu in Te Waipounamu, and Captain James Cook’s landing sites reflect his deep engagement with our postcolonial and Pacific histories. This first-ever comprehensive survey of his work honours one of our most distinguished — and continually compelling — photographers. It includes photographs taken across the Pacific, the United Kingdom and Europe that explore the migration of artistic and cultural practices across the globe, and examine the role of museums, and photography itself, in this dynamic and ongoing cross-cultural exchange. [Hardback]

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Being, Seeing, Making, Thinking: 50 Years of the Chartwell Project edited by Sue Gardiner and Megan Shaw $50
Since its establishment in 1974, Chartwell has championed the importance of creative visual thinking, shaping an expansive collection of contemporary art and an enduring programme of philanthropic and educational support. Illustrating over 150 images from the Chartwell Collection, the book features new writing on 50 selected artworks from New Zealand, Australia and further afield as well as rarely seen archival images of artists and exhibitions. The book offers unprecedented insight into the art, artists and remarkable story and philosophy of The Chartwell Project. Featuring a preface by Chartwell’s founder, Rob Gardiner, an essay by Chartwell’s chair, Sue Gardiner, a Timeline by co-editor Megan Shaw and 50 accompanying texts on artworks, this landmark book offers unprecedented insight into the art, artists and remarkable story and philosophy of the Chartwell Project. [Flexibound]

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• Creative thinking in action.

Groundwork: The art and writing of Emily Cumming Harris by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson $60
Part inspired creative endeavour and part determined detective work, this long overdue book brings to light one of New Zealand's most significant botanical artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just as Emily Harris's beautiful paintings occupy a liminal space between scientific botanical illustration and art, so this book occupies a shifting ground between biography and imagineered monograph. The result is often moving and always intriguing. Importantly, it restores to Aotearoa art history a figure who had almost disappeared. Emily Harris has been examined alongside her artist peers Sarah Featon and Georgina Hetley, but until this book neither her distinctive voice nor her almost 200 surviving images have been heard or seen in any quantity outside of archival or online spaces. Her life story is remarkable and her diaries, letters, poems and paintings constitute a fascinating legacy. Harris was born in England in 1837 and dies in Nelson in 1925. [Hardback]

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• Michele Leggott’s poetry collection Face to the Sky finds a special connection with Emily Cumming Harris.

Shade and Breeze by Quynh Tran (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $45
Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. The younger brother, always on the periphery, always an observer, gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect. The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade. In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Tran’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family. [Paperback]
”A magic voice. Working with the coming-of-age in a smalltown narrative, Quynh Tran creates a world completely of its own kind, a story of belonging and estrangement, and of the refugee experience. In a sensual, dreamy prose, still so very real, with an authority reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Tran has written a first novel that shines like a precious gem.” —Monika Fagerholm
”A perceptive debut, where the significant events are intentionally placed in the background, in line with the family’s wishes. Not everything should be discussed, claims the mother whose anger instead turns into a physical condition — a slap here and there. Nobody is capable of seeing how their actions cause a ripple effect, how human darkness is passed down through generations. In different ways, the family members try to find a mutual place where they can love one another. This makes Shade and Breeze a complex, delicate, and wistful debut. It deserves to be pulled into the light.” —Sydsvenskan

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet $33
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertiliser, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. [Paperback]

• The immanent ur-language.

The History of Medicine in Twelve Objects by Carol Cooper $45
THE TREPHINE, THE BONE SAW, THE MASK. THE MICROSCOPE. THE STETHOSCOPE. THE ETHER INHALER, THE HYPODERMIC SYRINGE, THE OBSTETRIC FORCEPS, THE X -RAY MACHINE, THE E.C.T. MACHINE, THE HIP PROSTHESIS, THE HEART-LUNG MACHINE. Over the course of centuries, the ways in which doctors have engaged with sickness has changed drastically, and so too have the tools at their disposal. The history of these medical tools is truly astounding, revealing the true extent of human ingenuity, curiosity, and compassion. [Hardback]

