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Invisible dogs by Charles Boyle $36

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

Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn $35

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

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

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

• Hope and despair.

Dusk by Robbie Arnott $38

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

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

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

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Ryder by Djuna Barnes $35

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

Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser $38

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

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth by Markus Zusak $40

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

• Wanting to be decimated.

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

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

• Weeping for Babylon.

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

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

The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston $30

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

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

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

• Visit the author’s Substack.

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

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

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Small Acts by Kate Gordon and Kate Foster $19

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

Determination by Tawseef Khan $40

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

Insectarium by Dave Goulson and Emily Carter $55

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

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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher $28

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

• Dissecting privilege.

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

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

Final Cut by Charles Burns $85

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

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• Watch the trailer.

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

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

[ … ] by Fady Joudah $33

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

• More than a repository of wounds.

• Read a poem.

• Trust in time.

• Volume Focus: Literary Palestine.

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

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

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt $36

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

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

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

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

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

• A prisoner writes.

• Translation and incarceration.

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru $37

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

• The men are not OK.

• Where radical art meets obscene wealth.

• Time of no time.

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

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

• Chaos in the Heavens.

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

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

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

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

• Horror inheres within the benign.

• An entire generation was gaslighted.

• No help from real things.

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

• Look inside!

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

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst $38

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Look inside!

Party Rhyme! by Antonia Pesenti $24

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

• Look inside!!!

• Rhyme Cordial.

• Rhyme Hungry.

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

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

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

• Look inside!

• The author talks without moving her lips.

Episodes by Alex Scott $40

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

• Look inside!

• Making (it) work.

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

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

Vehicle: A verse novel by Jen Calleja $40

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

• Experimental writing and transformative politics.

• Other books from Prototype Publishing.

Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens $40

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

• Disintegrating worldviews.

• The question of selfhood.

• A new book of grotesques.

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

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

• Look inside!

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

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

• A good fit.

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

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

• Other books on Palestine/Israel.

The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel $25

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

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

• The archive as potter’s field.

• Ubiquity.

rock flight by Hasib Hourani $33

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

• The imperative voice.

• Writing into silence.

Pātea Boys / Ngāti Pātea by Airana Ngarewa $37

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

Nature, Culture, and Inequality by Thomas Piketty $35

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

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel $28

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

• Read an extract.

• Shapeshifting power.

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

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

• Some other books about Paris.

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

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

Take your pick from the carousel!
Click through to our website for your copies:

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles $36

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

• Bad subsidence.

• Read an extract.

• Quite a small number.

• Evolve and escape.

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

Delirious by Damien Wilkins $38

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

• Above water.

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

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

• Absence, presence, and disappearance.

• Reclaiming space through absence.

• The lost and disappeared voice.

• Many themes.

• A certain degree.

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

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

• Stitches, stems, and pockets.

• Prose possibilities.

• How to say nothing.

• Fictions and forms of reading.

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

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

• Look inside!

I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson $38

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

• Trauma and memory.

• What are siblings?

• Read Thomas’s review of little scratch.

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

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

Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu $38

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

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

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

• Look inside.

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

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

• Read an extract.

• Futures and pasts.

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

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

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

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

• Other useful books by Hona Black.

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

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

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

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

• Look inside.

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

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

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

The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame $40

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

• Voyage into delusion.

• Everything is walking through you.

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

• Red currants.

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

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

• We can never express precisely what we mean.

• Deprivation exercises.

• The uses of illiteracy.

• The Illiterate.

• Read Thomas’s review of The Notebook.

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

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

• We were not always Indigenous.

• Defending the tongue.

• The necessity of linguistic diversity.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey $26

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

• Liking Alien — Having Insomnia

• Try orbiting

• A Melville of the Skies

• Viewing from Space

• Live with the Astronauts

• The Shapeless Unease.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden $38

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

• Read an extract.

• On (Not) Reading Anne Frank.

• What the author reads.

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

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

• From civic hacker to cabinet minister.

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

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

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

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie $28

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

Juice by Tim Winton $55

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

• New ground.

• Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists.

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

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

• Look inside!

• Self-obsession and environmental disaster.

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

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

• Takeaways.

• He took a camera, too.

Ideology: An introduction by Terry Eagleton $37

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

Odyssey by Stephen Fry $40

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

• Mythos.

• Heroes.

• Troy.

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

• Circumspect Penelope.

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

Kataraina by Becky Manawatu $37

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

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

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

• Stella reviews the book on RNZ.

• The translator reads from the book.

• Reinterpreting the classics.

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

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

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

• Out of the darkness.

• Other books by Esther Kinsky.

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

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

• Look inside.

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder $40

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

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

Great Women Sculptors edited by Lisa Le Feuvre $110

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

• See a full list of artists.

• Look inside!

Playground by Richard Powers $38

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

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss $40

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

• A voice in the back of her head.

Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders $37

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

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

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

Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies by Lyell Cresswell $50

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

• Music by Lyell Cresswell.

• Look inside.

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

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

• Look inside!

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

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

• Look inside.

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

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

• Look inside!

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

With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang $40

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

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

Lublin by Manya Wilkinson $35

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

• Read an excerpt.

• A story for the ages.

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett $38

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

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

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

• Books by Natalia Ginzburg.

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

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

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

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

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

• Look inside!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Look inside.

Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison $40

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

• He had a rough time as a kid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Look inside the box!

• Notebooks and poetry.

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

Titiro / Look by Gavin Bishop $25

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

• Look inside!

• Other wonderful books by Gavin Bishop.

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

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

• Look inside!

Leslie Adkin: farmer photographer by Athol McCredie $70

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

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

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

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

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

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang $25

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

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

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

Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon $38

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

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff $26

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

• Read Stella’s review.

The Year of Sitting Dangerously by Simon Barnes $29

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

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout $38

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

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

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

• Never summon a power you can’t control.

The Name She Gave Me by Betty Culley $25

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

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers $25

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

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

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner $38

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

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

• A secret being deposited.

• Read an extract.

• Getting older.

• To help her cause.

• Kindred.

• Other books on the 2024 Booker long list.

COMFORT by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh

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

• Look inside!

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

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

• Quite surprised.

• This book has chosen me.

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

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

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

The Empty Grandstand by Lloyd Jones $30

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

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

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

• Look inside!

Translation State by Ann Leckie $28

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

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

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

• Unspeakable times.

THAT GREEN OLIVE by Olivia Moore

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

• Look inside!

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

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

All That We Own Know by Shilo Kino $38

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

The Echoes by Evie Wylde $38

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

• Resound and rebound.

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

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

• Look inside!

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

Nine Girls by Stacy Gregg $22

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

• The author on the book.

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

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

• Look inside.

• 160 years on from the fighting.

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

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

• Look inside!

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

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

• A lightning rod.

• Capital and Empire.

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker $38

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

• A fierce and chilling end.

• The Women of Troy.

• The Silence of the Girls.

• Intolerable when not writing.

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

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

• Talking politics.

• How the world might be remade.

• After Confronting Leviathan.

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

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

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

Granta 167: Extraction edited by Thomas Meaney $33

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

• Look inside.

• Culture bound up with extraction.

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

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

• Other BWB Texts.

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

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

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

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

• Long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

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

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

Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers $37

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

• The beauty of the three-minute pop song.

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

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

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor $30

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

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

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

• Speaking ta rē Moriori.

The following books are keenly awaiting admission to your shelf.
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Diaries by Franz Kafka (translated by Ross Benjamin) $50

Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka's handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications — notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive — and often surprisingly unpolished — writing as it appeared in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.
”One of the finest translating achievements in recent history.” —Literary Review
”A new translation of the writer's diaries from his twenties restores them to how he wrote them: chaotic, sometimes incoherent and full of black comedy. The diaries will open your eyes.” —John Self, The Times
”An unprecedented, almost 600-page peephole into the mind of a writer whose published prose is otherwise classically abstract and inscrutable. It's some secret to be let into.” —Tanjil Rashid, Financial Times
”This new edition restores the variegated richness of the diaries. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us.” —Guardian
”This edition of the Diaries seems a model of both scrupulousness and generosity. Here we find the unpolished inner life of one of the most significant writers that ever lived; and the entries, which come from the mind of an ordinary human being and not from some otherworldly realm of inner consciousness, do not in any way detract from Kafka's work.” —Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator

• What we learn.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange $38

A tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope. Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America’s war on its own people. Readers of Orange’s classic debut There There will know some of these characters and will be eager to learn what happened to Orvil Red Feather after the Oakland Powwow. New readers will discover a wondrous novel of poetry, music, rage and love, from one of the most astonishing voices of his generation.
”This powerful epic entwines the stories of a diverse cast of characters, each grappling with the weight of history, identity and trauma. Through well-crafted prose and deftly drawn perspectives, Tommy Orange paints a vivid portrait of the Native American experience – both the pain of displacement and the resilience of those who continue ancestral traditions. Spanning centuries, the novel explores universal themes of family, addiction and the search for belonging in a society that often fails to recognise the value of its Indigenous people. Wandering Stars is a stunning achievement, a literary tour de force that demands attention.” —Booker judges’ citation
”It’d be a mistake to think that the power of Wandering Stars lies solely in its astute observations, cultural commentary or historical reclamations, though these aspects of the novel would make reading it very much worthwhile. But make no mistake, this book has action! Suspense! The characters are fully formed and they get going right out of the gate […] Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves, who contend with holding private and public identities, makes Wandering Stars a towering achievement.” —Jonathan Escoffery, New York Times Book Review

• Read an extract.

• I didn’t know you coulod do this.

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

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood $37

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place she grew up, finding solace in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town. She finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past. With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?
”Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.” —Booker Judges’ citation
”I have rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel. Wood is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here — the way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look, the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and inconsiderate to those around them — it all rings true. It's the story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance is global. This is a powerful, generous book.” —Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Guardian

• Nothing trivial, nothing insincere.

• Read an extract.

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

What Is Mine by José Henrique Bortoluci (translated from Portuguese by Rahul Bery) $28

In What Is Mine, sociologist José Henrique Bortoluci uses interviews with his father, Didi, to retrace the recent history of Brazil and of his family. From the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s, Didi’s work as a truck driver took him away from home for long stretches at a time as he crisscrossed the country and participated in huge infrastructure projects including the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a scheme spearheaded by the military dictatorship of the time, undertaken through brutal deforestation. An observer of history, Didi also recounts the toll his work has taken on his health, from a heart attack in middle age to the cancer that defines his retirement. Bortoluci weaves the history of a nation with that of a man, uncovering parallels between cancer and capitalism — both sustained by expansion, both embodiments of ‘the gospel of growth at any cost’ — and traces the distance that class has placed between him and his father. Influenced by authors such as Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich, What Is Mine is a moving, thought-provoking and brilliantly constructed examination of the scars we carry, as people and as countries.
”A son’s journey, around father and country, subtle and complex, tender and brutal; an intimate work of rare beauty and power.” —Philippe Sands
”What Is Mine is an unforgettable oral history of truck driving along the potholed roads carving up the Amazon rainforest: bandits, sleep deprivation, beef barbecued on the engine. It is also an incisive political critique of ecocidal ideas of ‘progress’, a powerful reflection on the ways labour shapes a human body, and a loving exploration of a relationship between a father and son. It already has the feel of a classic.” —Caleb Klaces
”A political document told as memoir, this is a book of incredible beauty and insight, one which demonstrates one of the greatest truths: that our lives, and the lives of our families, are inextricably bound to the structures of class, economics, and history they were born into.” —Madeleine Watts

Philosophy of the Home: Domestic space and happiness by Emanuele Coccia (translated by Richard Dixon) $30

A bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom — are these three rooms all that make a home? Not at all, argues Emanuele Coccia. The buildings we inhabit are of immense psychological and cultural significance. They play a decisive role in human flourishing and, for hundreds of years, their walls and walkways, windows and doorways have guided our relationships with others and with ourselves. They reflect and reinforce social inequalities; they allow us to celebrate and cherish those we love. They are the places of return that allow us to venture out into the world. In this intimate, elegantly argued account, Coccia shows how the architecture of home has shaped, and continues to shape, our psyches and our societies, before then masterfully leading us towards a more creative, ecological way of dwelling in the world.
”I have been waiting for Philosophy of the Home. Coccia's reflections take you through the complexity of the notion of home — not merely as a place, but as a space of philosophy, history, politics, and art.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist
”A precious guide. There is so much more at stake than the material quality of a place for living — for us human beings, the house represents the universe.” —Chris Dercon

• The last obstacle.

• It’s all about love.

Pity by Andrew McMillan $37

The debut novel from award-winning poet Andrew McMillan, exploring community, masculinity and post-industrialisation in Northern England. The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important, it had purpose. But what is it now? Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex, is now in his middle age, and must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to mask. Simon is the only child of Alex and had practically no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs. Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's short and magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of a life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change. [Hardback]
”Tender and true. It explores with brilliance and deep empathy how our lives — and our secrets — are always intertwined with those who went before us.” —Douglas Stuart
”Pity digs deep into the heart and history of South Yorkshire and brings out the black gold of love, longing and loss. A triumph.” —Jon McGregor
”Pity pays a great poet's tough but tender attention to the unspoken layers and historic fissures which lie beneath the wounded town of the self. This beautiful book about the marks that are left on people and places in turn leaves a deep empathic mark on the reader.” —Max Porter
”Pity is as tough, glittering and multilayered as the coal upon which it rests. With lyrical prose and deep tenderness, Andrew McMillan beautifully explores the complex hauntings of love and grief across generations.” —Liz Berry
”Truly stunning. A novel that deals with the ways history intervenes in our lives and how we can use our lives to intervene in history. South Yorkshire is a crucible.” —Helen Mort

Quit Everything: Interpreting depression by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi $40

Depression is rife amongst young people the world over. But what if this isn't depression as we know it, but instead a reaction to the chaos and collapse of a seemingly unchangeable and unliveable future? In Quit Everything, Franco Berardi argues that this "depression" is actually conscious or unconscious withdrawal of psychological energy and a dis-investment of desire that he defines instead as "desertion". A desertion from political participation, from the daily grind of capitalism, from the brutal reality of climate collapse and from a society which offers nothing but chaos and pain. Berardi analyses why this desertion is on the rise and why more people are quitting everything in our age of political impotence and the rise of the far-right, asking if we can find some political hope in desertion amongst the ruins of a world on the brink of collapse.
”Berardi, your words are disgusting.” —Giorgia Meloni

• The power of quitting.

• Breaking the relation.

No Judgement: On being critical by Lauren Oyler $40

It is the age of internet gossip; of social networks, repackaged ideas and rating everything out of five stars. Mega-famous celebrities respond with fury to critics who publish less-than-rapturous reviews of their work (and then delete their tweets); CEOs talk about reclaiming 'the power of vulnerability'; and in the world of fiction, writers eschew actually making things up in favour of 'always just talking about themselves'. In this blistering, irreverent and funny first book of non-fiction, Lauren Oyler — one of the most trenchant, influential, and revelatory critics of her generation — takes on the bizarre particularities of our present moment in a series of interconnected essays about literature, the attention economy, gossip, the role of criticism and her own relentless, teeth-grinding anxiety. No Judgement excavates the layers of psychology and meaning in how we communicate, tell stories and make critical judgements.
”Brisk, honest and soaring with elan. Oyler persuasively advocates clear thinking through doing it herself with such poise. Her critical approach isn't currently common sense, but it should be, and soon enough maybe it will.” —Naoise Dolan

• You are what you write.

• Why criticism can never be written by A.I.

• How to criticise.

• Cultural critics are people too.

• The critic in the internet age.

