VOLUME FLYERS (15.8.26)

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

ALL HER LIVES by Ingrid Horrocks $35
”Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. … Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation on awarding All Her Lives the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

THE ORIGINAL by Nell Stevens $35
Nell Stevens’s enjoyable novel queers our usual understandings of authenticity and fakery, with all the dramatic vicissitudes and complexities of plot of the type of Victorian novel that it both imitates and remakes. Grace shows a prodigious talent at copying and forging paintings, presented here as a virtue because “the value of the copy is in the copyist’s powers of empathy”. But are our social interactions enabled by just the same species of empathy? Isn’t it by copying others that we gain fulfillment and love, and become ourselves?

BORROWED LAND: A Highland story by Kapka Kassabova $55
In the Scottish Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation.
”Combines the detail and intimacy of boots on the ground reportage with the universality of a dark fable. This is a Highland story, but also a global story — a poetic and haunting anatomy of what happens when a world is addicted to extraction.” —James Crawford

CAPTAIN COOK AND THE UNSETTLED AFTERLIVES OF EMPIRE by Tony Ballantyne $60
James Cook is one of the most contested figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. His name evokes not only exploration and scientific endeavour but also the violence of first encounters and the enduring legacies of colonisation. Ballantyne examines how stories about Cook have changed over time — and what these shifting narratives reveal about the making of national identity. From Cook’s death through to Tuia 250, Ballantyne traces three major phases in collective understandings of Cook.

SAID THE DEAD by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.