The Companion to Volcanology by Brent Kininmont $25
The Companion to Volcanology is not a field guide to volcanoes. But tectonic shifts are present in Brent Kininmont's second book of poetry, and so are companions. The child, for instance, carried up a mountain in the titular opening poem, and companions alive to the brevity of their time together. Kininmont, who grew up in Aotearoa, has lived in Japan for many years, and so these poems are of a life between two places and of the body in anxious or joyful motion. [Paperback]
”Kininmont’s terrific second book has that sense of lived experience finding forms which release thought and feeling. I read it in one go as a kind of interrupted story.” —Damien Wilkins
”Luminous, surprising, inventive, original.” —Paula Green

Umai: Recipes from a Japanese Home Kitchen by Millie Tsukagoshi Lagares $65
In this beautiful book, you have precision alongside the simple and relaxed. Discover unfussy lunch dishes and favorite family meals. Find recipes that are a joy to make together and to share. Millie Tsukagoshi Lagares guides you through her home kitchen and out onto the streets to experience food is both serene and exhilarating. From dumplings to fungi to matcha cookies, you will find accessible recipes that will delight and sooth in the making and the eating. [Hardback]
”A vibrant exploration of Japanese cuisine with beautiful writing and exciting recipes to nourish the soul.” —Ixta Belfrage

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Caret by Adam Mars-Jones $30
”We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?”; “People in authority are always saying you should know your rights, though I've noticed they don't much enjoy it when you do.”; “Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day - it just can't be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away... We're off the books.” That's John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren't just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don't be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world. Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult's daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play. [Paperback]
”Thank god for John Cromer and his creator Adam Mars-Jones, one of the funniest, most self-aware characters in English fiction, whose minute observations on everything from constipation to lust are a source of unexpected delight.” —Linda Grant
”Mars-Jones is building a facsimile of existence; a map with a scale that seems, when you’re reading it, to be closing on 1:1. It’s an inordinately bold technique, but in the end it succeeds: it feels, as we follow the seemingly endless meander of Cromer’s thoughts, that we’re not so much reading a story, as living in one.” —The Guardian

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God and the Devil: The life and work of Ingmar Bergman by Peter Cowie $40
A chronicle of the life and career of one of film's defining figures, God and the Devil draws on exclusive extracts from Bergman's diaries, letters and production workbooks. Peter Cowie brings us close to the man and the artist, as he wrestled with themes of love, sex and betrayal — with the figure of Death always hovering overhead. [Now in paperback]
"A commanding portrait: one that consistently ties events in his life to specific scenes, themes and locations in his movies. Having met Bergman in 1969 and corresponded with him until 1995, veteran film author Peter Cowie is able to channel first-hand knowledge of Bergman into a book that's respectful without being overly reverential." —Matt Looker, Total Film
"Indispensable, rich, engaging, thorough." —Sight & Sound

Munichs by David Peace $40
February 6, 1958, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on take-off at Munich Airport. On board were the young Manchester United team, 'the Busby Babes', and the journalists who followed them. Twenty-one of the passengers died instantly, four were left fighting for their lives while six more were critically injured. Twenty-four hours later, Jimmy Murphy, the assistant manager of Manchester United, faced the press at the Rechts der Isar Hospital: 'What of the future, you ask? It will be a long, hard struggle. It took Matt Busby, Bert Whalley and myself twelve years to produce the 1958 Red Devils. It was long, hard, tiring work, but we succeeded. At the moment, I am so confused, so tired and so sad, I cannot think clearly, but what I do know is that the Red Devils will rise again.' Munichs is the story of how Manchester United rose again, of the crash and its aftermath, of those who survived and those who did not, of how Britain and football changed, and how it did not; a novel of tragedy, but also of hope. [Paperback]
”Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation.” —Richard Lloyd Parry, The New York Times

Pearl: A graphic novel by Sherrie Smith and Christine Norrie $21
”We are in Japan in the 1940s with Amy, a 13-year-old Japanese American girl born in Hawaii, sent to visit her ailing great-grandmother. After Pearl Harbour is bombed Amy is stuck in Japan, where she is conscripted by the military to be a Monitor Girl listening in and translating U.S. radio messages. The other story thread is the one her great-grandmother tells her: the Japanese annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in Okinawa in 1879. Both are stories of survival and hope, and for Amy, identity, the conflict of being both Japanese and American. Christine Norrie’s illustrations capture the confusion and emotion of the situation, and the sharp singular colour palette has great impact.” —Stella

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Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy by Quinn Slobodian $30
An important book right now, showing how capitalist extremists profit from the collapse of the democratic nation. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalisation has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities — tax havens, free ports, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation — and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government altogether. Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians — from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel — around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled. [Paperback]

Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams $35
Eley Williams returns with a thrilling collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient — from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. A courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. A child's schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. Elsewhere, an editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention, and an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips. Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to account: their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths. [Paperback]
”Stories that work from the inside out: glancing, intriguing.” —Guardian
”Erudite and audacious.” —Kieran Goddard
”Frequently brilliant and deeply pleasurable.” —Caoilinn Hughes

Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands by Annie Worsley $29
Annie Worsley traded a busy life in academia to take on a small-holding or croft on the west coast of Scotland. It is a land ruled by great elemental forces — light, wind and water — that hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits and what grows. Windswept explores what it means to live in this rugged, awe-inspiring place of unquenchable spirit and wild weather. Walk with Worsley as she lays quartz stones in the river to reflect the moonlight and attract salmon, as she watches otters play tag across the beach, as she is awoken by the feral bellowing of stags. Travel back in time to the epic story of how Scotland’s valleys were carved by glaciers, rivers scythed paths through mountains, how the earliest people found a way of life in the Highlands — and how she then found a home there millennia later. [Paperback]
”Windswept is a wonderful work, prose-painted in bold, bright strokes like a Scottish Colourist's canvas. It is a story of learning to keep time differently, in one of the most spectacular landscapes in Britain. Annie Worsley has written a gorgeous almanac or year-book in which the minutes, hours and months are marked not by the tick of clock-hands but weather-fronts, bird migrations and plant-patterns of growth and decay.” —Robert Macfarlane
”A shaft of golden stormlight, a blast of pure Highland air, Windswept is an exhilarating account of life lived closer to the elements than most of us will ever have the chance to experience.” —Melissa Harrison
”I have read pages and pages of this wonderful book, swept away by its beauty and understanding, its chromatic brilliance, flickering and surging into colour at every turn, moulded to its mountains and all the subtleties of its winds and skies. Honestly it is a great, great book.” —Adam Nicolson

Fog Island by Tomi Ungerer $35
Two young siblings find themselves cast away on mysterious Fog Island. No one has ever returned from the island's murky shores, but when the children begin to explore, they discover things are not quite as they expected. Ungerer's captivating drawings evoke the eerie beauty and magic surrounding this timeless adventure. [Hardback]

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Pop-Up Surrealism by Gérard Lo Monaco $454
In this magical book, pop-up engineer Gérard Lo Monaco brings to life eight works of art by leading surrealists: Salvador Dalí, Victor Brauner, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Dora Maar, René Magritte and André Breton. Short texts introduce each work and its historical context, while hand-painted illustrations bring a new dimension to this revolutionary period in modern art. [Hardback]

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Any of these books could go straight to the top of your reading pile. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber $38
Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work-a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way — from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album. As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves. Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonising search for meaning through art. This book delivers many of the reading pleasures of Thomas Bernhard.
"Lesser Ruins is a near perfect document of what it is to procrastinate, spun out in Haber's signature absurdist, looping, intellectually ecstatic style." —Emily Temple, Literary Hub
"Haber's novel is fluent and compelling, often rhapsodic, with a cumulative power to its repetitions." —Hal Jensen, Times Literary Supplement

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Twigs and Stones by Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop $30
Snake and Lizard live together in a burrow in the desert. They are such good friends that Lizard decides to display their names above the burrow entrance. But three small words can cause trouble between friends. They must decide whose name should appear first. Then Lizard makes an unfortunate spelling mistake—he thinks it’s very funny but Snake is not laughing. Snake finds some spelling of her own that will teach Lizard a lesson! The friends eventually find a way to put the argument behind them in this funny picture book that holds a mirror to our human flaws and reminds us that names and nicknames must be used with care.

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Tree Spirits Grass Spirits by Hiromi Ito (translated from Japanese by Jon L. Pitt) $40
A series of intertwined poetic essays written by Japanese poet Hiromi Ito — part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants. Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one’s life through the logic of flora. Ito’s graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.
"Ito's vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections on what it means to be a human moving through the environment. Jon Pitt's translation gracefully conveys Ito's engaged yet casual tone while allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it's not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph in this book is a joy to read." —Kathryn Hemmann
"These ambient poems about the flora of the California desert and Kumamoto, Japan are philosophical meditations on the peculiarity of human storytelling and naming practices.. Ito's poems suggest that the ways we humans look at plants contain information about how we produce both selves and others as well as narratives about death and transformation."  —Angela Hume

• Translating Kodama Kudasama.

Plasmas by Céline Minard (translated from French by Annabel L. Kim) $35
The stories in Plasmas dive into a post-human, more-than-human world where life as we know it has been replaced by life as it goes on. Acrobats glide through the air attached to biotech devices, an archivist presents scenes from Earth after interstellar colonization to her students, and scientists in Siberia play god with a manmade beast. Written as a series of vignettes into futures near and far, Plasmas dives into questions of legacy, memory, the body, and technology through striking prose from one of France's leading sci-fi writers. Equally comfortable in the worlds of Donna Haraway and Vladimir Nabokov, Plasmas is stunning in both philosophical and literary depth.
"Plasmas is a cubist painting: representing reality, while simultaneously shattering our perception of it." —The Harvard Gazette
"Plasmas is six stories that, as an archipelago-vaguely disquieting, wonderfully styled-constitutes a unique literary planet, if not a constellation of heretofore unclassified matter, forming an unprecedented unknown." —Le Monde

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley $39
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast — the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly — her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John's; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
”Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.” —Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

• A boat pressing against the outline of the sea.

The Spanish Mediterranean Islands Cookbook by Jeff Koehler $70
Explore the diverse cuisine of Spain's Balearic Islands - Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera — through 155 authentic home cooking recipes. Located off the Spanish Mediterranean coast, the Balearic Islands are renowned for their natural beauty, yet their cuisine has been largely underappreciated. This evocative recipe collection transports readers to the family kitchens, cafes, and markets of the archipelago, revealing a distinct culinary heritage shaped by the region's geography. The islands' most beloved dishes celebrate local produce, familiar Mediterranean ingredients — olive oil and garlic, rice and fresh fish — and resourceful cooking methods passed down for generations. From Menorcan-Style Stuffed Eggplant, Baked Fish with Spinach and Swiss Chard, Black Rice with Cuttlefish and Artichokes, and Pork with Wild Mushrooms to Baked Figs, Almond Cookies, and Formentera's most famous dessert, Fresh Cheesecake with Mint, the book's recipes include both sweet and savoury classics. Alongside the bounty of dishes, acclaimed author Jeff Koehler presents short essays highlighting culinary traditions, such as weekly village markets and St Martin's Day festivities; local ingredients, including cured sausages and tomato preserves; and essential techniques, such as preparing a perfect sofregit.

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Boodle Boodle Boodle by Geoff Stahl $28
The Clean's 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa and defined what became known as the ‘Dunedin Sound’ At the time, The Clean were seen as ambassadors for a burgeoning independent music culture in Aotearoa, drawing on the DIY spirit of punk and post-punk centred around Dunedin. Geoff Stahl considers the influence and legacy of the EP and band on indie music in New Zealand and elsewhere. Examining the myth of the ‘Dunedin Sound’ associated with The Clean, the EP, and Flying Nun Records, he details how this myth emerged, its repudiation by many of the artists it presumes to cover, and its complicated persistence in the contemporary New Zealand imaginary.

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Song of a Blackbird Maria van Lieshout $30
Emma is a young student about to be drawn into what will become the biggest bank heist in European history: swapping 50 million guilders' worth of forged treasury bonds for real ones — right under the noses of the Nazis. Emma's life — and the lives of thousands, including a little girl named Hanna — hangs in the balance. Almost seventy years later, Annick discovers something surprising about her family. Her grandmother needs a bone marrow donor but none of her relatives is a match. In fact, they are not even related. Desperate to find a living blood relative, Annick dives into the past, aided by her grandmother's only childhood possession, five copper etchings, and the name of their maker: Emma Bergsma. In this stranger-than-fiction graphic novel, Maria van Lieshout weaves a tale about family, courage and the power of art. Beautifully done.
”So heart-rending and familiar, and so brilliantly, unforgettably different.” —Morris Gleitzman
”Song of a Blackbird illustrates, with great tenderness, how the past lives within us. This is essential, illuminating reading.” —R. J. Palacio

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The Crisis of Narration by Byung-chul Han $31
Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being.  And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling shouts out loudly but narratives no longer have their binding force.  Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community — the community of consumers.  No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out.  It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers.  Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling.  The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our age.
"Like a Sartre for the age of screens, Han puts words to our prevailing condition of not-quite-hopeless digital despair." —The New Yorker

• The coming of Phono sapiens.

A History of the World in Six Plagues: How contagion, class and captivity shape us — From Cholera to Covid-19 by Edna Bonhomme $40
Edna Bonhomme traces the long history of viral outbreaks under conditions of social confinement-the plantation system, colonial camps, imprisonment, quarantine, factories-and reveals how these enclosed spaces fuel epidemics. This is a book about the complicated histories of movement and stagnation, and about the time we live in, with a focus on the racialised history of several key epidemics from the impact of cholera on the plantation economy to HIV/AIDS outbreaks in US prisons.
”An expansive portraiture of how colonialism and confinement have influenced our understanding of illness and humanity. Thankfully, due to the author's talent and sheer strength in combining personal narrative with history, this book is also tender as it tackles some of the most stigmatised subjects of our time.” —Morgan Jerkins

Twist by Colum McCann $37
Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea- the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world's information across the ocean floor — and what happens when they break. So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver — and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele. As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer — and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding on the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in. Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him.
”McCann may follow Coppola upriver and Conrad to the heart of darkness but the concerns of his novel are contemporary and urgent and utterly compelling. This is an ambitious novel, note perfect, wild but controlled, with its deft apparatus mapping our most mysterious 21st century malaise — the great loneliness of the connected world.” —Kevin Barry

The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra $45
an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications. Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world - the 'darker peoples', in W. E. B Du Bois's words — the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation — freedom from the white man's world. The World after Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century — the West's triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the darker peoples' frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world's balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world's population. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration.
”In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity.” —Rashid Khalidi
”This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the centre of this book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza.” —Hisham Matar

Wife by Charlotte Mendelson $38
When Zoe Stamper, specialist in Ancient Greek Tragedy, meets fellow academic Dr Penny Cartwright at a faculty event, she seems impossibly glamorous. After all, Zoe is several rungs down the academic pecking order, and a nervous ingenue as far as Penny's sophisticated circle is concerned. But Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues. Once Penny confesses all to her live-in lover, Penny and Zoe move in together and their happiness seems assured. But there is something else Penny needs as badly in her life as Zoe's adoration, and thus the beginning of their affair might also have signalled its end.
”A devastating treat of a novel: funny, furious, dark and delicious.” —Sarah Waters
”It takes the most ferocious intelligence, skill and a deep reservoir of sadness to write a novel as funny as this. I adored it.” —Meg Mason

Too Late to Awaken: What lies ahead when there is no future? by Slavoj Žižek $30
We hear all the time that it's five minutes to global doomsday, so now is our last chance to avert disaster. But what if the only way to prevent a catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened - that we're already five minutes past zero hour? Why do we seem unable to avert our course to self-destruction? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek deliver his most forceful, hopeful account of our discontents yet. Surveying the interlocking crises we currently face — global warming, war, famine, disease — he points us towards the radical, emancipatory politics that we need in order to halt our drift towards disaster.

Replenish your reading pile with these new arrivals! Books can be sent by overnight courier or collected from our door.

The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $40
In the summer of 2020, as Germany slowly emerges from lockdown, a young Japanese woman studying in Göttingen waits at the train station to meet an old friend. Nomiya died a decade earlier in the Tōhoku tsunami, but he has suddenly returned without any explanation. The reunited friends share a past that's a world away from the tranquillity of Göttingen. Yet Nomiya's spectral presence destabilises something in the city: mysterious guests appear, eerie discoveries are made in the forest and, as the past becomes increasingly vivid, the threads of time threaten to unravel. With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is an astounding exploration of the strange orbits of memory and the haunting presence of the past. [Paperback]
"A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief." —Jessica Au
”This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed.” —Yoko Ogawa
”Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence.” —Yoko Tawada

• Unfortunate lodgers, resident ghosts.

• Read an extract.

Central Otago Couture: The Eden Hore Collection by Jane Malthus and Claire Regnault, with photographs by Derek Henderson $70
In 1975, a makeshift museum opened on a farm in the tussocked hills of the Maniototo region of Central Otago. The main feature of this new attraction was the more than 220 high-end fashion garments on display. It has been called one of the most significant collections of its kind in Australasia. And it was housed in an old tractor shed. It had been amassed by J Eden Hore, a successful but quietly spoken high-country farmer — a man of many contrasts. He embodied and boldly defied the stereotype of the ' Southern Man' , confidently forging his own idiosyncratic path through life. Central Otago Couture tells the compelling story of his string of eccentric and memorable obsessions, from Miss New Zealand shows to a menagerie of animals, at the centre of which was his collection of over 270 high-fashion garments. The collection' s continued existence, acquired by the Central Otago District Council, honours and recognises the skills of New Zealand creatives and designers of the 1970s and 1980s, and represents a unique slice of couture fashion not found anywhere else in the country. To this end, fashion photographer Derek Henderson has captured these extraordinary garments in the empty majesty of the Central Otago landscapes that Eden Hore loved, bringing these stories to life for a new generation. [Hardback]

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• The Naseby attraction.

Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado $48
A mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment. The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament. With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado's theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our actions: transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, 'electronic heroin', digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado's most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward. [Paperback with French flaps]
"How lucky we are to have Paul Preciado as companion and interpreter of all we've just been through, with a global pandemic — luckier still is the gift of his revolutionary optimism, which runs through his thorough, gritty analysis of our current predicament. If you're tired of ricocheting between neofascists and doomer dudes, here comes Dysphoria Mundi to recast our situation as ‘the most beautiful (or devastating) collective adventure we have ever embarked on’, and give us new strategies and inspiration to reconceptualise — and stay on — the ride." —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
"Paul Preciado's singular genius is for writing vividly within the immediacy of everyday life, and then also unraveling from there the deeper historical forces that shape those moments. In Dysphoria Mundi we learn how the invisible traces of a virus thread bodies and societies together, lacing us into shifting regimes of power and commodification. Preciadio has that rare ability to lead the reader through familiar situations to unexpected conceptual insight. An essential thinker for the contemporary world." —McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
”This monumental work brings the commitments of the bibliophile to bear on a time and a world now irreversibly out of joint. Drawing on theories of language, mind, technology, immunology to retell a story of this world, Preciado's work more firmly shatters the binaries responsible for the destruction of love and futurity." —Judith Butler

