INTERNATIONAL BOOK-GIVING DAY - 14 FEBRUARY
The word 'book' and the word 'gift' might be synonymous anyway, but did you know that there is a day especially nominated for giving books as gifts? (it happens to be Valentine's Day too). 
Come and choose a book for someone you love. We will gift-wrap, include a special bookmark, and even deliver anonymously for Valentine's Day (if that's what you'd like). 
You might also consider giving someone a VOLUME book subscription. If you're out of town, choose from our website or e-mail us to arrange your gift or VOLUME voucher. 
If you'd like to give books to people who might not otherwise have them, you might consider Book Aid International or Room to Read: World Change Starts with Educated Children (Official) or Duffy Books in Homes.
VOLUME Books


LIONS HAVE ALL THE BEST BOOKS!

A Lion in Paris by Beatrice Alemagna
A very beautiful large-format book telling the story of a lion who seeks the excitement of the city but is disappointed that he is not noticed when he gets there. For lion-lovers and Paris-lovers old and young.

 Lafcadio, The lion who shot back by Shel Silverstein
Lions have always run away from the hunters who come in search of lion-skin rugs, but one day a young lion questions this tradition, eats a hunter and takes his gun. After a bit of practice, the lion becomes such a good shot that soon all the lions have hunter-skin rugs. A man comes to take the lion to be a sharp-shooting star in a circus, and so begins a new life for Lafcadio: fame, clothes, travel, marshmallows. He becomes more and more human-like and begins to forget that he is a lion. What happens when his friends persuade him to go to Africa on a lion hunt, and, when he is standing there in his lion-hunting outfit, an old lion recognises him? Is he a human or is he a lion? Deep issues of identity are treated with a light touch in this funny book with great illustrations.

 The Lion and the Bird by Marianne Dubuc
A gentle lion finds a wounded bird who cannot fly off with its flock and makes it a bed in a slipper, nursing it back to health as they become close friends through the winter. Spring comes and the flock returns. Will the bird leave the lion to rejoin them? The story is full of subtle observations about attachment and freedom, about seasons in the year and also in relationships, about being true to your nature and about the strength of friendship, but these are not shouted and the reader is entirely involved in the characters’ immediate feelings. This might well become your favourite picture book.

 A Hungry Lion (or: A dwindling assortment of animals) by Lucy Ruth Cummins
The hungry lion's friends are all disappearing. Where could they have got to?
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Children's books
VOLUME BooksBook of the week
















4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster - our BOOK OF THE WEEK!    {Reviewed by STELLA}
From page one, I knew this was going to be splendid. When a writer tells a subtle joke and makes you laugh within the first few moments of reading, you know that you're onto a winner. Paul Auster’s first book in seven years, 4 3 2 1, follows the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson born March 3, 1947. It’s not one life though: this Jewish boy born in Newark has 4 lives. Auster tells the story in parts - four strands - in sliding door style. In each part a fateful event at Archibald's father’s business (a burglary, a fire, a tragic accident and a buy-out) leads to a change in circumstances for the family, and Archie’s life is determined by how his immediate family respond. The minutiae of each of Ferguson’s lives are delightfully told and, despite the variations in his circumstances, his characteristics, along with those of his immediate family, keep the four strands linked together. Auster keeps many things the same, the characteristics, likes and dislikes, interests and talents of the main characters are constant. Circumstance dictates the roles they take and the choices they make.The extended family play their roles like bit actors, adding substance and colour to the novel and giving Auster room to articulate the social strata and political opinions of the time, and to bring in (or, conversely, to leave out) players that add to the sweeping saga of Ferguson’s life. This is excellent writing, taking you into the mind of one life in all its fragmented realities, and capturing a time and place - the American mid-twentieth-century - in all its tumultuous glory. If you enjoy Donna Tartt,Jonathan Franzen or Jonathan Safran Foer you will enjoy this.
VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Review by Stella
















The Severed Land by Maurice Gee    {Reviewed by STELLA}
With a striking cover and a map of a divided world, I knew I was hooked. Maurice Gee’s new novel for children is a thoughtful, fast-paced adventure with a wonderful heroine. The novel opens with Fliss observing some soldiers and their cannon. Never able to break through the invisible wall, they have become increasingly frustrated with their inability to colonise the other side. As mayhem breaks loose, a drummer boy runs from the soldiers only to find himself stuck between the wall and the barrel of a gun. Fliss, for reasons unknown to her, is able to pull the drummer boy through the wall. Not that he’s grateful, but the Old One who holds the wall in his mind has been expecting him and he has a mission for Fliss and Kirt: they must rescue the Nightingale - to save the wall, which is in peril, and so keep their land protected from the warring families that wish to take it all. Going back through the wall is dangerous and uncertain: to be caught by the ruling elites would be certain death, and rescuing the Nightingale and bringing her to the Old One has many obstacles.The relationship between Fliss and Kirt has just the right amount of tension, each not quite sure of the other, but their mission relies on trust and courage. The underlying references to colonisation, to the power and passion of a people to resist, and the symbolism of the wall are pitched just right, lending layers of meaning beyond the action. The great story-line and compelling characters, Fliss - daring and passionate and Kirt - brave and stubborn, and their interactions with friends and foes will keep you entranced and leave you wanting more.
VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella















The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock    (Reviewed by STELLA}
Set in Alaska in the 1970s, The Smell of Other People’s Houses is a excellent debut YA novelabout growing up in small towns, about looking out at the world and comparing your own life with the lives of others, about seeking answers where often there are only questions. The premise that other people’s homes smell certain ways, and what this indicates in terms of lifestyle, social structure and family histories, is a wonderful premise and a successful way in which to hang together the lives of this community. Following the lives of four young people - Ruth, who wants to be remembered; Dora, who doesn’t want to be noticed; Alyce, who wants to please everyone; and Hank, who needs to run away - each story is touching and real. You’ll find yourself rooting for them all, that their lives will be what they wish. This isn’t a sentimental novel though, there are tough issues and hard decisions for all the teens to make. Their lives are often difficult as they deal with absent parents, family secrets, tragedy, teen pregnancy, abuse, first love, and the twists and turns of friendship and family. All the characters have decisions to make as they move from being children to adults, as they realise that life isn’t black and white. But this isn’t melodramatic writing. Hitchcock embraces her characters and tells their honest and sometimes gritty stories with lightness, humour and integrity. Cleverly plotted, the lives of the community intersect as the four main characters become entangled, as secrets are revealed. Ultimately this is a novel about what you leave behind, what holds you together and how lives can be redeemed. 


VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

















Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard      {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The narrator, a writer recently returned to Vienna after two decades overseas, attends an ‘artistic dinner’ given by a bourgeois couple he was once close to, in honour of a distinguished actor. In the first half of the book, the narrator sits mostly silently in a wing chair as the company awaits the actor’s arrival, and experiences a vitriolic fugue of invective against his hosts, their behaviour past and present, their associates and everything they think and do and say and represent. That afternoon, the narrator, the hosts and the majority of the guests had attended the funeral of Joana, with whom the narrator had once had a close affinity, who had failed to make any sort of artistic impact in Vienna and had fallen into years of alcoholism and despair that led eventually to her suicide. The narrator’s stream of invective, which is both razor-sharp and frequently very funny, could be seen as a subconscious strategy of avoiding thinking of Joana’s death, as an outlet for his anger at a milieu that allows one of its members to descend to suicide, and, not least, as an indirect expression of his nauseation at everything to do with himself, his past and, in particular, his unacknowledgeable shortcomings in his relationship with Joana. As always in Bernhard, all loathing is primarily self-loathing and only secondarily loathing of the world as it is distilled in the loather. The strongest statements are the most unstable: in the second half of the book, when the loathed actor arrives and the dinner progresses, the narrator’s extreme opinions run up against their objects outside his head and undergo disconcerting reversals leading to a highly unsettling end. Woodcutters is one of Bernhard’s finest and most incisive books, and a good one to start with if you haven’t read him before.


VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas













My Documents by Alejandro Zambra   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“My father was a computer, my mother a typewriter. I was a blank page and now I am a book.” Zambra's enjoyable (occasionally disconcerting) book is a collection purportedly from the 'My Documents' folder on his desktop. In the first three sections, Zambra, or a narrator very similar to Zambra, relates, in clean, direct (though sometimes ironic) and energetic prose, events or thematic developments from a life growing up and progressing through adulthood in a Chile over which hangs the shadow of the Pinochet regime and under which the earth occasionally unexpectedly shifts. The true subject of these pellucid pieces is always memory, and the tension that always exists between memory and personal or collective history: how does the past shape who we are, and what is the relationship between living an experience and living as someone who has had an experience? What is the difference between a memory and a story? In the fourth section the stories are told in the third person and have a different texture: why should this be, considering that there is no real reason (only a tendency) to think of these characters and events as any more fictional than those told in the first person?
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas









Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The eleven stories in this book seem (quite reasonably and refreshingly) preoccupied with what may (to the mind at least) be termed ‘the body problem’, which is (of course) not a problem but a number of interrelating problems (or potentials) clustered around the disjunction between the kinds of relationships had by bodies and the kinds of relationships had by their correlated minds. Minds and bodies are subject here to differing momentums, and one bears the other away before the two can coalesce. Tan is concerned also with the interchangeability of persons, and with the contortion of persons, Physically or psychologically, that enables this interchangeability. Whether it is twins who both fall in love with the same amnesiac, or the narrator of ‘Legendary’ who discovers photographs of her boyfriend’s previous partners in his drawer and becomes obsessed with one, an ex-aerialist once badly injured in a fall, stalking her and attempting to enter her experience using a playground swing, the stories have a raw elegance and precision and are full of intense and sometimes surprising images which give them a very realistic texture, he best of them mostly keeping their engines off-screen and only occasionally falling to the temptation to wheel these engines into view at pivotal moments (such as endings).
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