Tipo 00: The pasta cookbook by Andreas Papadakis $55

This attractive and informative book is packed with everything you want to know to be able to make superb pasta — from scratch to sauce — any time of the day. With over 80 recipes and illustrations that will soon make you an expert in the kitchen and very popular with anyone who eats in your house, this is a good book to have. You’ll soon be eating pasta for every meal of the day. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Living on Earth: Life, consciousness, and the making of the natural world by Peter Godfrey-Smith $40

How has life shaped and been shaped by our planet? He visits the largest living stromatolite fields, examples of how cyanobacteria began belching oxygen into the atmosphere as they converted carbon dioxide and water into living matter using the sun's light. The extraordinary increase in oxygen in the atmosphere resulted in an explosion in the diversity of life. And so began a riotous tangle of coevolution between plants and animals, as each changed the environment around them allowing others to utilise these new ecosystems and thus new species to evolve. From cyanobacteria, through algae on to ferns or trees or grasses, and from protists , through invertebrates and fish through the dinosaurs and on to birds and mammals - our planet has seen an explosion of life forms, all reacting to their environment and all creating new environments that allow other life to evolve. In our own evolutionary line, an initially unremarkable mammal changed in new ways, evolving to come out of the trees to inhabit new savannas and then onto inhabit the whole planet. One of the most adaptable species ever found on Earth, and arguably the species causing the most change, humans are still part of this 3.8 billion year history of life forms changing the world around them. In Living on Earth, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Living on Earth shows that Humans belong to the infinitely complex system that is the Earth, and our minds are products of that system, but we are also an acting force within it. We are creatures of Earth, but we hold Earth's future in our hands.
”An exquisite account of intelligence across species. Living on Earth is consistently rewarding, packed with insights and invitations to reflect, and blessed with exquisite writing'.” —Guardian
”Clever, compassionate and often deeply moving. An excellent finale to an ambitious trilogy exploring the evolution of intelligence.” —New Scientist

• Would the planet be better off without us?

• Other Minds.

• Metazoa.

Mrs S. by K. Patrick $35

In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’. Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S’s world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both women know that a choice must be made. K. Patrick’s portrait of the butch experience is revelatory; exploring the contested terrain of our bodies, our desires and the constraints society places around both.
”The intense physicality of the novel's emotions and its stylish, stripped-back prose make for an arresting pairing.” —Observer
”Entirely captivating. Patrick's staccato sentences become a secondary language for butchness, powerful and confident” —New York Times

• Spooky sexy.

• The itch of skin.

The Samurai of the Red Carnation by Denis Thériault (translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie) $45

Matsuo is born to be a samurai, but as he is being trained in the art of war he realises he was meant for a different art altogether. Turning his back on his future as a warrior of the sword, he decides instead to do battle with words, as a poet. Thus begins a story of romance and adventure, love and betrayal, that takes Matsuo across medieval Japan, through bloody battlefields and burning cities, culminating in his ultimate test at the uta awase — where Japan's greatest poets engage in fierce verbal combat for the honour of victory. [Hardback]
”A charming, magical, picaresque journey through medieval Japan, filled with mystery, meaning and wonderful imagery. Denis Theriault's brilliant evocation of the noble art of the waka (classical Japanese poetry) is an absorbing, pacy and immensely enjoyable read.” —Sean Lusk

The Tree Collectors: Tales of arboreal obsession by Amy Stewart $55

When Amy Stewart discovered a community of tree collectors, she expected to meet horticultural fanatics driven to plant every species of oak or maple. But she also discovered that the urge to collect trees springs from deeper, more profound motives, such as a longing for community, a vision for the future, or a path to healing and reconciliation. In this slyly humorous, informative, often poignant volume, Stewart brings us fifty captivating stories of people who spend their lives in pursuit of rare and wonderful trees and are transformed in the process. Vivian Keh has forged a connection to her Korean elders through her persimmon orchard. The former poet laureate W. S. Merwin planted a tree almost every day for more than three decades, until he had turned a barren estate into a palm sanctuary. And Joe Hamilton cultivates pines on land passed down to him by his once-enslaved great-grandfather, building a legacy for the future. Stewart populates this lively compendium with her own watercolour portraits of these extraordinary people and their trees, side trips to investigate famous tree collections, arboreal glossaries, and even tips for 'unauthorised' forestry. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

• How do you collect a tree?

Sick Of It: The global fight for women’s health by Sophie Harman $40

We know the causes of death and disease among women all over the world. We have the funding and commitment from governments and philanthropists to tackle it. So why are women still dying when they don't have to? Harman argues that women's health is being caught in the crossfires of global politics — and gives us a roadmap for how we might stop it. There are multiple case studies on how women's health is being used and abused by politics and politicians across the globe: the repeal of abortion rights, Serena Williams's near-death experience, the bombing of Ukrainian maternity hospitals, and lesser-known issues like healthwashing by countries like Rwanda and the exploitation of women by the very health organisations that are supposed to help them. Through these stories, Sick of It explores urgent, topical questions around populist politics, big data and how women's work is valued, and offers smart solutions on how to fix this crisis through activism and political work.
”A powerful and inspiring must-read.” —Elinor Cleghorn
”Radical and thought-provoking, this book should drive us all to action — and the author tells us how.” —Gina Rippon

Cake for Everyone by Thé Tjong-Khing $30

Just when it is time for cake, an eagle swipes up the picnic blanket and flies away. The animals chase after to find all their stolen picnic things. Thé Tjong-Khing's visual storytelling slows us down and invites us to look more closely. Can you remember everything on the blanket? Hat, ball, doll, feather, cake? Who is hiding in the bush? What has the dog seen on the cliff? How will pig get back her sun umbrella? Why is the rabbit crying? And how can there be cake for everyone when the very hungry rat family has eaten it already? Collect all the missing objects, find out who they belong to, and come back home for more cake in this cheerful, wordless look-and-find story. (There is cake at the end.) [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Out of the carton and (nearly) into your hands.
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The Mermaid Chronicles: A midlife mer-moir by Megan Dunn $35

The true tale of how one woman's lifelong obsession became a midlife mermaid odyssey. Forty, freckled and facing infertility, writer and disgruntled project manager Megan Dunn hears the siren call that reawakens her lifelong obsession and sets off in pursuit of mermaids. Real mermaids. From Coney Island and Copenhagen to Courtenay Place, Wellington, New Zealand; from Waterhouse's classic painting ‘A Mermaid’ to the 1984 romantic comedy Splash to Skyping the first freelance mermaids of the new millennium, her odyssey takes her fathoms deep to strange and unlikely places, probing the collective unconscious and asking the question that has plagued humans for millennia — What is it about mermaids? Diving into the caves of her own life, Megan loses the plot but finds her voice and hears the mermaids singing. Shimmeringly intellectual and devastatingly deadpan, tragicomic and true, The Mermaid Chronicles is an off-the-hook tale about sex and marriage, mothers and daughters, middle age, women's work, obsession, the stories we tell ourselves and the myths that define us all. (And Daryl Hannah, too.)

• All day avoiding it.

• The Mermaid Chronicles: the exhibition.

• Immersed.

• More interviews than you could wish for (only just (there are a lot)).

• Footless footage.

• Professional mermaid.

• Don’t you forget about me.

• Things I Learned at Art School.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak $37

“A storm is approaching Nineveh, the sky swollen with impending rain. One of the clouds approaching the world's largest and wealthiest city, built on the banks of the river Tigris, is bigger and darker than the others-and more impatient. It floats suspended above a majestic building adorned with marble columns, pillared porticos and monumental statues. This is the North Palace, where the king resides in all his might and glory. The cloud casts a shadow over the imperial residence. For unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles. Dangling from the edge of the cloud is a single drop of rain - no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously - small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth open down below like a lonely lotus flower. Remember that raindrop, inconsequential though it may be compared to the magnitude of the universe. Inside, it holds a miniature world, a story of its own...” Shafik’s astounding, expansive new novel, set between the 19th century and modern times, is about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris — their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh.
”Gloriously expansive and intellectually rich — a magnificent achievement.” —The Spectator
”An absorbing novel. Shafak is a novelist whose interest in mapping the intricately related world and its history goes beyond literary device.” —Guardian
”Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf. Make place for her in your heart too. You won't regret it.” —Arundhati Roy
”It will surprise no one that this is a brutal, elegant and incredible book. Amazing what Elif Shafak has done here — again! Magic.” —Evie Wyld
”An odyssey, an epic, a lament, and a tale of redemption, There are Rivers in the Sky is a clarion call to honor the elemental forces that shape our memories, our histories, and our world. In short, a masterpiece.” —Ruth Ozeki

• A warning from history.

• Connected by water.

• Put on trial for fiction.

Like Love: Essays and conversations by Maggie Nelson $50

A raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's incisive work.  These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide — from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker — but certain themes recur- intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; the roles of the critic and language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the sustenance offered by art and artists. [Hardback]
”One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation.” —Olivia Laing.
”Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have.” —Guardian
”To read Like Love is to watch [Nelson] circling issues of gender and sexuality, but refracted through a variety of different prisms, so that the end result is a constellation of ideas that seem to be expanding outwards.” —Telegraph

• Does language make art happy?

• The conversations she wants to be having.

• Criticism is an expression of love.

• The magic of paying attention.

• Bluets.

The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen) $37

Having married her childhood sweetheart, Riko now finds herself trapped in a relationship that has been soured by infidelity. One day, by chance, she runs into her old friend Mr Takaoka, who offers friendship, love, and an unusual escape: he teaches her the trick of living inside her dreams. And so, each night, she sinks into another life: first as a high-ranking courtesan in the 17th century, and then as a serving lady to a princess in the late Middle Ages. As she experiences desire and heartbreak in the past, so Riko comes to reconsider her life as a 21st century woman, as a wife, as a mother, and as a lover, and to ask herself whether, after loving her husband and loving Mr Takaoka, she is now ready for her third great love.

• I won’t let you go.

• Other books by Hiromi Kawakami.

Metamorphoses: In search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba $45

It might seem obvious, where our obsession with Kafka's life stems from. We want to know what made Kafka Kafka. But there is also another part to this story, a part that does not get told nearly as often. To understand how Kafka became Kafka, we cannot stop in 1924, the year of his death, where most biographies end. To gain the status he gained, Kafka needed readers. Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself. Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.
”A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.” —Marina Warner

• His life after his death.

• More than just a prophet of malaise.

• Is That Kafka?

Around the World with Friends by Philip Waechter $30

Raccoon finishes his book and is ready for his own adventure — he wants thrills, excitement and to conquer the sea! He borrows everything he needs from his friends: a boat from Badger, who insists on coming along because you should never go on an expedition alone. Fox packs them eggs for the omelette — then must join to be the cook. Bear insists on coming to scare away the jellyfish, and Crow says he should be lookout. The friends sail through rapids, collect sweet blackberries, chase away bees, and play soccer, until a little rain and thoughts of home bring their excursion to an end. That, thinks Raccoon, was the most thrilling magnificent adventure with friends I've ever had. Let's go again soon — and next time we'll bring the chickens.

• Look inside!

• Also available: A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends.

The Architecture of Modern Empire: Conversations with David Barsamian by Arundhati Roy $30

A piercing exploration of modern empire, nationalism and rising fascism that gives us the tools to resist and fight back. Over a lifetime spent at the frontline of solidarity and resistance, Arundhati Roy's words have lit a clear way through the darkness that surrounds us. Combining the skills of the architect she trained to be and the writer she became, she illuminates the hidden structures of modern empire like no one else, revealing their workings so that we can resist. Her subjects — war, nationalism, fundamentalism and rising fascism, turbocharged by neoliberalism and now technology. But also — truth, justice, freedom, resistance, solidarity and above all imagination — in particular the imagination to see what is in front of us, to envision another way, and to fight for it. Arundhati Roy's voice — as distinct and compelling in conversation as in her writing — explores these themes and more in this essential collection of interviews with David Barsamian, conducted over two decades, from 2001 to the present.

Future of Denial: The ideologies of climate change by Tad DeLay $47

Capitalism is an ecocidal engine constantly regenerating climate change denial. Emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green-washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth's paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left? The symptoms suggest society's inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. And all the while, hypocritical governments and corporations pretend that increasing fossil fuel consumption is a way to ‘transition’ to cleaner energy. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War. Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?
”It is through denial that the climate crisis deepens, but we have hardly begun to get our heads around how it works. In this sweeping survey, Tad DeLay turns and twists the concept and uses it to shine light on a range of aspects of the crisis. It is a leap forward in the study of denial." —Andreas Malm
”The contradictions of daily life in the global North in the face of accelerating climate change have become normalized. Sure there are those who refuse to ‘believe’ in climate change, but even people who recognize the magnitude of the problem have to manage the chasm between how contemporary capitalism works and the radical otherwise that is required. This requires a vast arsenal of denial that we rarely if ever talk about, and Tad DeLay is its generous but unflinching diagnostician. This book uncovers not only the scams, lies and misinformation that sustain the degradation of people and planet, but just as importantly the repressions and suppressions that have for many become essential to making it through the day. It is also an excellent guide to how we might move forward without them, but without giving in to doom-saying.” —Geoff Mann
”An impressive, beautifully written and unsparing book. DeLay's precise, controlled fury lends itself to mournful ironies and asperous satire as he brutally exposes the sources of denial and weighs the options for a future beyond denial. Not a word is wasted in this vital intervention.” —Richard Seymour
”Tad DeLay is one of the most important and disquieting theorists of consciousness and politics writing today. His work is indispensable.” China Mieville

• What if there just is no solution?

Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu) $39

2080, the world is divided, dominated by two antagonistic factions, the Pacific League and the Atlantic Alliance. Tensions are high and the smallest disturbance in the status quo could set the world on fire. And a signal flickering through deep space could be just that spark. As three young scientists form an alliance to decode the signal, they realise that the answers don't only lie in deep space, they also lie deep in humanity's past. What they discover will change everything — our past, present and future. If we have one.
”A fresh approach — emphasising Chinese history, and including scenes of martial artistry along with philosophical debates — adds extra zest to the popular idea of wise and helpful aliens in this entertaining adventure.” —The Guardian
”Relentlessly charming. It is precisely its madcap range that makes it such a treat, its total lack of interest in distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow entertainment or between philosophy and mere fancy.” —Washington Post

How to Make a Bomb by Rupert Thomson $37

Philip Notman, an acclaimed historian, attends a conference in Bergen, Norway. On his return to London, and to his wife and son, something unexpected and inexplicable happens to him, and he is unable to settle back into his normal life. Seeking answers, he flies to Cadiz to see Inés, a Spanish academic with whom he shared a connection at the conference, but his journey doesn't end there. A chance encounter with a wealthy, elderly couple sends him to a house on the south coast of Crete. Is he thinking of leaving his wife, whom he claims he still loves, or is he trying to change a reality that has become impossible to bear? Is he on a quest for a simpler and more authentic existence, or is he utterly self-deluded? As he tries to make sense of both his personal circumstances and the world surrounding him, he finds himself embarking on a course of action that will push him to the very brink of disaster.
”An exceptional, frightening and curiously persuasive novel. I hope it brings Thomson the attention and reward that one our finest and most imaginative novelists clearly deserves.” —Miranda Seymour, Financial Times
”A magnetic portrait of one man's radicalisation. The text sparkles with clarity and precision, and frequently beauty too. A book that strikes to the core of our age of uncertainty.” —Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

• The violent effects of grief.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See $29

According to Confucius, ‘an educated woman is a worthless woman’, but Tan Yunxian — born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness — is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations — looking, listening, touching, and asking — something a man can never do with a female patient. From a young age, Yunxian learns about women's illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose — despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it — and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other's joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife — embroider bound-foot slippers, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights. How might a woman like Yunxian break free of these traditions and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? A re-imagining of the life of one person who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

The House at the End of the Sea by Victoria M. Adams $20

Saffi doesn't want her new life, living with her dad, little brother and old-fashioned grandparents in their B&B by the sea. She is grieving for her mum and longs for things to go back to normal. But this new home is anything but normal: the walls change colour, a face appears in the mirror, and the pantry is suddenly filled with fancy food. When a party of extraordinary visitors arrive at midnight, Saffi begins to realise that her family has a dark, magical secret. It will take all her bravery to discover the truth and find a way into another world.
”A delightfully eerie mystery that explores complicated family histories. A twisty tale of fairy folklore and what it means to stand betwixt and between." —Skye McKenna
"Majestic, in the tradition of Garner and Cooper. A debut with real magic in its pages." —Sinead O'Hart

Click through to our website for your copies.

Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall $40

Polly and Wiki and all the other kuia ride on the roof of Kerry’s Toyota Corona with its navy blistered bonnet. They do this for all the moko; they are everywhere and roam inside us as they keep weaving the net and it’s no small thing that only a few slip through. Time and whakapapa slowly unravel as Talia Marshall weaves her way across Aotearoa in a roster of decaying European cars. Along the way she will meet her father, pick up a ghost, transform into a wharenui, and make cocktail hour with Ans Westra. Men will come — Roman, Ben, Isaac — and some go. Others linger. And it is these men — her father, Paul, and grandfathers Mugwi Macdonald and Jim; her tīpuna Nicola Sciascia, tohunga Kipa Hemi Whiro, Kupe himself — who she observes as she moves backwards into the future. With her ancestor Tūtepourangi she relives Te Rauparaha’s bloody legacy, and attempts and fails to write her great historical novel. But it is her wāhine, past and present, who carry her, even as the ground behind her smoulders. Tempestuous and haunting, Whaea Blue is a tribute to collective memory, the elasticity of self, and the women we travel through. It is a karanga to and from the abyss. It is a journey to peace.  
”This is a wild road trip, frightening and funny. You can taste all the food, see all the ghosts, hear the ancestors. It’s a masterclass in honesty. It’s one for the wāhine. Through Marshall’s extraordinary storytelling I saw and laughed with the people she loves, and cried for those she wished had stayed.” —Becky Manawatu 
”Whaea Blue is a fiercely original memoir with a fresh Māori perspective, scanning the record of inter-iwi hatreds, curses, war, and colonial aftershocks. In the process, she crafts a complex personal relationship to Māori identity. No one is spared in this droll, lyrical memoir, least of all the author herself. Marshall dives fearlessly into the darkest topics – pain, loss, abandonment, violence, death, madness, war — and comes up with a testament you won’t forget.” —John Dolan
”Marshall’s whirlwind prose effortlessly slams the reader with neck-snapping speed from laughter to sorrow to recognition to disbelief and then back again. An uncommonly good debut by an author who is as original as she is undeniable.” —Victor Rodger

• “I always think I know better than Pākehā men in corduroy pants.”

• A walk backwards.

• A tour inside the mind.

• Continue the tour.

• Look inside.

• Everyone is wrong about Ans Westra except Talia Marshall.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith $40

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know. She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows — almost — about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape. Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
“Eloquently oblique and profoundly empathetic, dredging up meanings from under the river that runs over undesired histories. Han Smith slides round the side of the unsayable by turning language over to its silver side.” —Selby Wynn Schwartz
”Kaleidoscopic and beguiling. A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics.” —Andrew McMillan
”Strange, intriguing, exhilarating.” —Camilla Grudova
”Intimate, intricate, and ultimately irresistible. Smith's unforgettable style builds a political-personal narrative that resounds to the drumbeat of resistance and rebellion.” —Ruby Cowling
”Like being in a hall of mirrors where you think you've caught Smith's eye but it's just a reflection. When something slips into view between the glass, you get that uncanny feeling you're staring back at yourself. A mysterious quest of excavation.” —Jen Calleja

• A secret history.

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto (translated from Japanese by Beth Cary) $30

Tokyo, 1960. As the first rays of morning light hit the rails at Kamata Station, a man's body is found on the tracks: blood-stained, disfigured and unrecognisable. With only two leads — a distinctive accent and a single word, "kameda" — senior inspector Imanishi Eitaro is called in to solve the puzzle. Accompanied by junior detective Yoshimura, he crosses Japan in search of answers, determined to uncover the secrets of this gruesome crime. With no suspect, no evidence and no witnesses, the two quickly reach a dead end. But, before long, a series of strange coincidences reopen the unsolved case: a young woman scatters pieces of white paper out the window of a train; an actor, on the verge of revealing an important secret, drops dead of a heart attack; and Inspector Imanishi investigates... A fascinating glimpse into 1960s Japanese society. This is one of Seicho Matsumoto's best-loved of his many novels. A nice edition.
”This reminds me of John le Carre's writing. It's a moment of transition in Japan; new ideas are spreading, new contexts are forming. There's traditional beauty still, but modernity is yammering to be let in. Highly recommended.” —Nick Harkaway

Rēwena and Rabbit Stew: The rural kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800—1940 by Katie Cooper $50

The rhythms and routines of country life are at the heart of this compelling account of the rural kitchen in Aotearoa. Historian Katie Cooper explores how cooking and food practices shaped the daily lives, homes and communities of rural Pakeha and Maori throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Delving into cooking technologies, provisions, gender roles and hospitality, the story of the rural kitchen highlights more than just the practicalities of putting food on the table.
”This book is a fantastic addition to rural history, with a compelling perspective and a fresh set of concerns about place, dwelling, and movement in and around rural spaces. The book brings both an intimacy and a vulnerability to rural life plus a strong sense of rural robustness. Visually, this is an extraordinary collection. The images themselves tell a compelling story.” —Jane McCabe

• Look inside!

• A voice from the rural kitchen.

A Man Holds a Fish by Glenn Busch $75

A retrospective survey of 79 extraordinary images, chosen by the photographer himself, and beautifully presented in a large-format book. Almost other-worldy, and striking in their humanity and emotional affect, the images in this resonant book bear returning to again and again. Busch left school at 14 and spent his early years working as a manual labourer in many different places around Australia and New Zealand. His passion for photography began with the viewing of the work of Hungarian photographer Brassai and his understanding of the medium was helped through a chance meeting with John B Turner. Throughout his career, Busch has focused on capturing the essence of daily life, often exploring themes of community, work and identity. His influential projects include Working Men, You Are My Darling Zita, The Man With No Arms and Other Stories, My Place and the ongoing Place In Time documentary project.
”In the early 1970s, the social documentary tradition was the reigning, respectable approach, and Busch's work remains foundational, even after half a century retaining a vividness and force in its resistance to any tendency to idealise in his portraiture, as this book so clearly attests.” —Peter Ireland

• Look inside!

The World of James Joyce (and Other Irish Writers): A 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle by Michael Kirkham, with text by Joseph Brooker $45

Step into Dublin on 16 June 1904 with Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and a host of other characters. Spot Joyce himself along with fellow Irish writers as you explore the world of Ulysses.
"Challenging, but easier to finish than Ulysses." —VOLUME customer

• What it’s like!

• Ulysses.

• A reader’s companion.

The Girls in the Red House Are Singing by Tracey Slaughter $30

our task is to sing in this killer place — but how does the body go on singing, in pain, in isolation, in dead-end love? Tracey Slaughter’s new collection of poems begins with the sequence that won the £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize in 2023, ‘opioid sonatas’, which travels the jagged aftermath of a high-speed crash, charting the fallout of grief and the body’s long-term struggles with dosage and damage. The sequence ‘psychopathology of the small hotel’ haunts the rooms of stale, no-exit adultery, watching the trade-offs the body makes to dull its pain. ‘the girls in the red house are singing’ tunnels back into childhood and teenage years, to face the echoes of violence left unvoiced — and confront the legacy of rape culture. ‘nudes, animals & ruins’ circles the emptied streets during lockdown, listening for the sounds the body makes when it must survive alone.
”Haunting and harrowing, yet executed with such forceful luminous brilliance. We kept reading the poems aloud, revelling in the breath-taking momentum, beautiful language, and galloping rhythmic quality. Outstanding.” —Malika Booker, Manchester Poetry Prize judge, 2023

Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Māori, Honoring the Treaty by Avril Bell $30

Becoming Tangata Tiriti brings together twelve non-Māori voices — dedicated professionals, activists and everyday individuals — who have engaged with te ao Māori and have attempted to bring te Tiriti to life in their work. In stories of missteps, hard-earned victories and journeys through the complexities of cross-cultural relationships, Becoming Tangata Tiriti is a book of lessons learned. Sociologist Avril Bell analyses the complicated journey of today's partners of te Tiriti o Waitangi, and asks: Who are we as tangata tiriti? How do we identify in relation to Māori? What are our responsibilities to te Tiriti? What do we do when we inevitably stumble along the way? This concise paperback acts as a guide for those just beginning their journey towards a Tiriti-based society — and is a sound refresher for others well along the path.
”Based on interviews with twelve non-Maori New Zealanders, Bell expertly weaves their narratives with existing writing, exploring what it means to be a good ally to Māori in contemporary times. To call it a 'how-to manual' would be too reductive but it does offer a pragmatic set of tools for those willing to do the work. Through teasing out the ways in which non-Māori have engaged with te ao Māori, and the often layered and nuanced complexities these engagements create, the book offers an invitation to Pākeha and, in fact, all non-Māori to be part of the conversation around what makes us New Zealanders — and how we might move forward in ways that are just and that enhance the mana of Māori and non-Māori alike. An easy-to-read book that should be compulsory reading for anyone concerned about our country's future.” —Rebecca Kiddle

Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid $38

A reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare's most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her. The Lady knows the stories: that her eyes induce madness in men. The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed. The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of survival, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armour. She does not know that her magic is greater, and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. She does not know this yet. But she will.
”Reid takes one of Shakespeare's most interesting antiheroes and endows her with vulnerability, power and depth: a protagonist who's neither flower nor serpent, but something both more magical and more human. This is a darkly gorgeous feast of a book, rich with irony and invention. I was spellbound from the very first page.” —Freya Marske
“Lady Macbeth is a dark, elegant, heart-stirring novel, beautifully written, rich with the history of language and of medieval Scotland. This tale of a tortured, appealing, resourceful woman carves its own life from the Scottish play in a unique and powerful way. I loved every page.” —Louisa Morgan

The Museum of Failures by Thrity Unrimgar $37

Remy Wadia left India for the United States long ago, carrying his resentment of his mother with him. He has now returned to Bombay to adopt a baby from a young pregnant girl — and to see his elderly mother for the first time in several years. Discovering that his mother is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life, he is struck with guilt for not realizing just how sick she has become. His unexpected appearance and assiduous attention revives her and enables her to return to her home. But when Remy stumbles on an old photograph, shocking long-held family secrets surface. As the secrets unravel and Remy's mother begins communicating again, he finds himself re-evaluating his entire childhood, his relationship to his parents, and his harsh judgment of the decisions and events long hidden from him, just as he is on the cusp of becoming a parent himself. But most of all, he must learn to forgive others for their failures and human frailties.
”There's no powder keg like a family secret. And when it explodes, nothing in the past is ever as it was, and nothing in the future is ever the same. The Museum of Failures is a symphony of secrets and lies, love and hate, regret and forgiveness.” —Marlon James

The West: A new history of an old idea by Naoíse Mac Sweeney $30

We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread stretching from classical antiquity to the countries of the modern Western world. But what if this is wrong? Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures — including a formidable Roman matriarch, an unconventional Islamic scholar, an enslaved African American poetess and a British prime minister with Homeric aspirations — archaeologist and historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney charts how the idea of The West was invented, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and why it is no longer ideologically fit for purpose today. New paperback edition.
”One by one she takes on hoary old myths, explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past.” —Guardian

A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle $38

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to? Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions. A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief.
”A life-affirming, deeply felt novel of the decisions we make and the lives that unspool from them. To read A Language of Limbs is to be reminded of the power of queer joy and community. I loved it.” —Hannah Kent
”Poetic, fresh and mesmerising, Hardcastle's work is like nothing I have ever read. A Language of Limbs is full of feeling; a love story about the family we make ourselves. Upon finishing this book I was overwhelmed by a sense of, more. I am desperate for more stories like this.” —Jessie Stephens
”Dylin Hardcastle's novel carried me away like a tidal current. Expansive across time, yet intimate in its focus, A Language of Limbs is that rare book that's equally poetic and propulsive — with twin protagonists who are impossible to shake. Nothing short of an instant queer classic.” —Benjamin Law

• Finding their own voice.

Into the Sideways World by Ross Welford $19

When twelve-year-olds Willa and Manny hear of a mysterious animal prowling their town, they are determined to prove it is real. Following the creature into a cave one full moon, they are swept into an alternate, ideal, world – one where pollution and conflict have been conquered decades ago and even their own families seem happier. But when they return, no one believes them. So, with a global war looming in their own world, their quest for proof of the Sideways World becomes ever-more urgent, in a nail-biting race against time. And Willa and Manny will have to make an impossible decision: because once you find a perfect world, can you ever leave it behind?

New books for a new month. Choose and read something new:

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) $36

Also available as Spontaneous Acts $35

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik… Yoko Tawada's novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music, of seeing and being seen weave a life together across decades, languages, and cultures, and reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.
”A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition." —Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review
"The varied characters in Tawada's work — from different countries, of different sexes and species — are united by the quality that Walter Benjamin describes as 'crepuscular': none has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines." —Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Magazine
"Yoko Tawada conjures a world between languages. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds." —Julian Lucas, The New Yorker
”Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel reads almost like a cautionary tale: this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry. Celan’s poems are Patrik’s only confidants. His girlfriend is long gone. A mysterious stranger, the trans-Tibetan angel of the title, lifts his spirits by seeking him out at a café with a gift: a German medical text that Celan once annotated on his quest for new language. This is Tawada's pandemic novel, which is never addressed directly—but it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why Patrik’s desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency.” —Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
"Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible." —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

• The present is a constant deferment.

• Removing language from the paper it’s written on.

• A poem intends another, needs this other.

Célina by Catherine Axelrad (translated from French by Philip Terry) $38

By the age of fifteen, Célina has lost her father to the sea, a brother to suicide, a sister to tuberculosis, her virginity to a wolfish man at the inn where she was waitressing, and the job at the inn when another servant informed on her. In the Channel Islands of the 1850s, Alderney is not yet the tourist paradise filled with luxury cars it is today. When the chance arises to leave and work in Hauteville House for the Victor Hugo household during their exile in Guernsey, it is Célina's first glimpse of a different kind of life. Axelrad sheds a new light on the complexity of Hugo’s persona, and on the sexual and class dynamics at play in the proprietary, yet strangely tender relationship between the maid and le grand homme. A fictional recreation based on Hugo’s Guernsey Diaries and on letters from his wife, Célina is a miniature literary monument to a forgotten life cut short.
”Pitch-perfect, and so light yet so profound. All of Axelrad's books have at their centre a silent, vulnerable young woman, but also one who is tough and resilient, totally unsentimental but deeply responsive and intelligent. How such a person emerges out of such apparent silence is the wonder of her work. Célina is as quiet and devastating a novel as I have read in a long time. Unforgettable.” —Gabriel Josipovici
”Seen through Célina’s eyes, told with her curiosity, her wonder, her sharp observations, what we witness unfolding here is not so much Victor Hugo’s life as that of the young narrator. We see the intelligence she brings to bear, playing her few cards just so in a time which may be the most patriarchal in our history: the nineteenth century. Catherine Axelrad describes a quiet young woman who nevertheless hears everything, sees everything, silently appraises her lovers, picks and chooses, and escapes submission in her own way. It’s a joyful read.” —Colombe Schneck
”Living in exile in the Channel Islands, the irrepressibly philandering author of Les Misérables went through what is called his ‘Chambermaid Period’. In this moving short novel, Catherine Axelrad gives us the great man and his retinue, his house and his mania for Gothic décor, the island and the threatening sea, all through the eyes of a chambermaid—not a fantasy maid, but the real girl from Alderney whose death in 1861 saddened the whole Hugolian establishment. The poverty, ill-health and exploitation of working folk and especially of the young girls who are brought to life here deepen the understanding of what Hugo’s great novel was really about. In this lively translation by Philip Terry, Axelrad’s portrait of a normal yet unique Victorian household seen from ‘downstairs’ is a true gem.” —David Bellos
”In this remarkable book Catherine Axelrad gives speech to a young woman born in poverty and almost lost to history. Célina is restored to life, emerging as lively, courageous, complex, witty, pragmatic, and joyful. There are moments of great tenderness and longing; despite her exploitation (for relations are often complicated, as Axelrad so subtly weaves), there is a real and delicate relation between her and her master, with whom she discovers the possibility of poetic language. Célina and Célina, woman and book, haunt me.” —Sharon Kivland

• Meeting Monsieur.

• Moot points.

• Other books published by Les Fugitives.

Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich $38

Eva meets Jamie by chance. She is sixteen, living in middle-class Brooklyn; he is the same age, but from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She's observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he's bold, mysterious, eccentric. Eva's family is warm and welcoming, but Jamie avoids going home to his. Despite having little in common, they instantly forge a deep friendship. As Eva goes off to college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and is drawn toward radical experiments in politics and religion. Their separate spheres seem to be spiralling away from each other, but it soon becomes clear that they are both circling the same question: how do you define yourself and your beliefs in a divided and unjust world?
”Ask Me Again is a beautifully observed and deeply philosophical novel, which surprises and delights at every turn.” —Jenny Offill
”Rigorous, intensely observed, and brimming with the sort of elusive revelations that form the heartbeat of a life, Sestanovich's novel debut demonstrates a tremendous gift at rendering the texture of love, faith, and heartbreak with both subtlety and force. In her masterful hands, relationships condense, turn acute, and unfurl with symphonic grace across the individual arcs of characters that you can't help but carry with you long afterward.” —Alexandra Kleeman

• Different people.

A Radically Different World: Preparing for climate change by Jonathan Boston $18

Boston provides an urgent exploration of our future in the face of climate change. Focusing on the challenges of adaptation, Boston’s insightful analysis assesses the scale of impact on communities, the need for robust policy for relocation and the design of fair compensation schemes. He charts the changing landscape of residential property insurance and offers a vision for navigating our uncertain future with hope.

A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw $38

Maxine has been losing things lately. Her car in the shopping centre carpark. Important work files — and her job as a result. Her marbles? 'Mild cognitive impairment', according to the doctor. Time for a nursing home, according to her daughter, Rose. Rose has her own troubles with memory: a recurring vision of a locked cupboard, claustrophobic panic. Something in the shadows. Something to do with the old family house in Kutarere. Back in that house by the beach, Maxine and Rose try to find their bearings. But they can't move forward without dealing with the past — and the past has a few more surprises in store.
”A beautiful story, this tangled yarn of dementia and love—harrowing, haunting and tender.’ —Michelle Elvy

Pirate Enlightenment, Or, The Real Libertalia by David Graeber $30

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolising risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies — vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire. In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, written while he and David Wengrow were working on what would become their major bestseller, The Dawn of Everything. In direct conversation with that work, Graeber explores how the proto-democratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. The result is a short but sweeping exploration of the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and an endeavor to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future. [Now in paperback!]
”The chief pleasure of Graeber's writing is not that one always agrees with his arguments about the past. It is rather that, through a series of provocative thought experiments, he repeatedly forces us to reconsider our own ways of living in the present. Whatever happened in 18th-century Madagascar, Pirate Enlightenment implies, we could surely all do with a bit more free-thinking and egalitarianism in our own social, sexual and political arrangements.” —Fara Dabhoiwala, The Guardian

This Other Eden by Paul Harding $26

Inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways — in flight from society and its judgment — have landed and built a home.  In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey arrives on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, to make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, alongside an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours.  Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island. A missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions — or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark. [Now in paperback.]
Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
”Based on a relatively unknown true story, Paul Harding’s heartbreakingly beautiful novel transports us to a unique island community scrabbling a living. The panel were moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders.” —Booker judges’ citation

The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy Each $25

New editions of two favourite books from this beloved feminist poet.

The World’s Wife: Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.

Feminine Gospels: Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions — and revisions — of female identity. Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect - as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door.

“Part of Duffy's talent — besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety — is her ventriloquism: from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets — that is, she makes it look easy.” —Charlotte Mendelson, Observer

WHAT by John Cooper Clarke $40

Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen — and that's just the first poem. Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke's could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection.

• Maintaining his front.

• I Wanna Be Yours.

Leonardo Forever by Richard Yaxley $20

In the summer of 1465, fourteen-year-old Annalisa de Torriano reluctantly travels with her family to her father’s new estate near the village of Vinci. Although she misses her privileged life, and the wealthy Matteo, in magnificent Florence, Annalisa is soon entranced by the freedom the countryside offers—and by the brilliant and charming young King of the Forest, Leonardo da Vinci, who, alongside his beloved companion Dante, quickly befriends her. Mesmerised by Leo’s intelligence and beauty, an infatuated Annalisa starts to dream of a different life. But her dreams are an illusion, and as her relationship with Leo unfolds, it is Dante who will change all their lives forever.

Jumping out of the carton and into your hands. Click through to our website to secure your copies:

Woman, Life, Freedom by Marjane Satrapi et al $65

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, returns to graphic art with this collaboration of over 20 activists, artists, journalists, and academics working together to depict the historic uprising, in solidarity with the Iranian people and in defense of feminism. On September 13th 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. A wave of protests soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" — words that have been chanted around the world during solidarity rallies. In order to tell the story of this major revolution happening in her homeland, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together an array of journalists, activists, academics, artists, and writers from around the world to create this powerful collection of full-color, graphic-novel-style essays and perspectives that bear witness. Contributing artists: Joann Sfar, Coco, Mana Neyastani, Catel, Pascal Rabate, Patricia Bolanos, Paco Roca, Bahareh Akrami, Hippolyte, Shabnam Adiban, Lewis Trondheim, Winshluss, Touka Neyastani, Bee, Deloupy, Nicolas Wild, and Marjane Satrapi. 3 expert perspectives on Iran: long-time journalist for Libération and political scientist Jean-Pierre Perrin; researcher and Iran specialist Farid Vahid; and UC Berkeley historian Abbas Milani, Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrates that this is not an unexpected movement, but a major uprising in a long history of women who have wanted to affirm their rights.
 "A small miracle of lively, serious and joyful intelligence." —Elle (France)
"Each comic in this anthology might also function as a small lantern, an opportunity to illuminate yet another aspect of daily Iranian life and resistance under the current regime." —The Markaz Review

• Look inside!

• Finger cramps.

• What can art achieve in a revolution?

The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an easier life in the kitchen by Bee Wilson $70

This excellent book, compiled from a lifetime’s experience of preparing, eating, thinking and writing about food, realigns even a sophisticated cook’s basic approaches and ingredients, and makes life in the kitchen simpler, more enjoyable, and always satisfyingly productive. The Secret of Cooking is packed with solutions for how to make life in the kitchen work better for you, whether you are cooking for yourself or for a crowd. Wilson shows you how to get a meal on the table when you're tired and stretched for time, how to season properly, cook onions (or not) and what equipment really helps. The 140 recipes are doable and delicious, filled with ideas for cooking ahead or cooking alone, and the kind of unfussy food that makes everyday life taste better.
”A lifetime of kitchen wisdom here.” —Nigel Slater
”A truly remarkable cookbook that will change lives.” —Rachel Roddy
”It's not often that a genuinely game-changing cook book comes out, but this accomplished, approachable and helpful book — its writing as nourishing as the recipes — is most definitely it. Quite frankly, there's not a kitchen that should be without a copy of The Secret of Cooking.” —Nigella Lawson
”There is wisdom, and notes from a lifetime of reading, thinking, cooking and eating here. And it's not just about food but about how we live, and how we look after ourselves and each other>” —Diana Henry
”The very acest book — so utterly lovely and so utterly necessary.” —Jeremy Lee
”Bee Wilson seems to help me in my moments of crisis — both when I'm struggling to find the right words and when I've got creative fatigue. The Secret of Cooking reminds us to cut ourselves some slack. Bee focuses on probability rather than possibility. The book is brimming with clever tips, handy shortcuts and substitutions, with 15 pages devoted to the versatile and underrated box grater (NB it really isn't just for cheese).” —Yotam Ottelenghi
”It is my Book of the Year, across any genre — packed to the absolute gills with invaluable advice, hints and tips, so reassuring and warm in tone that you feel actual love for the author, and, of course, also full of fantastic, achievable, home-kitchen friendly recipes that I guarantee will immediately become part of your repertoire.” —India Knight
”I don't need a lot of convincing to pick up a pan, but Wilson's tips are so clever, her recipes so tempting, and her vignettes of family life so candid, that this is a book I can read for pleasure alone.” —Niki Segnit
”This book is the perfect cooking companion and Bee Wilson is the ultimate kitchen friend: smart, funny, conscientious and patient, this is a book you'll want to spend time with, in and out of the kitchen.” —Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer

• Look inside!

The Raven’s Eye Runaways by Claire Mabey $25

A gripping fantasy quest set in a parallel medieval world. Three friends and a one-eyed raven find themselves up against the rulers who restrict the gifts of writing and reading to an elite few. They must go on a wild and unpredictable rescue mission. Who and what will they meet along their way? And what is the terrible truth behind everything they think they know about their world?  
”As delicate as it is potent, The Raven's Eye Runaways is a hot, pungent pot of tea. With every gulp, you'll be transported to a heady, haunting world where words are a currency reserved for the few, and paid with the price of spilled blood. A feverish love letter to the written word, I dare you to read it — you will be bewitched!” —Graci Kim 
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox
”I adored it.” —Rachel King
”A beautiful, warm and assured debut.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
”Claire Mabey writes like a dream.” —Anna Smaill

• Witch trials and post-it notes.

• Now think.

Marrow, And other stories by Sloane Hong $35

A collection of short comics by Sloane Hong, brought into print for the first time. Although varied in content, each story explores how we relate to each other and the world around us — through grief, love and our innate curiosity of the unknown. Plagued with intrigue and often unsettling, these gloriously stylish panels peel back layers of the human psyche, exposing them, throbbing and pulsating, for all to see.

• Look inside.

• Pip Adam recommends this (and a couple of other good books).

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won) $26

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression. Now in paperback.
”By turns love letter to and critique of language itself, Greek Lessons is a brief yet, in its concision and finesse, lapidary work. One of Han's most intimate works.” —Financial Times
”In Greek Lessons Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable. Han Kang turns the well-worn idea of the mind-body disconnect into something fresh and substantial.” —Los Angeles Times
”This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language. Han is an astute chronicler of unusual, insubordinate women.” —The New York Times
”Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience.” —Katie Kitamura
”Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up even the most jaded of literary palates.” —Independent

• How language misses its mark.

Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk $50

Following The Great War for Civilisation, this posthumous volumes is a chronicle of Fisk's trademark rigorous journalism, historical analysis and eyewitness reporting. Fully immersed in the Middle East and skeptical of the West's ongoing interference, Fisk was committed to uncovering complex and uncomfortable truths that rarely featured on the traditional news agenda.
”Every sentence of Robert Fisk radiates his loathing of wars and the inevitable dehumanisation they produce, which makes his (sadly) last book an everlasting warning, beyond its value as a meticulous historical recount and analysis of today's events.” —Amira Hass, journalist, Haaretz
”In his attentive, careful, detailed, historically grounded reporting — and in this remarkable posthumous book, which deserves to be widely read — the voices of people demanding freedom are given space, recognition, and dignity. This is an exemplary and deeply human work of both journalism and history.” —Anthony Arnove
”Even after 20 years, we still don't know the full depths of the strategic bankruptcy and moral depravity of America's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Legendary journalist Robert Fisk's Night of Power is essential reading to understand the full extent of the crime that was the Iraq war.” —Trita Parsi

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy $28

Claire Kilroy takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity. Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn't know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember. Tender and harrowing, Kilroy's book portrays parenthood in all its agony and ardent joy.
"Oh this novel! Powerful beyond description. I read it in a day, holding my breath, heart bursting. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever felt swallowed alive by caring for a child, and essential reading for everyone who hasn't." —Barbara Kingsolver
"The most vivid account I've ever read of how difficult it is to cope with the demands of an infant. Through a prism of love and despair, Kilroy's narrator illuminates how a baby can tear away at a woman's sense of self, as her needs disintegrate in the face of her child's interminable demands.., if a woman chooses to devote herself to ensuring her child's wellbeing, then someone needs to take care of her too." —John Boyne

• Parenting under the patriarchy.

Mask by Sharrona Pearl $23

From the theater mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks — as faces — are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponised and politicised, Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object. By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Sharrona Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value.
”Masking is, as Sharrona Pearl wisely observes, a complicated enterprise: masks can protect and buffer even as they diminish, eviscerate, and lie. With a historian's rigor and a human's candor, Pearl addresses all of this and more. From public health to performance and ritual, Mask interrogates the personal, public, and inevitably paradoxical ways we both conceal and reveal our increasingly imperiled selves.” —Jessica Helfand

• Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie $25

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband's abuse have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-three years. She has told no one of her own visions and knows that time is running out for her to do so. The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything. Vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women. New paperback edition.
”A tiny marvel, tenderly illuminating the inner lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.” —Guardian
”Electrifying — This slim novel is a pocket epic; you will read it in no time but be thinking about it for ages after. You feel in every sentence the weight of history pressing down on and confining these women.” — Frank Cotterell-Boyce, Guardian
”A beautiful book. I loved it. Margery and Julian are both so alive. The invisible balancing and weighing MacKenzie has done across the whole to bring them dialogue with each other and to bring the reader into emotional and spiritual connectedness with them is just so brilliant. And it's funny. It warmed my heart.” —Max Porter

• How much has been lost.

• Suprising.

To the City: Life and death along the ancient walls of Istanbul by Alexander Christie-Miller $40

Caught between two seas and two continents, with a contested past and an imperiled future, Istanbul represents the precipitous moment civilizations around the world are currently facing. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the fears and hopes of the present-day inhabitants, and the story of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II's siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform Turkey in an echo of its imperial past. Istanbul stands at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. Environmental decay, rapacious development and a refugee crisis are straining the city to breaking point, while its civil society gutters in the face of resurgent authoritarianism. Yet, the city has endured despite centuries of instability. Christie-Miller introduces us to people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds. Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country's history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future.
”The author is a sensitive and patient presence, piecing together these stories over many pages. Spending time at a teahouse, an animal shelter and a former Dervish hall that is now an academic institution, he brings to life the rich variety of these neighbourhoods. While Christie-Miller's focus remains on the streets surrounding the walls, his characters offer broader insights into Turkey's social and political make-up. He is also sensitive to the poetry of his surroundings, captured in moments of lyrical precision.” —Financial Times

Father and Son: A memoir about family, the past, and mortality by Jonathan Raban $40

On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his own mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the extraordinary story of his parents' marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.
”A beautiful, compelling memoir. Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement." —Ian McEwan

Inheritance: The evolutionary origins of the modern world by Harvey Whitehouse $40

Every human being is endowed with an inheritance. A set of ancient biases — forged by natural selection and fine-tuned by millennia of culture — that shape every facet of our behaviour. For countless generations, this inheritance has been taking us to ever greater heights — driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organised religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it is failing us. Suddenly, we find ourselves on a path to destruction.Here, a leading anthropologist offers a sweeping account of how our inheritance has shaped humanity's past and future. Unveiling a pioneering new way of viewing our collective history — one that weaves together psychological experiments, on-the-ground fieldwork, and big data — Harvey Whitehouse introduces three evolved biases that shape human behaviour everywhere — conformism, religiosity, and tribalism. He recounts how our tools for managing these biases have catalysed the greatest transformations in human history — the birth of agriculture and the invention of kingship, the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of the first crusading empires. And he takes readers deep into the modern-day tribes — from Indonesian terrorist cells to Libyan militias to American ad agencies — that show how our three biases are now spiralling out of control.Above all, he argues that only by understanding our ancient inheritance can we solve our thorniest modern problems, whether violent extremism, political polarisation or environmental catastrophe. The result is a powerful new perspective on the human journey; one that transforms our understanding of where we have been and where we are going.
”A bold and sweeping analysis that ranges widely through time, across geographies and through different kinds of human societies. A book of rare ambition and scope.” —Peter Frankopan
”A compelling, thoughtful, nuanced, and ultimately hopeful new perspective on our history, present crises, and future potential. This book is a masterpiece - important, thought-provoking, and great fun to read.” —Kate Fox

The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival $22

There's a bunch of kids in there and suddenly they're all looking at me like someone who can actually do something, not just some weirdo with the wrong shoes and a rubbish coat . Will has the wrong shoes – he's always known it but doesn't know how to change it. Navigating the difficulties of home and school when you feel you stick out is tough, but finding confidence with the help and empathy of friends can be all you need to see the way. A sensitive exploration of the experience of child poverty.
”Reading fiction is about walking in the shoes of people whose lives are very different to ours and allowing more readers to see themselves in stories. The Wrong Shoes is the perfect example of both — the right book at the right time.” —Tom Palmer

Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen $23

Eighteen-year-old Aihui Ying dreams of becoming a brilliant engineer just like her beloved father - but her life is torn apart when she arrives a moment too late to stop his murder, and worse, lets the killer slip out of reach. Left with only a journal containing his greatest engineering secrets and a jade pendant snatched from the assassin, Ying vows to take revenge into her own hands.Disguised as her brother, Ying heads to the capital city, and discovers that the answer to finding who killed her father lies behind the walls of the prestigious Engineers Guild - the home of a past her father never wanted to talk about. With the help of an unlikely ally - Aogiya Ye-yang, a taciturn (but very handsome) young prince - Ying must navigate a world fraught with rules, challenges and politics she can barely grasp, let alone understand.But to survive, she must fight to stay one step ahead of everyone. And when faced with the choice between doing what's right and what's necessary, Ying will have to decide if her revenge is truly worthwhile, if it means going against everything her father stood for…

Newspaper by Maggie Messitt $23

Newspaper is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account. This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home — the United States and South Africa. The ‘first draft of history’, newspapers figure prominently through each movement and period of unrest in both nations — from the first colonial papers published by slave traders and an advocate for press freedom to those published on id cards, wallpaper, and folio sheets during civil wars. Offices were set on fire. Presses were pushed into bodies of water. Editors were run out of town. And journalists were arrested. Newspaper reflects on a tool that has been used to push down and to rise up, and a journey alongside the hidden lives that have harnessed its power.

• Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Good Night, Belly Button by Lucie Brunellière $22

A delightful interactive board book! Baby is ready to sleep so it's time to say good night — all the way from toes to nose! With each new blanket-page longer than the previous one, the cosy check blanket gradually covers the baby's whole body. One by one, we say good night to little feet, little ankles, little knees... And what about you, little eyes — are you ready to close?

• See how it works!

Chose your new book from the newest of the new books:

All Fours by Miranda July $37

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY.  Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrilling.
 “A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers. Funny, honest, rich with the energy of the mind, All Fours will jump-start your relation to language and cause you to think anew about the nature of desire.” —George Saunders
”All Fours is profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind.” —Emma Cline

• Threads of identity.

• New forms for mid-life.

• It started with this story.

• Determined to cure the inhibitions of middle age.

• The miracle of middle age.

• Standing on the cliff of motherhood.

• Being Miranda July.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan $26

This tender and fierce novel set in the societal trauma of the Sri Lankan civil war has been awarded the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?
”V.V. Ganeshananthan's novel Brotherless Night reveals the moral nuances of violence, ever belied by black-and-white terminology.” —The New York Times
”A beautiful, brilliant book: tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better.” —Danielle Evans
”With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief. "I want you to understand," the narrator of Brotherless Night insists, and by the end of this blazingly brilliant novel, we do: that in a world full of turmoil, human connections and shared stories can teach us how — and, as importantly, why — to survive.” —Celeste Ng

• Read an extract.

• Earning trust.

Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki $36

Mary Toft was just another eighteenth century woman living in poverty, misery and frequent pain. Mary Toft was the kind of person overlooked by those with power, forgotten by historians. Mary Toft was nothing. Until, that is, Mary Toft started giving birth to rabbits... In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, Noemi Kiss-Deaki reimagines Mary's strange and fascinating story — and how she found fame when a large swathe of England became convinced that she was the mother of rabbits. Mary and the Rabbit Dream is a story of bodily autonomy, of absurdity, of the horrors inflicted on women, of the cruel realities of poverty and the grotesque divides between rich and poor. It is a story told with exquisite wit, skill and a beautiful streak of subversive mischief.
“One of those novels that seemingly arrives from nowhere, fully-formed, as odd, disturbing and lingering as the most vivid of fever dreams. To create something so playfully provocative, subversive and gripping displays a rare literary talent. I’ve certainly never read anything like it.”   —Benjamin Myers
“In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, Noémi Kiss-Deáki transforms the tale of Mary Toft into a stinging, witty critique of the oppressions heaped upon the bodies of impoverished women. This is a brave debut, one told with courage and wit, one which dissects a ruthless system of class and gender – and lays bare the concentric circles of power that still govern our world.” —Selby Wynn Schwartz
“Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s style is astonishing – hypnotic, poetic, persistent, wild, blazing and marvellous. As the novel unfolds you simply can’t believe what is happening – it’s outrageous, it’s cruel, it’s unfathomable and yet – it’s the way of the world. Here is Mary Toft’s tale, retold in dazzling prose that is both exquisite and furious. Noémi Kiss-Deáki reimagines the possibilities for historical fiction and Mary and the Rabbit Dream is utterly original and utterly brilliant." —Victoria Mackenzie

• Mysterious labours.

• A curious case.

• A little more about the book.

• Medical science has come a long way.

The Picnic: An escape to freedom and the collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo $40

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable- they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain — and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border between Hungary and Austria and packed the nearby camping sites, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The highest state authorities were choosing to turn a blind eye — but that could change at any moment. The stage was set for the greatest border breach in Cold War history — that day hundreds would cross from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union — the so-called end of history — all would flow from those dramatic hours. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved — activists and border guards, escapees and secret police, as well as the last Communist prime minister of Hungary — Matthew Longo reconstructs not only this remarkable event but also its complex and bittersweet aftermath. Freedom had been won but parents had been abandoned and families divided. Love affairs faltered and new lives had to be built from scratch. The Picnic is the story of a moment when the tide of history turned. It shows how freedom can be both dream and disillusionment, and how all we take for granted can vanish in an instant.
Winner of the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing (non-Fiction)
”Longo covers the Picnic at ground level, evoking the dramatic events in vivid colour. Anecdotes and impressions are woven through the historical narrative, providing an insight into how deeply this history still matters today. The chain of events in 1989 and its historical context are outlined with clarity and verve. The narrative is spiked with Longo's commentary and anecdotes from his trips, making The Picnic a deeply personal account of a fascinating milestone of Cold War history.” —Katja Hoyer, Telegraph

Choice by Neel Mukherjee $37

A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift.
These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee's new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them.
”Choice is funny, horrible, ironic, damning, affecting and deadly serious.” —Financial Times
”In his dazzling new novel, Neel Mukherjee dissects how economics rules our lives and impoverishes our souls. Choice is by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking. It burns brightly with fierce intelligence, with wisdom and compassion, and achieves what so few novels even attempt: it makes the reader think deeply about how we've come to live this way, at what cost, and about those who pay the greatest price.” —Monica Ali
”In each panel of this masterful triptych exquisite prose gradually crescendos to jaw-dropping revelations. Possessed of great moral seriousness, Choice is also very funny in its satirical excoriation of the obsession with calculating life in purely economic terms in so many realms of contemporary life. It is, in short, a deeply human novel, and a humane one. We come to realize that a human life is not simply the result of rational choices but rather, as Mukherjee puts it, the lull between them — a rich and swaying lull, thick with love and responsibility.” —Namwali Serpell

• Hard choices, hidden costs.

A Body Made of Glass: A history of hypochondria by Caroline Crampton $40

"There is a twilight zone between illness and health, and that's where I dwell." An ache, a pain, a mysterious lump, a strange sensation in some part of your body, the feeling that something is not right. The fear that something is, in fact, very wrong. These could be symptoms of illness. But they could also be the symptoms of hypochondria — an enigmatic condition that might be physiological or psychological or both. Caroline Crampton tells the story of hypochondria, beginning in the age of Hippocrates and taking us right through to the wellness industry today. Along the way, we encounter successive generations of doctors positing new theories, as well as quacks selling spurious cure-alls to the desperate. And we meet those who have suffered with conditions both real and imagined, including Moliere, Darwin, Woolf, Freud, Larkin, and Proust (whose symptoms and sensitivities gradually narrowed his life to the space of his cork-lined bedroom). Crampton also examines the gendered nature of the medical response, the financial and social factors at play, and the ways in which modern technology simultaneously feeds our fears and holds out the promise of relief. Drawing on Crampton's own experience of surviving a life-threatening disease only to find herself beset by almost constant anxiety about her health, A Body Made of Glass explores part of the landscape of illness that most memoirs don't reach: the territory beyond survival or cure, where body and mind seem locked in a strange and exhausting kind of dance. The result is both a fascinating cultural history of hypochondria and a moving account of what it means to live with this invisible, elusive and increasingly wide-spread condition.
”Clarity and beauty combine with terror and dark comedy — essential reading for everyone who has a body.” —Lucy Worsley
”A thoughtful and touching examination of what it means to be well. Crampton's unflinching honesty and skill with words make for a tender and often heart-breaking history of medicine. Every medical professional should read this book.” —Subhadra Das

• The podcast interviews to accompany the book.

• Do hypochonriacs want to be cured or do they want someone to confirm that they’re sick?

Vertigo: The rise and fall of Weimar Germany, 1918—1933 by Harald Jähner $40

Germany, 1918 — a country in flux. The First World War is lost, traditional values are shaken to their core, revolution is afoot and the victory of democracy beckons. Everything must change with the times. The country is abuzz with talk of the 'new woman', the 'new man', 'new living' and 'new thinking'. What follows is the establishment of the Weimar Republic, an economic crisis and the transformation of Germany. A triumphant procession of liberated lifestyles emerges. Women conquer the racetracks and tennis courts, go out alone in the evenings, cut their hair short and cast the idea of marriage aside. Unisex style comes into fashion, androgynous and experimental. People revel in the discovery of leisure, filling up boxing halls, dance palaces and the hotspots of the New Age, embracing the department stores' promise of happiness and accepting the streets as a place of fierce battles. So much of this short burst of life between the wars seems amazingly modern today, including, amidst a frenzy of change, the backlash from those who did not see themselves reflected in this new culture. Little by little, deep divisions in society began to emerge. Divisions that would have devastating consequences, altering the course of the twentieth century and the lives of millions around the world.
”Vertigo is outstanding. Harald Jahner's gift for illuminating the big picture with telling detail gives the reader an uncanny sense of what it was actually like to be present in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This is history at its very best.” —Julia Boyd

Analogue: A field guide by Deyan Sudjic $70

Covering sound, vision, communication and information, Analogue: A Field Guide is an evocative trip through an era of innovative design, profiling 250 classic objects from radios to turntables, TVs to cameras, and typewriters to telephones. Along the way, it surveys all the iconic brands as well as the technological developments that have made these devices possible. There is a growing nostalgia for physical, real-world interaction with design and technology and a desire to reconnect with both things and people, something that has been eroded by the digital revolution. The wide-ranging approach of this book enables it to show the deeper cultural and social significance of the analogue era, with the authority to convince those who know a lot about each category and the breadth to attract the non-specialist. Ideal for those nostalgic for physical media, as well as those who collect, use and maintain these older technologies. Impressive.

• Look inside!

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada (translated from Japanese by David Boyd) $30

Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time. One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole — a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.
”A great book.” —Patti Smith
”Surreal and mesmerizing.” —New York Times

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad $26

After years away from her family's homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. On her arrival, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. When Sonia meets the charismatic Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing with a dedicated, if competitive, group of men — yet as opening night draws closer, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life she once knew starts to give way to the exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home. New papernack edition.
”Enter Ghost retells Hamlet for now, dropping its readers deep into the contemporary tensions of the West Bank, asking crucial and layered questions. Hammad is a calm and vital storyteller, a writer of real rhythmic grace.” —Ali Smith
”How can a production of Hamlet in the West Bank resonate with the residents’ existential issues? Enter Ghost is a beautiful, profound meditation on the role of art in our society and our lives.” —Monica Ali
”Beautifully written, poignant yet forceful, thoughtful and thought provoking, but above all challenging the reader to respond to the question facing the characters in the novel: how to live under occupation while preserving your dignity and humanity? Hammad answers this question through taking us into the hearts and minds of the characters in the novel and through that into the heart and mind of Palestine.” —Azar Nafisi

• Fiction unbuttons the constraints of history.

• It doesn’t look good.

• Always more than a place.

The King’s Witches by Kate Foster $38

Denmark, 1589. Princess Anne is betrothed to King James VI of Scotland — a geo-political royal marriage designed to forever unite the two countries. But first, she must pass the trial period: one year of marriage in which she must prove herself worthy of being Scotland's new Queen. If the King and the Scottish royal court find her wanting, she faces disgraced and permanent exile. Determined to fulfil her duties to King and country, Anne resolves to be the perfect royal bride. Until she meets Lord Henry. By her side is Kirsten, her loyal and pious lady's maid. But whilst tending to Anne's every need, she has her own motives for the royal marriage to be a success . . . On the other side of the border in North Berwick, a young housemaid by the name of Jura is dreaming of a new life. With an abusive master and a soured relationship with a young farmer's son, she secretly practises the charms taught to her by her mother. When the tension reaches breaking point, Jura makes a run for it: to Edinburgh. But it isn't long before she finds herself caught up in the witchcraft mania that has gripped the capital, and her freedom and her future are on the line. Will Anne, Kirsten and Jura be able to save each other, and in doing so save themselves?

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (translated from German by Jane Degras) $33

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to 'read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content', but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realise that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies... But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for life. New edition.

The Dream Factory by Steph Matuku, illustrated by Zak Ātea Komene $22

An amazing building rises on the edge of town — it's the dream factory. Every night, it sends out magical mist. Flying cars, flower cakes and talking tigers fill people's dreams. And the next day, the people make those dreams come true. But when a kereru flies into the dream factory, and a feather floats into a cog, everything goes terribly wrong.

• Look inside.

• Shortlisted for the Russell Clark Award for Illustration in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

The Further Adventures of Miss Petitfour by Anne Michaels, illustrated by Emma Block $23

Miss Petitfour enjoys having adventures that are 'just the right size' for a 'single, magical day’. With her sixteen cats and the aid of a tablecloth as a makeshift balloon, Miss Petitfour soars — which is to say, she rises high in the air and flies — over her charmingly eccentric village, encountering adventures along the way. One never knows where the wind will take her in this delightfully seasonal collection of magical outings: perhaps to the aid of dearly loved friends and neighbours, including a hapless handyman and an onion-loving baby, or to a coconut-confetti parade, or in search of keys, lucky charms or even simply the perfect tablecloth for her next flight. A witty, whimsical, beautifully illustrated collection of tales that celebrate language, storytelling and all the pleasures of life, large and small.

• Meet Miss Petitfour and her cats.

Birds Aren't Real: The true story of mass avian murder and the largest surveillance campaign in U.S. history by Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos $35

Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? You haven't, have you? No one has, not in many, many years. They used to be everywhere. That's because they come out of the factory as adults. In the 1970s, the United States government killed off the entire bird population and replaced them with robotic bird replicas that are used for mass surveillance. Bird drones that recharge on power lines and leave 'liquid tracking devices' on your car are omnipresent while the American people live in blissful ignorance. Until now. In Birds Aren't Real, whistleblowers Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos trace the roots of a political conspiracy so vast and well-hidden that it almost seems like an elaborate hoax. These hero Bird Truthers have risked life and limb to spread the word, to free America and prevent other countries' governments from enacting a similar scheme.

• The lunacy is getting more intense.

Straight from the carton and into your hands!

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin $40

The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
”Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly — a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin's nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.” —Guardian

• On remembering to touch base with yourself.

• Identity, language, and desire.

• Writing fiction for the first time.

• Other books by Lauren Elkin.

Sight Lines: Women and art in Aotearoa edited by Kirsty Baker $70

From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa. How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith and Megan Tamati-Quennell alongside the author, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists.

• Look inside!

• A hook but no fish.

The Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of Neoliberalism (and how it came to control your life) by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison $32

Neoliberalism — do you know what it is? We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives — our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; the planet we inhabit — the very air we breathe. So pervasive has it become that, for most people, it has no name. It seems unavoidable, like a natural law. But trace it back to its roots, and we discover that it is neither inevitable nor immutable. It was conceived, propagated, and then concealed by the powerful few. It is time to bring it into the light — and, in doing so, to find an alternative worth fighting for.
”This brave book borders on being a page turner — 'The Secret History of Neoliberalism' is really the ultimate crime novel, one in which we all play a part.” —Kevin Anderson
”Incisive, illuminating, eye-opening-an unsparing anatomy of the great ideological beast stalking our times.” —David Wallace-Wells
”The Invisible Doctrine is everything you need. Monbiot and Hutchinson have written the definitive short history of the neoliberal confidence trick.” —Yanis Varoufakis
”Read it, get angry, demand better!” —Gaia Vince

• Neoliberalism’s ascent.

• On the mess we’re in.

Ædnan: An epic by Linnéa Axelsson (translated by Saskia Vogel) $55

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the ground, the earth. In this majestic verse novel, Linnea Axelsson chronicles the fates of two Indigenous Sámi families, telling of their struggle and persistence over a century of colonial displacement, loss and resistance. It begins with Ristin and Ber-Joná, who are trying to care for their troubled young sons while migrating their reindeer herd in northernmost Scandinavia during the 1910s. The coming of the Swedes brings new borders that lay waste to Sámi customs and migration paths – and mean devastating separation for this family. In the 1970s, Lise grapples with how she was forced to adapt to Swedish society, haunted by her time in a ‘nomad school’ where she was deprived of her ancestors’ language and history. Lise’s daughter, Sandra, seeks to reclaim that heritage, becoming an activist struggling for reparations from the Swedish state. As one generation succeeds another, their voices interweave and form a spellbinding hymn to lands and traditions lost and reclaimed. Written in sparse, glittering verse that flows like a current, Ædnan is a profound and moving epic of Sámi life.
”Crystalline — reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I've never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old.” —Tommy Orange
”Mesmerising. A beautiful, poetic weaving of language, character and place. Evocative and heart-breaking.” —Audrey Magee
”A soul-gripping and enthralling journey into what it feels like to be othered in your own land. Axelsson offers us a profound invitation into understanding what it means to be deeply intertwined with nature.” —Lola Akinmade Akerstrom
”A sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Expanses of white space.

• Many threads and voices.

• “I am not particular about what readers call it.”

A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Tanya Leslie) $25

On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux's mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother's condition, she had refused to fathom, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time in an effort to recover the different facets of a woman whose openness to the world and appetite for reading created the conditions for the author's own social ascent. Mirroring A Man's Place, in which she narrates her father's slow rise to material comfort, A Woman's Story explores the ambiguous and unshakeable bond between mother and daughter, its fluctuation over the course of their lives, the alienating worlds that separate them and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute to the last thread connecting her to the world out of which she was born, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was.
”Ernaux's genius, here as elsewhere, is in using her own experiences to bring into consciousness our painful unknown knowns, through a deeply relatable, hyper-personal objectivity.” —Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Irish Times
”What emerges is something that verges on the mystical: Ernaux writes as though she is not writing but unearthing something that already exists.” —Lucy Thynne, The London Magazine
”The writing itself in A Woman's Story is truly exquisite. Annie Ernaux is a master of the form: her crisp sentences and plain style manage to convey the story so clearly, leaving the reader in no doubt of its genuineness. At the same time, this purity of language transmutes the most difficult emotions with highly effective results.” —Gosia Buzzanca, Buzz
”The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething.” —Edouard Louis, author of Change
”Infinitely original. A Woman's Story is every woman's story. [Its] power rests not in the drama of its main event but in moments that might escape unnoticed, if not for a writer desperate to recapture every last image that her memory reluctantly yields of a lost loved one.” —New York Times

• Other books by Annie Ernaux (fill your gaps!).

• Other books published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Bad Archive by Flora Feltham $35

In these deftly woven essays Flora Feltham explores the corners where her memories are stashed: the archive vault, her mother’s house, a marriage counsellor’s office, the tip and New World. She takes us on a frenzied bender in Croatia, learns tapestry and meets romance novelists, all while wondering how families and relationships absorb the past, given everything we don’t say about grief, mental illness or even love. Most importantly, she asks, how do you write about a life honestly – when there are so many flaws in the way we record history and, more confrontingly, in the way we remember? Bad Archive is a lucid, continually surprising, funny and at times bracingly personal essay collection.
”Flora is just so smart and funny and these essays have so much heart. Her idiosyncratic, warm and wry voice moves seamlessly across time and space.” —Rose Lu

• Archiving and weaving.

• Julian of Norwich.

• Crystal systems.

Empireworld: How British imperialism has shaped the globe by Sathnam Sanghera $40

2.6 billion people are inhabitants of former British colonies. The empire's influence upon the quarter of the planet it occupied, and its gravitational influence upon the world outside it, has been profound — from the spread of Christianity by missionaries to nearly 1 in 3 driving on the left side of the road, and even shaping the origins of international law. Yet Britain's idea of its imperial history and the world's experience of it are two very different things. Travelling the globe to trace its international legacies — from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond — Sanghera demonstrates just how deeply British imperialism is baked into our world. From the author of the excellent Empireland (which examines how the legacies of imperialism are evident in modern Britain).
”If you thought Empireland was beautifully written, this follow up takes you even further on an extraordinary, entertaining and eye-opening journey around the globe.” —Sadiq Khan
”Essential and absorbing reading for those not afraid to encounter diligently researched, complex, and often contradictory truths about colonial rule and its legacies.” —Alan Lester
”This is a ground-breaking and eye-opening book, that everyone should read. Written with wit, nuance and academic rigour; it is a long overdue look at Empire and its effect on the world.” —Kavita Puri

• Knowing and not knowing.

What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh $23

A poignant, incisive meditation on Israel's longstanding rejection of peace, and what the war on Gaza means for Zionism. When apartheid in South Africa ended, dismantled by internal activism and global pressure, why did Israel continue to pursue its own apartheid policies against Palestinians? In keeping with a history of antagonism, the Jewish state established settlements in the Occupied Territories as extreme right-wing voices gained prominence in Israeli government, with comparatively little international backlash — in fact, these policies were boosted by the Oslo Accords. Condensing this complex history into a lucid essay, Raja Shehadeh examines the many lost opportunities to promote a lasting peace and equality between Israelis and Palestinians. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe, each side's perception of events has strongly diverged. What can this discrepancy tell us about Israel's undermining of a two-state solution? And will the current genocide in Gaza finally mark a shift in the world's response? With graceful, haunting prose, Shehadeh offers insights into a defining conflict that could yet be ameliorated.
”In his moral clarity and baring of the heart, his self-questioning and insistence on focusing on the experience of the individual within the storms of nationalist myth and hubris, Shehadeh recalls writers such as Ghassan Kanafani and Primo Levi.” —New York Times
”Shehadeh is a great inquiring spirit with a tone that is vivid, ironic, melancholy and wise.” —Colm Toibin
”A buoy in a sea of bleakness.” —Rachel Kushner

• All this solidarity and yet nothing has changed.

• Other books on Palestine and Israel.

• Other books by Raja Shehadeh.

Slim Volume by James Brown $25

A slim volume of verse, like a bicycle, offers us fresh and joyful and sometimes troubling ways of seeing the world. James Brown’s eighth collection of poems begins in childhood and moves through education, jobs and the essential unremarkable activities that occupy our lives – before arriving in a post-apocalyptic future, where the nights run late and down to the wire. The poems are ever-alert to the minutiae of power, the thrill of the unexpected, and the shiny potential of an ending. Always compelling, funny, heartening, Brown speaks volumes even when claiming to have little to say.
”James Brown makes the process of reading feel effortless, but always rewards active attention. Like Stevie Smith, he can sometimes seem to be waving and drowning at the same time.” —Bill Manhire
”How gifted Brown is at the craft of poetry, the game of word and sounds on the page that are tidy and tight and clever and cool. And also how he lifts aside that cleverness to show us the tender inner self, the moist soft core of James Brown and his world.” —Anna Livesey

Get the Picture: A mind-bending journey among the inspired artists and obsessive art fiends who taught me how to see by Biana Bosker $40

In Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker trained her insatiable curiosity, journalist's knack for infiltrating exclusive circles and eye for unforgettable characters on the wine world as she trained to become a sommelier. Now she brings her smart yet accessible sensibility along for a ride through another subculture of elite obsessives. In Get the Picture, Bosker plunges deep inside the world of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators and, of course, artists themselves — the kind who work multiple jobs and let their paintings sleep soundly in the studio while they wake up covered in cat pee on a friend's couch. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly naked performance artist and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for an hour straight while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonisation machine but also a more expansive way of living. The book encompasses everything from colour theory to evolutionary biology, and from ancient cave paintings to Instagram as it attempts to discern art's role in our culture, our economy and our hearts.
”In Get the Picture — curious but not nave, gossipy but generous, critical but admiring, hilarious but profound — Bosker probes the human thirst for art, examines the addictive high it gives and rescues the unfashionable idea of beauty, of the pleasure of creation, from the theorists and the marketeers. This book is sheer pleasure: the best book I've ever read about contemporary art.” —Benjamin Moser
”This book freaked me out. Bosker's accessible, conversational spelunking into the world of contemporary art so powerfully rehydrated the PTSD in me between the little kid artist I once was with the self-consciously constricted thinker I became in art school that at one point I simply had to put it down, shaken. If you've ever wondered 'what happened' to art — galleries, critics, collectors — and, of course, artists — then this book is a very companionable start. It's also very funny, to say nothing of very vivid. And, confoundingly, very, very difficult to put down.” —Chris Ware

The Lodgers by Holly Pester $40

“What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.” After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination. The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester's irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures.
”Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters.” —Kate Briggs
”There is no one better than Holly Pester at communicating the eerie, sometimes hilarious and often hallucinatory experience of modern precarity. This is a novel for the age and for generation rent: a captivating and unforgettable account of how economic circumstance can lead to a feeling of being only half alive.” —Nathalie Olah
”With tang and pith in every sentence, The Lodgers speaks to a generational epidemic of rootlessness and porous selfhood with vital wit and utter originality.” —AK Blakemore

• Pester reads from the novel.

• The sharp end of the housing crisis.

• The naughty thing that she did.

• Unlicensed housing.

The Hunger Between Us by Marina Scott $25

In a city ruled by hunger, the black market is Liza’s lifeline, where she sells or steals whatever she can get her hands on just for enough food to survive. Morality, after all, has become a fluid thing during the brutal year her city has been under siege. But when Liza's best friend proposes that they go to the secret police, rumored to give young women food in exchange for ‘entertainment’, Liza thinks there surely must be some other way. Then her friend disappears, and Liza devises a plan to find her, entangling herself with two dangerous young men—one a member of the secret police, the other forced to live underground—and discovering there are some lines that should never be crossed.
"A fast-paced and atmospheric historical thriller. In this rare portrayal of the fight for survival inside the necropolis that was Leningrad between 1941 and 1944, its protagonists and the formidable enemy they face--starvation--add up to a ravishing, unforgettable portrait of an era." —The Historical Novel Society

Our solutions to your reading resolutions are below.

The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden $37

When she was a child, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died and ten when she lost her mother. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, her personal devastation was mirrored by a city that was ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she begins to research the mysterious parallels between the histories of AIDS and the internet. She questions what it means to 'go viral' in an era of explosive biological and virtual contagion and simultaneously finds her own past seeping into her investigation. While connecting her disparate strands of research — images, fragments of scientific thought, musings on Raymond Chandler and late-night Netflix binges — she makes an unexpected discovery about what happened to her family and who her parents might have been. Entwining an intensely personal search with a history of viral culture and an ode to Los Angeles,  The Observable Universe is a prismatic account of loss calibrated precisely to our existence in a post-pandemic, post-internet life.
”McCalden's sequence of itemized yet interlocking chapters — many less than a page long — is so surprising that this debut book feels revelatory. She hires a private investigator to look into the life of her father, about whom she knows very little. This gives her story drive — rare in a collection of vignettes. But it becomes clear that for McCalden the facts of the past are not really important: what matters is grappling with how we live now, with contagion and loss in the digital age. —Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
”A gifted writer's brilliantly innovative approach to autobiographical non-fiction, syncing a narrative of profoundly personal emotion with the invention and evolution of today's cyberspace.” —William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
”Part meditation on loss, AIDS, and viral transmission, part howl of grief and fury, The Observable Universe spells out better than anything else I've read the transformative power of the internet. It felt like Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts meets Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, and is easily the equal of both.” —Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being
”It isn't pain itself that inspires great art; it's the frenzied avoidance of pain that pushes an artist to do something, anything, other than feel pain. This book is what arises from that practice: the artifact of one writer's solitary, complicated grief. With every carefully, thoughtfully written page, one feels the unwritten grief thudding behind it, beautiful and monstrous. And in the end there's no true story, no solution to the mystery, no final coherence. But there is this marvelous book.” —Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque stories by Ali Smith, Tommy Orange, Naomi Alderman, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Charlie Kaufman, Elif Batuman, Leone Ross, and Joshua Cohen $38

What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from Kafka’s work and use it to spark something new? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.
”This inspired anthology demonstrates the enduring influence of Franz Kafka's fatalistic worldview and mordant humour. These stories will do the trick for the Kafka-curious and diehard fans alike.” —Publishers Weekly

• “Kafka himself would have loved it.”

Urban Aotearoa: The future for our cities edited by David Batchelor and Bill McKay $18

A critical look at the evolution of New Zealand’s cities, at a crtitical time. Moving past the country’s rural image, the book addresses the realities of its urban majority, questioning suburban spread and exploring options for smarter living. A range of contributors provide insights that span housing trends, Māori urban development, Pacific design, climate action and more. This BWB Text is a straightforward look at how cities work and how they can change for every New Zealander interested in the future of our urban spaces. Contributors: Ben Schrader, Shamubeel Eaqub, Selena Eaqub, Anthony Hōete, Lama Tone, Jane Higgins, Paul Dalziel, John Tookey, Morten Gjerde.

The Ministry of Time by Keliane Bradley $38

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' — Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?
”Holy smokes, this novel is an absolute cut above! Exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic.” —Max Porter
”An outrageously brilliant debut. This is already the best new book I will have read next year>” —Eleanor Catton
”Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It's thought-provoking and horribly clever — but it also made me laugh out loud.” —Alice Winn
”Conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage.” —Mark Haddon
”Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm — no, hotter than that — in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time-bomb of a book> —Francis Spufford

• It started as a joke.

• She fell in love with him herself!

• Luck jumper.

Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes (translated from Italian by Jill Foulston) $37

Looking back over her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in 1930s Rome. A sensitive child, she was always alert to the loneliness and dissatisfaction of her mother and the other women in their crowded apartment block. Observing how their lives were weighed down by housework and the longing for romance, she became determined to seek another future for herself. This conviction will lead her to rebel against the expectations of her family, rail against the unjust treatment of women and seek to build a life with an anti-fascist professor. As her independence grows, so too does resistance against it - even from those closest to her. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the partisan struggle in the Second World War, Her Side of the Story is a devastating story of one woman's determination to carve her own path.
”Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere.” —Annie Ernaux
”De Cespedes's novel anticipates the candid confessionals of writers such as Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk. Formally precise, psychologically rich, and suffused in suspicion and suspense.” —Financial Times
”While I'm writing, I confine myself to occasionally reading books that keep me company not as entertainment but as solid companions. I call them books of encouragement, like those by Alba de Cespedes.” —Elena Ferrante
”Recently rediscovered, her work has lost none of its subversive force.” —New York Times

• Forbidden Notebook.

The Fight for Freshwater by Mike Joy $40

Mike Joy is recognised in New Zealand as a leading freshwater ecologist and a fervent advocate for the preservation of waterways. However, the journey that led him to these influential roles is as winding and unique as the rivers he strives to protect. His story is not just about academic success and public profile, but also personal discovery, challenge and resilience. Before setting foot in academia, Mike’s early life included a surprising range of occupations, including time on farms – the very industry that would later be a particular target of his academic activism. It wasn’t until his early thirties that he decided to pivot towards academia, enrolling at Massey University. This memoir provides a rare first-hand look at the pressures and challenges faced by those who dare to raise their voices, especially when debating issues as crucial as the health and future of New Zealand’s waterways. At a perilous time for our universities, it is also an inspirational account of staying true to academia’s function as ‘critic and conscience’ for our society. More urgent now than ever.

• Tinker, tailor, water warrior, spy.

• Under pressure.

• Polluted Inheritance.

• Mountains to Sea.

Everything That Moves Moves Through Another edited by Jennifer Cheuk $95

A landmark anthology that brings together the creative work of twenty-seven mixed-heritage creatives from across Aotearoa. Weaving together a range of artistic mediums and giving space to both emerging and experienced creatives, this anthology lays the groundwork for deeper and more empathetic conversations around the experience of mixed-heritage individuals. Through an open call for contributors in 2023, this publication was created in response to the lack of authentic representation for biracial, mixed-heritage and multi-ethnic individuals living in Aotearoa. Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another features photography, comics, essays, poetry and multimedia art from a range of creative practitioners (listed below). The publication also includes an original introduction written by mixed Malaysian-Chinese poet, Nina Mingya Powles. This project showcases the importance of independent publishing and collective creativity in platforming diverse stories and voices. Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another explores the book as an object wherein communities can converse with one another, and different artistic mediums can converge on the page. Contributions from: Nina Mingya Powles, Kim Anderson, Cadence Chung, Kàtia Miche, Damien Levi, Jefferson Chen, Ivy Lyden-Hancy, Jessica Miku 未久, Ruby Rae Lupe Ah, Ying Yue Pilbrow, Emma Ling Sidnam, Jimmy Varga, Jill and Lindsey de Roos, Daisy Remington, Chye-Ling Huang, Evelina Lolesi, Eamonn Tee, Emele Ugavule, Harry Matheson, kī anthony, Maraky Vowells, Dr Meri Haami and Dr Carole Fernandez, Kechil-kechil chili padi, Nkhaya Paulsen-More, Yani Widjaja, Chyna-Lily Tjauw Rawlinson, romesh dissanayake, Jake Tabata.

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) $28

Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organising image, the narrator of Gospodinov's novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Both moving — such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill — and very funny — see the section on the awfulness of the question "how are you?" — The Physics of Sorrow is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various ‘side passages’, getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathising with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.

• Nothing ever certain.

• The unstable form.

• Literature develops empathy.

• Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter was awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize.

Bethlehem: A celebration of Palestinian food by Fadi Kattan $65

Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan celebrates the hidden parts of Bethlehem, his home, conjuring the colours and smells of its market and spice shops and introducing readers to the local farmers and artisans with whom he works to find the perfect ingredients and shares his love of culinary experimentation. Fadi’s inspiration comes from these food artisans, who grow the grapes, mill the wheat, make the olive oil, and most importantly, pass down the generational food knowledge. His loving profiles of these people are accompanied by his own recipes, some passed down, some from his restaurants in Bethlehem and London. Learn to stuff grape leaves with Nabulsi cheese, slow roast lamb seasoned with fenugreek and cardamom, roll labaneh in nigella seeds, and make Mouhalabieh, a milky pudding scented with mastic and pistachios.

• Look inside!

Space Rover (‘Object Lssons’ series) by Stewart Lawrence Sincliar $22

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated with the space race. Fifty years later, that vision feels like a nostalgic fantasy, but the lunar rover's legacy paved the way for Mars rovers like Sojourner, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Other rovers have made accessible the world's deepest caves and most remote tundra, extending our exploratory range without risking lives. Still others have been utilized for search and rescue missions or in clean up operations after disasters such as Chernobyl. For all these achievements, rovers embody not just our potential, but our limits. Examining rovers as they wander our terrestrial and celestial boundaries, we might better comprehend our place, and fate, in this universe.

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

Sarn Helen: A journey through Wales, past, present, and future by Tom Bullough, with illustrations by Jackie Morris $28

Sarn Helen — Helen's Causeway — is the old Roman Road that runs from the south of Wales to the north. As Bullough walks the route, sometimes alone, sometimes in company, he describes the changing landscape around him and explores the political, cultural and mythical history of this country that has been so divided, by language and by geography. Running alongside this journey is the story of Bullough's engagement with the issue of the climate crisis and its likely impact on the Welsh coastline. Sarn Helen is at once a vivid and immersive portrait of a nation, and a resonant meditation upon the way in which we are shaped by place and in turn shape the places — potentially irrevocably.
”Vital, and urgent with concern. You cannot leave this book without its message thundering in your head. It is not enough to walk old routes. This was. Now what?” —Cynan Jones
”A profound and beautiful portrait of Wales. With great charm and learning, Tom Bullough walks us through the country's leafy backways, its deep pasts, the sparkling shards of its identity, its vanishing rural traditions and its fragile ecology.” —Philip Marsden

• The author writes about the book.

Heartsease by Kate Kruimink $38

“I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.” Charlotte ('Lot') and Ellen ('Nelly') are sisters who were once so close a Venn diagram of the two would have formed a circle. But a great deal has changed since their mother's death, years before. Clever, beautiful, gentle Lot has been unfailingly dutiful — basically a disaster of an older sister for much younger Nelly, still haunted by their mother in her early thirties. When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed. Heartsease is a sad, sly and darkly comic story about the weight of grief and the ways in which family cleave to us, for better and for worse.
”Sharp, gorgeous and unforgettable.” —Robbie Arnott

• On writing the book.

• You give yourself away.

• Losing her fingerprints.

Clive and His Babies by Jessica Spanyol $18

Meet Clive — and his imagination! Clive loves his dolls. He enjoys playing with them, and sharing them with his friends. A gentle, affectionate book, celebrating diversity and challenging gender stereotypes.

• Look inside!

Big Ideas from Literature: How books can change your life $50

This book is an exploration of the ideas found in books, that teach children through the stories they tell. Books can be powerful, helping us through tricky times, offering us wisdom we haven't learnt yet, showing us that there are people like us, or showing us the opposite, that other people live very different lives. Books can be a friend when you need one the most and you can use them to help and inspire others too. Big Ideas from Literature helps children discover key ideas that lots of different books are trying to teach through the stories they tell - and helps a growing child develop empathy and resilience. This book teaches children (and adults!) about the history of literature, from the first ever story that was written down to the invention of books just for children. The best children's books become our dearest friends and companions. Children discover characters from a diverse range of books — including Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams — and learn how these stories can help them better understand the world around them.

• Look inside!

• In the same series: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.

Goodbye Eastern Europe: An intimate history of a divided land by Jacob Mikanowski $25

An epic history of the 'other' Europe, a place of conflict and coexistence, of faith and folklore. Eastern Europe is more than the sum total of its annexations, invasions and independence declarations. From the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev, the area exuded a tragicomic character like no other. This is a paean for a disappearing world of movable borders, sacred groves and syncretism. And an invitation to not forget.
”Do not rush to bid farewell to eastern Europe until reading this book. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this very personal story of the place that one can't find on the map pays tribute to the origins of the experiences, cultures and ideas that continue to shape political and ideological battles of the modern world.” —Serhii Plokhy
”This wonderful book is a firework display: an unforgettable flash of forgotten past. Mikanowski shows that the vast regions between Germany and Russia are not just a zone of blood and tragedy, but of marvellous human vigour and resilience.” —Neal Ascherson

A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal $25

On the streets of White Roaring, Arthie Casimir is a criminal mastermind and collector of secrets. Her prestigious tearoom transforms into an illegal bloodhouse by dark, catering to the vampires feared by society. But when her establishment is threatened, Arthie is forced to strike an unlikely deal with an alluring adversary to save it-and she can't do the job alone. Calling on some of the city's most skilled outcasts, Arthie hatches a plan to infiltrate the dark and glittering vampire society known as the Athereum. But not everyone in her ragtag crew is on her side, and as the truth behind the heist unfolds, Arthie finds herself in the midst of a conspiracy that will threaten the world as she knows it.
”A Tempest of Tea is a masterpiece, filled with phenomenal prose, impeccable world building, and a mesmerizing found-family cast embarking on the heist of their lives! Hafsah Faizal has written the kind of book you can't stop thinking about. If you like vampires, romance, and kick-ass characters with magic weapons, unique talents, and dangerous secrets, look no further and you'll be delighted! —Ali Hazelwood

Wisdom from the Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben $30

A beautifully illustrated hardback collection of insights from The Hidden Life of Trees. Discover the operations of the forest ecosystem where themes of communication, resilience, beauty, age, family, society and survival tie into our human world. With rich yet easy-to-understand language and evocative artwork from all over the world, this book highlights the interconnectedness of our world — and celebrates trees!

• Look inside!

• The book that started it all.

The following books would like a home on your shelf. Take your pick:

Chaos in the Heavens: The forgotten history of climate change by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher $49

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War. Climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism. From these intellectual and political battles emerged key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of an undeniable climate emergency, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.
”A truly fabulous book — surprising, thought-provoking and rich in historical irony. It is a necessary corrective to the narrative which makes the emergence of climate change as a matter of concern relatively recent and incremental. But it is more enlightening, more provocative and more entertaining than any mere necessity would have required.” —Oliver Morton
”The upshot of is this brilliant book is that historians have been asking the wrong question. For years we've been trying to date the emergence of a consciousness about the impacts of human activities on Earth's climate. But this awareness long predates modern science, as we learn from the authors' pathbreaking research. The real question, the one at the heart of their book, is why this awareness was always ambivalent and why it evaporated at the turn of the twentieth century. If you want to understand the long path to the climate crisis, read this book.” —Deborah Coen, Professor of History & History of Science & Medicine, Yale University

Hopurangi—Songcatcher: Poems from the maramataka by Robert Sullivan $30

Ngā mihi whakawhetai nui ki a rātou e whai ana i te ara mātauranga o ō mātou mātua tūpuna!
A new collection from acclaimed poet Robert Sullivan, inspired by the Māori lunar calendar.

Three birds flew from me:

a sparrow from my chest
a tūī out my throat
a pīwaiwaka from my thigh

they flew to see my father
to let him know I am well

— from ‘Tamatea Kai-ariki: ‘Three birds flew from me’

After rejoining social media, Robert Sullivan wrote and posted a poem a day over two and a half months – the poems collected in Hopurangi—Songcatcher. Inspired by the cyclical energies of the Maramataka, these poems see the poet re-finding himself and his world – in the mātauranga of his kuia from the Ngāti Hau and Ngāti Kaharau hapū of Ngāpuhi; in his mother’s stories from his Ngāti Manu hapū at Kāretu; in the singing and storytelling at Puketeraki Marae, home of his father’s people of Kāti Huirapa, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha and Kāi Tahu Whānui in Te Tai o Āraiteuru; and in the fellowship of friends on Facebook. Tīhei mauri ora!
”Rich, accessible and fun, intense and moving, Hopurangi—Songcatcher presents poems charting the increasing harmonisation of a Māori literary intellect with his world in cultural, spiritual and physical terms. This harmonisation is focused through his intensifying connection with the Maramataka, the whenua he inhabits, his Māori community (online and in real life), and his own body. The poems are extraordinarily appealing – technically tight, warm and emotionally moving.” — Tina Makereti

The Details by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $28

A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? The Details is a novel built around four such portraits, unveiling the fragments of memory and experience that make up a life. In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human. Short-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.
”Brief and penetrating. Genberg's marvellous prose is also a kind of fever, mesmerising and hot to the touch.” —Catherine Lacey, New York Times
”The nonlinear narrative renders the protagonist both vivid and obscure — the perfect conduit for this compelling, uncannily precise meditation on transience.” —Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

• Read an extract.

• Q&A with the author and the translator.

• The first time the band felt complete.

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova $35

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses — though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care — threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life. A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.
"At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture. Monstrilio packs in a lot, and the author pulls it off brilliantly. It is at once dark and tender, at times bleak, but balanced with humor that borders on slapstick. An outstanding debut; for all the ground being broken in genre-bending horror, his is a distinctive, exciting new voice in fiction." —Gabino Iglesias, Los Angeles Times
"In his masterful and surreal debut novel, Mexican author Gerardo Samano Cordova revels in the mire of grief, then lifts the veil and gets playful with it, like the Brothers Grimm ghostwriting Stephen King. Monstrilio is full of surprises and delightfully messed up — at once precise and inscrutable and horrifying." —Patrick Rapa, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry $38

Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits - torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love. Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva, said to haunt a nearby manor, and whose startling astronomical discoveries may never have been acknowledged. Inspired by Maria, and the dawning realisation James may not reciprocate his feelings, Thomas finds solace studying the night skies. Could astronomy offer as much wonder as divine or earthly love? Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas. In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world, and the sheer miracle of being alive.
”Gauzy and unhurried, a genteel novel of inner space. It's luxuriously — defiantly — old-fashioned. Perry has always produced gorgeous prose, and she has found a new, ethereal register in this book.” —Guardian
”A genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet.” —Telegraph
”Extraordinary and ambitious. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry's luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.” —Observer

• A taxonomy of love.

Max by Avi Duckor-Jones $38

I want to let her know that choosing something is the entire problem. How do you choose something without feeling the undeniable loss of everything you rejected?
Max is about to finish high school. On the surface it appears he has everything, but underneath he is floundering. Grappling with questions about his birth parents and his sexuality, he feels that there is a seed of badness deep within him that will inevitably be exposed. After an incident at the end-of-year party sets Max's world to crumbling, he must finally figure out who he is and where he came from — and who he is allowed to love. Max is a vivid and insightful coming-of-age novel about the ways we weave the threads of our adolescent identities into a cohesive adult self.

• Reconsidering the Southern Man.

Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh $28

Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes. The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked. For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped-for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year - a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life — from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world — and it is about all that does not change. All that which simply keeps on — living and breathing, nesting and dying — in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.
”Raw, visionary, lucid and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life.” —Katherine May
”I am a little in awe of Kerri ni Dochartaigh's work — the clarity and disinhibition of her storytelling; the wild freedom of her prose. Here is a brave and bold book, and one that deserves to be read, then read again.” —Helen Jukes
”Kerri ni Dochartaigh is one of those rare writers — like Dickinson, like Blake — whose way of seeing and being burns fierce and bright. Out from a year of intense isolation comes this hope-giving story about a soul taking flight and new life taking root.” —Tanya Shadrick

• Oddly boned.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud $38

June1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar — honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica — bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole. A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France — their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.
”Wonderfully enjoyable, intelligent, perceptive, moving. Written with such affection and understanding, such an awareness of the passing of time and of the unavoidably bruising nature of experience which is nevertheless redeemed by love, loyalty, and kindness. It is indeed rare to come upon a novel which offers such a cornucopia of pleasure, such a sense of the physical world and the reality of experience.” —Scotsman
”This epic family saga, which stretches from Algeria in 1927 to Connecticut in 2010 is a wise and insightful novel about identity and family, and how love can stifle as well as comfort.” —The Times
”One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller.” —Yiyun Li

• The past that lives within us.

• Drawing from the archives.

Uncivilised: Ten lies that made the West by Subhadra Das $40

Taking cues from Greek philosophy and honed in the Enlightenment, certain notions about humanity and human society grew into the tenets we live by, and we haven't questioned them a great deal since. But isn't it time we asked who really benefits from the values at the core of our society? How much truth lies in a science that conjured up 'race'? Who do laws and nations really protect? Why does it feel like time is money? What even is 'art'? And the real question - is the West really as 'civilised' as it thinks it is? This book will put everything back on the table and ask readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about civilisation. Taking ten core values of Western Civilisation in turn, it will examine the root of the idea, how it developed, and how it's impacted the way we live. Most importantly it will reveal how each of these ideas was either created in opposition to another group of people, or based on ideas they had first (and better).
”A witty and accessible survey of the shortcomings of western civilisation as many people imagine it.” —Angela Saini
”With cutting wit and incisive insight, Uncivilised makes minced meat out of the leviathan known as 'Western civilization'. Imagine a brilliant curator-comedian guiding you on an irreverent tour through a grand museum — exposing its attics, sewers, and closets full of real and metaphoric skeletons. Subhadra guides us out of hallowed, hypocritical halls of the 'Ten Lies That Made the West', and shares with us the histories, knowledges, and ingenuity of those peoples and cultures dismissed as 'uncivilised'.” —Xine Yao

• Take no-one’s word for it.

The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig (translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches) $28

Spring, 1974. After twelve years abroad, Natàlia Miralpeix returns to Barcelona and her family. Change is in the air: revolution sexual, political and artistic is simmering. Franco may still be in power, but his death is only two years away. The younger generation write poetry, listen to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and talk of a freer future. The older generation, though, carry the hidden wounds of the Civil War, their divided loyalties, and their own thwarted dreams, rebellions and desires. Translated here for the first time into English, Montserrat Roig’s The Time of Cherries is a beloved classic of Catalan literature, bold and startlingly fresh. As it dips in and out of timelines, stories and voices, it evokes a heady, captivating Barcelona that is as smoky, gritty and troubled as it is romantic and sun-kissed; a city and a people striving to leave the ghosts of the past behind, find a place in this invigorating new world and bring in the time of cherries, the springtime of joy.
”An exquisite portrait of old Catalonia meeting its newer version.” —Times Literary Supplement

Non-Places: An introduction to supermodernity by Marc Augé (translated from French by John Howe) $25

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of "supermodernity" to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

• Non-relational space.

How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary scientists and a Siberian tale of jump-started evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut $42

Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs--they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken — imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades.
In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary, untold story of this remarkable undertaking. Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15,000 years, but within a decade, Belyaev and Trut's fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes, as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. Trut has been there the whole time, and has been the lead scientist on this work since Belyaev's death in 1985, and with Lee Dugatkin, biologist and science writer, she tells the story of the adventure, science, politics, and love behind it all. In How to Tame a Fox, Dugatkin and Trut take us inside this path-breaking experiment in the midst of the brutal winters of Siberia to reveal how scientific history is made and continues to be made today.

The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar $25

In her cramped New York apartment, a mother wilts beneath the intense August heat, struggling to adapt to her role as the silent interpreter of her newborn baby's needs. She is not the first woman to give birth, to hold and carry and soothe and cradle. But the walls of her home seem to press ever closer as she balances on the fragile tightrope between maternal instinct and the longing for all she has left behind. A lifeline emerges in the unexpected form of Peter, her ailing upstairs neighbour, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. They are both confined to this oppressive apartment building, and they are both running out of time. Something is soon to crack. In this mesmerizing portrait of the first days of motherhood, Szilvia Molnar lays bare the strength it takes to redefine who you are, rediscovering the simple pleasures of life along the way.
”Brilliant. Molnar's sentences give up riches and terrors. An essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood.” —New York Times
”Molnar has written a daring and much-needed novel that has some of the hothouse, unflinching quality of Sylvia Plath's late poetry.” —The Atlantic

• Pulling back on reality.

• A painful process.

On Extinction: Beginning again at the end by Ben Ware $37

On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face 'the end of all things', Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. Combining lessons from Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Lacan, as well as drawing on popular culture and ecology, Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.
”A sweeping tour of our crisis present. Ben Ware offers a series of incisive and unforgiving readings that guide and impel us through the wreckage of contemporary capitalism.” —Benjamin Noys

The Three Little Tardigrades: A slightly scientific fairy tale by Sandra Fay $38

Gavin, Colin, and Doug live on a cozy little drop of H2O until one day, their mother tells them it's time for them to grow up and leave home. In search of the perfect place to settle down, the three little tardigrades (also known as "moss piglets") journey to an underwater ice cave, an erupting volcano, and even the moon! They can survive under extreme conditions, but can they avoid the Big Hairy Wolf Spider. . .?   Humor and scientific facts about these resilient microscopic creatures come together to remix a beloved story-with an unexpected twist (and tons of laughs)!   Includes material at the end of the book with detailed information about tardigrades, a glossary of terms from the book, and more science for eager young readers.

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Out of the carton and into your hands. Click through for your copies:

Parade by Rachel Cusk $37

Cusk clarifies her style and complicates her content still further in the creation of a new ‘documentary’ voice that operates on the border between fiction and reality. It braids imagined characters with the actual, experience with the philosophical, to altering effect. Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands. The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It spins past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a ‘true’ story about art, family, morality, gender, the relationships between mothers and daughters, and about how we compose ourselves. A new and potentised distillation of Cusk’s enduring themes (and targets).
"Cusk continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes. Self-consciously original, inward and undeterred, she has become ever more persistently determined to write about life precisely as she finds it, and in Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat. ... No one else can do what she does in the way that she does it. Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent." —The Guardian
“Parade ultimately reveals itself to be the work of the same genius of the ‘Outline’ trilogy and Second Place, one of the most exacting, terrifying novelists working today. Parade is either a guide or a warning. How thrilling not to know which.” —Los Angeles Times

• Either a guide or a warning.

• Upside down and inside out.

• Welcome to enter?

• Read Thomas’s reviews of the ‘Outline’ trilogy.

• Read our reviews of Second Place.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti (translated from German by Peter Filkins) $38

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

• Those who end life and those whose lives end.

• A metaphysical mistake.

My Cinema by Marguerite Duras (translated from French by Daniela Shreir) $45

Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression. Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history. A beautifully designed and produced volume, illustrated with film stills.
”To still be able to hear Marguerite Duras’s voice as she speaks and writes about her filmmaking practice is a gift.” —Bette Gordon, filmmaker
”Both ahead of her time and nostalgically mired in the past, in My Cinema, Duras deconstructs her own methods, going gleefully against the grain in order to ‘destroy’ conventional cinema. A beautifully translated collection of writing by an often maddening genius.” —Lizzie Borden, filmmaker

• Look inside!

• Some films by Marguerite Duras.

At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley $37

Following a disastrous family holiday, Libby and Curtis make a promise — if they ever visit the West Coast of the South Island again, it will be to stay at the majestic Grand Glacier Hotel. Twenty years later, Libby is recovering from cancer and the couple finally return to the resort. Except the glacier has retreated, nothing goes to plan, and after a storm separates her from Curtis, Libby finds herself alone in the isolated hotel. She tentatively begins to explore her surroundings. Could the inaccessible hotel and its lurious collection of staff and guests hold the key to Libby reconnecting with the person she once was?Drawing on a varied soundscape, this tangible, moving portrait of physical and emotional recovery offers a way forward, one hopeful step at a time.
”I am such a fan of Laurence's writing. I devoured her book in two sittings, breathlessly, compulsively, saying to myself, this is what fiction can do.” —Paula Green
”An experienced and accomplished writer with a command of language.” —Owen Marshall
”Fearnley pulls the reader into her story with a deft and inescapable grip that keeps you peering into the plot, arms out in front to keep your place in the narrative, to the last page.” —Sally Blundell

• A word that cradles the reader.

• I say glacier you say glacier.

A Silent Language by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searls) $25

Interesting enough to forget your coffee but short enough for your coffee still to be warm when you've read it. Jon Fosse's Nobel Prize in Literature lecture on how and why he writes, gives a picture of a mind with a unique relationship to language.

• Saying the unsayable and listening to silence.

• Books by Jon Fosse.

• Find out more.

Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard (translated from French by Daniel Levin Becker) $32

Éric Chevillard is one of France's leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday with some postmodern twists. This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel's cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip. Throughout, Chevillard's powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze — initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic — manages time and again to defamiliarise the familiar and make us think anew about what we thought we knew.
"In Museum Visits, Chevillard is at his best, spewing anxious observations of the everyday in shortform. While deliriously funny, Chevillard's short prose also palpitates from one anxious cogitation to another. In his fluid translation, Daniel Levin Becker matches the minute tonal shifts. The reader is elevated, planted in Chevillard's unordinary perspective and given access to an inside joke told by an author of extraordinary wit." —Bridget Peak, Asymptote
”Museum Visits is a book of sheer exuberance, a delicious ten-course meal whipped up out of Chevillard's fizzing, capacious, elegantly controlled delight in the world." —Lauren Groff
"These improbable, oblique, razor-sharp and often hilarious miniatures seem to be about nothing very much. Don't be taken in by appearances. Chevillard's gem-like pieces, superbly translated by Daniel Levin Becker, bring to life a whole world, and its gently squinting observer." —David Bellos

• Mental weather.

• Read a bit.

• On experimental writing.

Landfall 247 edited by Lynley Edmeades $30

Landfall 247: Autumn 2024 announces the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition, an annual competition that encourages young, up-and-coming writers to explore the world around them through words. Landfall 247 features the winning essay, alongside the judge’s report from Landfall editor, Lynley Edmeades. Landfall 247 also includes essays from the 2024 collaboration between Landfall and RMIT University’s nonfiction/Lab. These trans-Tasman essays, written in collaboration between New Zealand and Australian writers, focus on the theme of ‘making space,’ and what it means to use writing as a tool to create space for different voices, perspectives and ideas.
Contributors: NON-FICTION Maddie Ballard, Airini Beautrais, Lucinda Birch, Amy Brown, Joan Fleming, Mia-Francesca Jones, Emma Hughes, Lauren Vargo, Jessica Wilkinson; POETRY Nicola Andrews, Nick Ascroft, Rebecca Ball, Cindy Botha, Nathaniel Calhoun, Chris Cantillon, Medb Charleton, Brett Cross, Mark Edgecombe, David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy, Craig Foltz, Michael Hall, Chris Holdaway, Greg Judkins, Fiona Kidman, Wes Lee, Zoë Meager, Harvey Molloy, Federico Monsalve, Emma Neale, Mikaela Nyman, Claire Orchard, Vaughan Rapatahana, Harry Ricketts, Nicola Thorstensen, Ariana Tikao, Chris Tse, Rose Whitau, Kit Willett, Kirby Wright, Nicholas Wright, Zephyr Zhang; FICTION Connie Buchanan, Lorraine Carmody, Thom Conroy, Kristin Kelly, Michelle Duff, Scott Menzies, James O’Sullivan, James Pasley, Phoebe Wright; REVIEW David Herkt, Simone Oettli, Iain Sharp, Ian Wedde, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb, Helene Wong; ART Ayesha Green, Pat Kraus, Kate van der Drift.

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Echoes from Hawaiki: The origins and development of Māori and Moriori musical instruments by Jennifer Cattermole $50

Cattermole traces the origins and development of taonga pūoro, the stories they carry and how they connect present-day iwi with ancestral knowledge and traditions. She shows how traditional Māori and Moriori musical instruments have developed in response to available materials and evolving cultural needs, from their ancestral origins through the suppression of their use in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand, to their revival in the present day. An essential resource for all who are interested in taonga pūoro as treasured objects and as voices through time and place. Beautifully illustrated with examples of traditional instruments of all sorts.
”How did our forebears succeed in creating a bountiful array of musical instruments using stone tools and natural materials? This book answers that question in fine detail and also reveals how our present generation is reviving indigenous culture and language, thereby sustaining our brightly burning fires.” —Huata Holmes (Kāitahu, Kāti Mamoe, Waitaha, Hāwea a Rapuwai ano)

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The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry $37

Butte, Montana, October 1891, and a hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the bad-lands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast. A savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West, from the award-winning author of Night Boat to Tangier.
”Kevin Barry lights out for the territory and once again comes back with a shining nugget of gold. The Heart in Winter is a glorious and haunted yarn, with all the elements - the doomed lovers, the bounty hunters, the knife-fights and whisky-soaked songs - brought to mysterious life by the heft and polish of the Barry sentence. Marvellous.” —Jon McGregor

• A long while coming.

The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (translated from French by Frank Wynne) $40

In the soft morning light, a man, a woman, and a child drive to Les Roches, a dilapidated house, where the man grew up with his own ruthless father. After several years of absence, the man has reappeared in the life of his wife and their young son, intent on being a family again. While the mother watches the passing days with apprehension, the son discovers the enchantment of nature. As the father's hold over them intensifies, the return to their previous life and home seems increasingly impossible. Haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the father slips into a kind of madness that only the son will be able to challenge. A blistering examination of how families fold together and break apart under duress.
”The Son of Man demands a fearless kind of reading. It combines the impassive eye of a naturalist regarding their object of study, with the fierce revolt of that which is scrutinized, and resists being catalogued and known. Del Amo reaches into atavistic territories of impulse, desire, violence and repetition, and refuses to domesticate through conclusion. I was mesmerized by this formidable tale of a son and a mother who come up against both the law of the father and the lawlessness of nature.” —Daisy Lafarge
”An exquisite and mesmerizing novel, in which violence constantly threatens to break the surface. The precision and detail of the prose imprints on the mind like a photograph.” —Isabella Hammad

Granta 166: Generations edited by Thoimas Meaney $37

Baby-boomers, gen-X, millennials, zoomers: the dividing lines among generations in literary culture have become stark to the point of parody. Granta 166 tests the limits of each generation's given definition in popular culture against the reality of its most sharply observed fiction. Stories by Andrew O'Hagan, Brandon Taylor, Nico Walker and Lillian Fishman fill an issue that captures the change in values, aesthetic emphasis and technological experience among different age cohorts, all the while questioning the legitimacy of the generational conceit. Non-fiction includes meditations on the short history of the idea of 'a generation', as well as on the relative absence of youth revolts in our time, and the shadowy rule of the old — gerontocracy — in societies across the globe.

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Language City: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues by Ross Perlin $33

A portrait of contemporary New York City, the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet, told through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages. Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and — because many have never been recorded — when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Both social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is an exploration of a city and the world that made it.

• A language map of New York.

• The endangered languages of New York.

• One person’s efforts.

• Celebrating Babel.

• Deep linguistic diversity.

Liar’s Test by Ambelin Kwaymullina $30

Seven will come. Two will die. Two will sleep. Two will serve. One will rule. I didn't want to rule the Risen. Wreak a little havoc upon them, though? That was something else entirely. Bell Silverleaf is a liar. It's how she's survived. It's how all Treesingers have survived since they were invaded by the Risen and their fickle gods. But now Bell is in the Queen's Test — she's one of seven girls competing in deadly challenges to determine who will rule for the next twenty-five years. If Bell wins, she'll have the power to help her people and take revenge on the Risen. But first she has to make it through the challenges alive. She doesn't know how much she's been lied to, or where she fits in a bigger story, a mystery stretching back generations. And she's facing much bigger dangers than the Queen's Test. She's up against the gods themselves. Liar's Test is a fast-paced, intricately woven YA fantasy novel with an unforgettable heroine inspired by the strength and power of Aboriginal women.
”A genre-bending, non-stop adventure foregrounding First Nations lifeways, the power of resistance and the multi-generational harms wrought by colonialism and empire. Bell Silverleaf is the kick-arse First Nations heroine we have longed for.” —Rebecca Lim
”Tucked into a twisty, fast-paced narrative that explores legacies of colonialism are subtle messages about the ever-changing, symbiotic web of life. Intriguing and imaginative.” —Kirkus

Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler $37

An investigation into the medical origins of LSD, and how the Nazis and the CIA turned it into a weapon, by the author of Blitzed. First used as a drug capable of treating mental illnesses, then as a 'truth serum' by the CIA, Tripped reveals how the fortuitous discovery of LSD in April 1943 led to a mass exploitation of this ‘promising’ hallucinogen. Using archival material, Norman Ohler brings to light the often misguided interaction between scientific research, state authorities and hedonistic drug culture that shaped drug policy in the twentieth century. With a cast of characters ranging from Albert Hofmann to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics; Richard Nixon to Elvis Presley; to Aldous Huxley and John Lennon.
”Utterly fascinating and illuminating. In tracing the curious origins of LSD as a drug and as a cultural phenomenon — a compulsive maze-like trail that takes in obscure Swiss institutes, the rise of Nazi Germany, the philosophy of brainwashing, CIA conspiracies, the White House and Elvis Presley — Norman Ohler also cleverly throws fresh light on the Cold War that dominated the late twentieth century: a global struggle for psychological supremacy and psychic liberation. On top of all this, his storytelling is not only beguiling but — by the end — profoundly moving as well. It is possible that LSD will have a part to play in all our medical futures: this gripping and deeply felt book will tell you why.” —Sinclair McKay