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (translated from French by Helen Stevenson) $43
In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix's fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes. [Paperback]
”Following the disastrous deaths of 27 people, when a dinghy capsizes while crossing the Channel, the book’s narrator — who works for the French authorities and who had refused to send a rescue team — attempts to justify the indefensible and clear her conscience. In a world where heinous actions often have no consequence, where humanity’s moral code appears fragile, where governments can condemn whole swathes of society to poverty or erasure, Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit – and whether we could all do better. A gut-punch of a novel. “ —judges’ citation, International Booker Prize 2025

• Other books long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (translated from French by Laëtitia Saint-Loubert and Karen Fleetwood) $42
The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own. This is La Reunion in the 1980s: high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. One little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents' reign of terror and turns to school for salvation. Rich in the history of the island's customs and superstitions, and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirize the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you. [Paperback]
“A rollicking, sardonic picaresque set on the French outpost of La Réunion in the. 1980s. The novel has important things to say about colonialism and society, but it’s also tremendous fun — darkly funny, acerbic, energetic. There’s scarcely a dull moment on the page, and the translation is remarkably slick.” —judges’ citation, Republic of Consciousness Prize 2025
”A tour-de-force as volcanic as the little island of La Reunion, a tiny sliver of France marooned in the Indian Ocean, ‘a heap of rubble on the edge of the world’. The narrator of Gaëlle Bélem's novel, a little girl no-one wanted, the unloved daughter of the Dessaintes, is determined to be someone, to tell the story of her family, and through them the story of an island founded on slavery, poverty, cruelty and superstition with a caustic wit and a keen eye. It is a tragi-comedy worthy of Zola, candid and unflinching, yet shot through with humour and poignancy and even a glimmer of hope. Belem's novel is a joyous discovery and in Laetitia Saint-Loubert and Karen Fleetwood she has found translators alert to the nuances of French and Creole and to the poetry threaded through this startling debut.” —Frank Wynne

• Other books on the 2025 International Booker Prize long list.

• Other books on the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize short list.

Pox Romana: The plague that shook the Roman world by Colin Elliott $70
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 ‘pre-existing 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 postpandemic crises. The pandemic's most transformative power, Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived. [Hardback]
”Enlightening. Elliott expertly draws on trace evidence such as census records, real estate contracts, and paleoclimate research to make his case. It's an informative history that serves to encourage better pandemic preparedness today." —Publishers Weekly

Mother Naked by Glen James Brown $38
The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city's most powerful men. Mother Naked is his name, and the story he's come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome 'walking ghost' some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier. But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith - and the murders - have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery — of class, religion, art and ale — the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine. Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham's Cathedral rolls, 'Modyr Nakett' was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins, in a fury of imaginative recuperation. [Paperback]
”Exhilarating, freewheeling, brilliantly plotted and politically scathing, Mother Naked is a tour de force of language and style, and absolutely a novel for our times.” —Preti Taneja

• Other books short-listed for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

• Cuddy by Benjamin Myers is also set around Durham Cathedral.

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary) $35
In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers. [Paperback]
”Reservoir Bitches is a blisteringly urgent collection of interconnected stories about contemporary Mexican women. It absolutely bangs from the first page to the last. It’s extremely funny but deadly serious and we loved the energy and flair of the dual translators’ approach. It packs an enormous political and linguistic punch but is also subtle, revelatory and moving about the ways in which these women hustle, innovate, survive or don’t, in a world of labyrinthine dangers. This book weaves the riotous testimony of the living and the dead to create an expletive-rich feminist blast of Mexican literature. “ —judges’ citation, International Booker Prize 2025

• Other books on the 2025 International Booker Prize long list.

How to Leave the World by Marouane Bakhti (translated from French by Lara Vergnaud) $40
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer. [Paperback]

• Other books short-listed for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad $38
As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and more, and watching the slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. This powerful book is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means — as a citizen of the US, as a father — to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. [Paperback]
”This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world.” —Richard Flanagan
”It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book.” —Naomi Klein

The Fermentation Kitchen: Recipes and techniques for kimchi, kombucha, koji, and more by Sam Cooper $48
Explore a wide range of authentic and adapted techniques from across cultures and continents and harness bacteria, yeast, and fungus to create a variety of ferments to add flavour to dishes, boost gut health, and give perishable produce a new lease of life. Reconnect with these natural processes and learn to incorporate ferments into your everyday cooking with guides to flavour, texture and aroma alongside recipe ideas serving as inspiration. [Hardback]
”Definitely the best koji book in the world written in English by far!” —Haruko Uchishiba, founder of The Koji Fermentaria

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Cities Made Differently by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky $40
Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently. What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika's then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit — because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true. With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see. On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be-and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are. [Paperback]

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An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the prison, Restoring a house, Rebuilding myself by Yvonne Jewkes $48
Should architecture be used for punishment? How might the spaces we inhabit nurture or damage us? How can we begin to start over after the worst has happened? Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes grapples with these questions every day as the world's leading expert on rehabilitative prison design; she also faces them in her personal life when her partner of 25 years leaves her in the middle of a nightmare renovation project and then lockdown sees her trapped there. Used to fighting the punitive prison system to create spaces that encourage reflection, healing, even hope for those incarcerated, she must learn to be similarly compassionate to herself, as she considers what might help someone at the lowest point in their life to rebuild. There are 11.5 million prisoners worldwide, and most of them will eventually be released back into society. Yvonne asks, 'Who would you rather have living next door to you? Or sitting on the train next to your daughter? Someone who has been treated with decency in an environment that has helped to heal them and instilled hope for their future? Or someone who has effectively been caged and dehumanised for years?' Challenging our expectations of what prisons are for, she takes us along their corridors, into cells, communal spaces, visitors' areas, and staffrooms, to the architects' studios where they are designed, and even into her own home, to show us the importance of an architecture of hope in the face of despair. [Hardback]
”A book full of insights to illuminate the way we look at architecture. Jewkes's beautiful descriptions not only evoke the feel of the air in a space, but also reveal the moral significance of its design. So refreshingly distinctive from other types of prison books — a beautiful meditation on the universal need for sanctuary, what it means when it is taken away from us, and the courage it takes to reclaim it.” —Andy West
”Yvonne Jewkes takes a vital question — what are prisons for? — and turns it into a much wider and beautifully written reflection on the meaning of home. Her book is full of hard-won authority and expertise conveyed in tenderly human ways.” —Joe Moran

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert fell down the rabbit hole and came up with the universe by Ken Krimstein $55
A fascinating and superbly executed graphic biography. During the year that Prague was home to both Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka from 1911-1912, the trajectory of the two men's lives wove together in uncanny ways — as did their shared desire to tackle the world's biggest questions in Europe's strangest city. In stunning words and pictures, Einstein in Kafkaland reveals the untold story of how their worlds wove together in a cosmic battle for new kinds of truth. For Einstein, his lost year in Prague became a critical bridge set him on the path to what many consider the greatest scientific discovery of all time, his General Theory of Relativity. And for Kafka, this charmed year was a bridge to writing his first masterpiece, ‘The Judgment’. Based on diaries, lectures, letters, and papers from this period amid a planet electrifying itself into modernity, Einstein in Kafkaland brings to life the emergence of a new world where art and science come together in ways we still grapple with today. [Hardback]
"Clever, charming, amusing, and just plain brilliant. Ken Krimstein is the most inventive graphic biographer on the planet-and certainly the only one who could explain both Einstein and Kafka. A page turner on gravity and relativity!" —Kai Bird

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Squares and Other Shapes with Joseph Albers $25
This book uses the vivid artworks of Josef Albers to guide small children through a wide range of geometrics, one artwork per page, beginning with squares and returning to them as a familiar refrain throughout. The variations between the vibrant shapes adds to the book’s visual richness, and the accompanying text provides an engaging commentary that will encourage discussion. Josef Albers was a leading pioneer of 20th-century Modernism, best known for his ‘Homages to the Square’ paintings and his publication Interaction of Colour. Albers was a teacher, a writer, a painter, and a theorist. In this attractive book, his art is used to teach shapes, one of the most important concepts for young children to learn. [Board book]

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