The Doll's Alphabet 
"Imagine a world in which the Brothers Grimm were two exquisite, black-eyed twin sisters in torn stockings and handstitched velvet dresses. Knowing, baroque, perfect, daring, clever, fastidious, Camilla Grudova is Angela Carter’s natural inheritor. Her style is effortlessly spare and wonderfully seductive. Read her! Love her! She is sincerely strange – a glittering literary gem in a landscape awash with paste and glue and artificial settings." — Nicola Barker
VOLUME Books

https://volume.circlesoft.net/p/novel-the-unfortunates?barcode=9780330353298
The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The 27 sections of this novel are not bound together but come in a box so that, apart from the first and last sections, they can be arranged and read in any order. With unselfsparing autobiographical rigour, Johnson (who, ever a provocateur, stated that “telling stories is telling lies”) tells of a journalist who travels to [Nottingham] to report a football match and is constantly put in mind of previous trips to the city to visit a friend who died young of cancer. Memories of Tony and his decline are intruded upon by unbidden memories of a former lover who once accompanied him on a visit. Johnson gives scrupulous attention to how the concrete mundane either ignites emotional significance or provides a respite from (or impediment to) emotional significance when touched by the seemingly haphazard movements of the mind (hence the unbound sections) as it attempts to face but cannot bring itself to face the inevitability of death. “I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.” The Unfortunates is an impressively alert and careful portrayal of memory’s capacities and shortcomings, and an exacting yet moving portrayal of loss.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas















Inside the Head of Bruno Schultz by Maxim Biller, with two stories by Bruno Schulz {Reviewed by THOMAS}
During World War 2, the writer and painter Bruno Schulz was kept from the gas chamber by a Gestapo officer who wanted him to complete a mural for his children’s nursery. One day he was shot in the street by another Gestapo officer while returning to the ghetto with a loaf of bread. In this little book, Maxim Biller imagines a time just before the German invasion of Poland, with Schulz hidden from fear in his cellar and writing a letter to Thomas Mann, imploring his help and warning him that Mann’s sinister double, or at least someone claiming to be Mann, is present in Schulz’s town of Drohobycz, presaging in many ways the coming German invasion. Biller’s Schulz is having trouble concentrating and in making his message to Mann clear, and has to restart many times, each attempt being less successful than the last. The letters are invaded by fears and memories, or the doubles or stand-ins for fears and memories, and it soon becomes unclear which elements belong to the description of Schulz writing, which to the letter he is writing and which exist only in the head of Schulz and not in what he is writing or in the world in which he sits and writes. Even if it all only exists in Schulz’s head, and of course it does (he is alone), this three-fold distinction, or rather the inability (of Schulz and of the reader) to make this three-fold distinction remains. Biller’s text is followed by two of the actual Schulz’s most representative stories, ‘Birds’ (about a melancholic father’s increasing over-identification with birds) and ‘Cinnamon Shops’ (concerning the dissolution of the actual city into one built of dreams and memories as a boy is sent home from the theatre to fetch his father’s wallet). There is certainly something of Kafka in Schultz’s narratorial relinquishment of initiative to a less-than-conscious weight that presses against the text from below (or within (or wherever)), but Schulz has a wistfulness that gives his writing a flavour all of its own.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
 























City of Lions by Josef Wittlin and Philippe Sands {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The city known variously in history as Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg, לעמבערג and Leopolis in eastern central Europe was once a city where cultures and ethnicities (Jewish, Polish, Ukranian, Austrian) met and enriched each other, but, in the twentieth century, it became a city in which cultures and ethnicities obliterated each other. In the first half of this book, 'My Lwow', Josef Wittlin, looking back from exile in the 1940s, celebrates the rich texture of the city in which he grew up. Lying on the crossroads between East and West, North and South, Lwow was a melting-pot of buoyant and diverse traditions. Reading Wittlin's descriptions of the streets and life of the city reminds me of nothing so much as of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (who lived and was killed in Drohobycz, about an hour from Lwow). Although the shadows of the events of WW2 lie across Wittlin's text, his memories of the cosmopolitan city are all the more poignant for his saying little of them. “All memories lead to the graveyard,” he says, though. The second half of the book, 'My Lviv', is written by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who travelled to Lviv, now in the Ukraine, in the last several years, partly to learn more about his grandfather, who had lived there in the early twentieth century, but spoke little of that phase of his life, and partly to research his remarkable book, East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity – terms coined by Lvovians Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht  – which won the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. His is a mission to connect history to its locations, but he finds that everywhere, although the old Lwow physically persists, the stories that should give those places meaning are forgotten or suppressed. “Wittlin believes that memory 'falsifies everything', but surely imagination of the unknown is an even greater falsifier,” Sands writes. History must be multivocal to avoid authoritarianism. Sands finds and visits the site of the mass grave which holds the remains of the majority of the Lvovian Jewish population, killed when the city came under Nazi control in WW2. The city now being almost entirely monocultural, Sands reports the unchallenged ease with which some Ukranian nationalists assume the trappings and ideologies once stamped on the city by Nazism. But what should be preserved, the rights of the individual or the identity of the group?
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas