 | Can You Tolerate This? By Ashleigh Young {Reviewed by THOMAS} Like some sort of contrast medium, Ashleigh Young’s prose penetrates the fissures and fine vessels of her experiences so that when the reader turns their attention to her texts, subtleties and depths and dimensions hitherto unsuspected yet somehow deeply familiar are revealed and remain imprinted upon memory. The medium flows particularly into areas of ordinary damage (her personal sadness, discomfort, awkwardness, anxiety) and resolves here into twenty-one personal essays which lucidly yet with an almost tender subtlety picture the shared concerns (time, family, memory, the body, love, loss) with which we must constantly contend if we are to be aware of something we take to be ourselves. There is a certain lightness to Young’s touch, and often a concomitant humour, that allows her to describe and circumnavigate the heavy without snagging herself or us upon it, to treat delicately with subjects about which most writing is clumsy through its attempts to be profound. The essays that I remember most are those that acknowledge the dimensions of ambivalence that exist around their subject: the tangle of love and irritation around a childhood dog, her meditations on the hair on her lip, or her growing dislike for Katherine Mansfield in the midst of general adulation during her tenure at the Birthplace in Tinakori Road. The best pieces are those in which Young knows she does not need more than a few pages to be succinct, insightful and good company. This book has just been awarded a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction and is a finalist in the 2017 Ockham Book Awards. |
REBEL GIRLS
A quick survey of our shelves revealed them to be loaded with books that have feisty, adventurous girl protagonists who take their destinies into their own hands*. Here's a small selection - recommended reading for children and young adults of all genders.
On Taris rules govern everything, from personal appearance to procreation. Although these rules were devised to survive environmental crisis, Juno must work out when to challenge authority, and when to resist peer pressure, in her attempt to find out the truth and her place in her society.
Followed by Fierce September and Heart of Danger.
Ada will not stop asking 'Why?' This enables her to find out all sorts of things, but does she recognise the parameters of her research?
It’s Germany, 1956, and Hitler has won the war. Yael, an eighteen-year-old woman, is part of the Resistance and she has a mission – a dangerous one – she is charged with assassinating Hitler. As a child, Yael was in a camp and experimented on – the experiment, which was successful, has given her a gift that can be used against her enemies. In 1956 a famous motorcycle race, for the creme de la creme of youths, crosses Hitler’s Europe. After years of training, Yael is ready to join this often-dangerous race, where allegiances are necessary to survive and to win is difficult. But win Yael must so she can get to the Victors’ Ball. This novel draws you in slowly and then grips you with its teeth and doesn’t let up until the end.
Followed by Blood for Blood.
Sixteen-year-old Seraphina, assistant to the court composer, is drawn into an intrigue indiciative of the disintegrating relationship between humans and dragons, aware that she must hide her secret: her father is human but mother was a dragon, and this not only gives her special gifts but also puts her in immense danger, both from around her and within.
Followed by Shadow Scale.
16-year-old Nix and her father travel not only around the world but through time in their pirate ship stuffed with treasure and mythological artefacts. Nix's father is obsessed with returning to a time before Nix was born, when her mother was still alive. Nix feels safe in the belief that he will never succeed, but one day her father gets his hands on a map, and Nix must make some hard choices.
A lively, beautifully illustrated survey.
"Rachel Ignotofsky provides young women with the courage and the confidence to follow the exciting paths these scientists have blazed before them." - Eileen Pollack
When 12-year-old Clara meets an unusually large black cat, her life changes for ever. No sooner than she discovers that she can communicate with animals and harness the powers of nature, she finds herself exposed to unexpected danger. She finds she must learn to fight as well as to flee.
Followed by Oblivion, Life Stealer and Bloodling.
Dani is probably the happiest person she knows. She's happy because she's going to start school. Dani has been waiting to go to school her whole life. Then things get even better-she meets Ella Frida by the swings. After that, Dani and Ella Frida do everything together. They stick together through wet and dry, sun and rain, thick and thin. But then something happens that Dani isn't prepared for...
You will love the other 'Dani' books too.
Jena lives in a closed and remote community where a tragic incident has altered the lifestyle of the villagers. Out of tragedy has come a reverent regard for the mountain, a sect of wise Mothers who are all authoritative and who train a group of chosen girls to obey and harvest mica, which the villagers as an energy source. When a single stone is moved, Jena begins to question her role and the behaviours of others. The truth she will uncover will change all their lives. This is a gripping, powerful and completely compelling book that makes you think and question the fates we all encounter.
A beautifully illustrated children’s book outlining Bourgeois' early connection with textiles via her family’s work as tapestry restorers for generations in France, her early connection with nature, and her path to becoming an artist. While studying mathematics in Paris, Louise’s mother dies and Louise abandons her studies and begins her work as a painter and sculptor - a homage to her mother.
The daughter of a priestess is cast out as a baby, and after raiders kill her adopted family, she is abandoned at the gates of the Great Hall, anonymous and mute. Called No-Name, the cursed child, she is raised a slave, and not until she is twelve does she learn her name is Aissa: the dragonfly. Every year the Bull King takes a tribute from the island: two thirteen-year-old children to brave the bloody bull dances in his royal court. None have ever returned - but for Aissa it is the only escape. Aissa is resilient, resourceful, and fast - but to survive the bull ring, she will have to learn the mystery of her true nature. A well written adventure set in Bronze Age Crete.
Lyra and her animal daemon travel to Svalbard to attempt to rescue children who have having their souls removed, receiving help from an ice bear and a witch clan. Vast in scope and delectable in detail.
Followed by The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.
Deliciously Dickensian characters, a grimy setting, a plot that is both emotionally and intellectually engaging and keeps you guessing until the end (and beyond), plenty of good information about various kinds of misfortune prevalent in Victorian London, incandescent similes and other turns of phrase, the irrepressible verve both of Pullman’s writing and of 16-year-old Sally Lockhart, determined to find out the truth behind her father’s death. What more could you want?
Beautifully written, exciting and unusual. Feodora and her mother live in the snowbound woods of Russia, in a house full of food and fireplaces. Ten minutes away, in a ruined chapel, lives a pack of wolves. Feodora's mother is a wolf wilder, and Feo is a wolf wilder in training. A wolf wilder is the opposite of an animal tamer: it is a person who teaches tamed animals to fend for themselves, and to fight and to run, and to be wary of humans. When the Russian Army threatens her very existence, Feo is left with no option but to go on the run.
Imagine if Sherlock Holmes was an 11-year-old girl! Super-smart Friday Barnes solves everything, from missing homework to bank robberies.
You will enjoy all six Friday Barnes books.
Maresi came to the Red Abbey when she was thirteen. In a world where girls aren't allowed to learn or do as they please, an island inhabited solely by women sounded like a fantasy. One day Jai, her clothes stiff with dirt, scars on her back arrives on a ship. Jai has fled to the island to escape terrible danger and unimaginable cruelty, and the men who hurt her will stop at nothing to find her. Now the women and girls of the Red Abbey must use all their powers and ancient knowledge to combat the forces that wish to destroy them. Maresi, haunted by her own nightmares, must confront her very deepest, darkest fears.
"Dark, powerful and original. Really stands out in a very crowded YA marketplace. Thrilling, suspenseful and gloriously feminist." - The Bookseller
Naondel ('Red Abbey Chronicles' #2) coming soon!
>> Turtschaninoff introduces the series.
Set in China during the Han Dynasty, this is the story of a slave girl and her chance encounter with a dragon. Her journey with Danzi (the dragon) is one of danger and discovery. The girl, who had felt so worthless, finds an inner strength and courage to protect the dragon and becomes the dragonkeeper (a role reserved for very few). This book is beautifully written and rich in texture.
There are six books in the series!
100 one-page biographies of inspiring women from all times and all places, each with a wonderful full-page illustration by one of 60 artists (who just happen to all be women), including New Zealander Sarah Wilkins.
>> Watch this!
We have already pre-sold all our first delivery of this book, but more stock is on its way. Put your name down now for the next available copy!
* We found to our delight that the gender-bias assessment undertaken in this video did not apply to the books on our shelves (if anything, the reverse!). We would also contend that it is not only girls who need books with girl protagonists - boys can enjoy them too.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Read an extract!!
>> Read the review in The New York Times.
>> And the review in The Guardian.
>> The sadly shortened life of Willie Lincoln.
>> George Sanders the novelist talks with Dana Spiotta the novelist
{STELLA}
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In the week of International Women’s Day (8th March) it’s timely to revisit some feminist writings. Rebecca Solnit's essays in Men Explain Things to Me are hard-hitting and remind us that we still have a long way to go towards gender equality, respect and fairness. While we still encounter gender prejudices and stereotypical behaviour in what many of us consider a sophisticated culture, we need to keep questioning the political, social and psychological structures that frame our worlds, both personal and political. In a year where Trump rose to power, where the far right becomes ever more popular, and gender politics become the playground of the powerful elite, knitting a pussy hat and joining the protest movement looks like a good idea. Solnit writes with clarity, anger and spirit. While many of the brutal facts and figures of domestic violence will make you cringe, these figures are required reading that remind us that while there are good men, the rate of violence against women is too high. Intelligent and thoughtful, Solnit talks about gender politics with a clear eye on other factors of oppression (economic inequality, migrant politics, family dynamics, etc), making these short essays a good starting point for further investigation into her writing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's essay (a TED talk - so you can listen as well) is an excellent and hopeful argument for why we should all, men and women, campaign women's rights and equality. Adichie delivered this talk at TEDx in 2012, with millions of views, numerous articles and reviews, and the production of a small 52-page book, We Should All be Feminists, is an accessible essay that should be read by men, women and teens alike.
If you’re like Jessa Crispin, who thinks feminism has become too mainstream, too much of an apologist movement, you’ll be keen to read her treatise, Why I am Not a Feminist: A feminist manifesto. She gets under the skin of feminism to the structural problems of our socio-political structure, arguing for a radicalisation of feminism.
And if you’ve never read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, this beautiful hardback edition is now available. "The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me. Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: 'You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.' And we all went: 'Oh my gosh, she's right - you can blow things up with these!'" - Neil Gaiman
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 | Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders {Reviewed by STELLA} This is the most original and enjoyable novel to cross my path in recent times. George Saunders is an astounding writer whose gift for story-telling makes Lincoln in the Bardo a pleasure to read and thoroughly absorbing. Using first-hand accounts and a cacophony of voices (from the spirit world) this is predominately a dialogue-driven novel. The year is 1862, an eleven-year-old boy - Willie Lincoln - has a fever and the Civil War rages in America. The book opens with a stately dinner during which the President and his wife venture upstairs at intervals to check on their cherished son. The fever doesn't break and young Willie dies. Lincoln is inconsolable and this is the story of his grief and his visits to the young boy's grave. The historical details from recorded histories, letters, reports and observances create a wonderfully accurate picture of the time and a truthful account of what happened - Saunders cleverly arranges this information to become a readable script ,building visual scenes in the reader's mind. Interspersed are the sections in the Bardo - the Bardo (from Tibetan Buddhist tradition) is a place of transition, a place between death and life, where those stuck in this world are tormented by demons and biding time until the next world. The array of characters Saunders creates are both grotesque and humorous. Unwilling to depart this world, they live in hope for a way back to their loved ones and out of their 'sick-boxes'. Willie is in the Bardo and it is here that his father comes, stricken with grief, to cradle his son one more time. In this place, the cacophony of voices telling this story and their fascination with the living one who enters their world, are intriguing. Not only do these voices give an insight into the times, but their stories of woe are both tragic and entertaining. Saunders gets the pitch just right. A story of grief and familial love against a backdrop of tragedy and crisis, Lincoln in the Bardo is a gem for its stylistic endeavours and the interplay between lightness and dark. |
 | The Fall by Albert Camus {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I have no more friends; I have nothing but accomplices. To make up for this, their number has increased; they are the whole human race. And within the human race, you first of all. Whoever is at hand is always the first.” Addressed throughout (over five days) to a mute companion met in a bar in Amsterdam, as indeed the narrator began addressing the reader in the bar in Amsterdam (draw your own conclusion), and with, throughout, an increasingly intimate tone as it becomes clear that the narrator is including not only this mute companion but the reader who is that mute companion and indeed all humanity in his demolition of ethical frameworks, The Fall is a demonstration of the hypocritical assumption of ethical frameworks used to justify the basest selfish motives, an attempt to comprehend how humans are capable of doing horrendous things to one another, from the personal level to the generalised, and an assertion that all human motives are base and selfish. The stronger the assertion of propriety, the stronger the guilt it ornaments. More than an expression of ambivalence, the narrator undertakes a meticulous erasure of distinction between each impulse and its opposite, between virtues and vices, between propriety and crime, between nobility and selfishness, to the extent that the very concepts of virtue, vice, propriety, crime, nobility and selfishness are nullified not so much by their superimposition as by the fact that there is no border between them, that the extolling of a virtue segues into the justification of a vice with no change of tone or content. The basest self-interest can be presented as a virtue (“I announced the publication of a manifesto exposing the oppression that the oppressed inflict on decent people”) and the narrator throughout is intent on presenting himself either as the victim of the inescapability of his crimes and shortcomings or presenting his crimes and shortcomings as virtues and strengths. Everything that seems like a confession is ultimately a justification, everything that seems like humility is pride. “The question is to elude judgement. I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgement is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune.” But the avoidance of judgement gives rise to a longing for the relief that judgement provides, and this ambivalence, ridiculous in itself, is nullified by the narrator’s ridiculing of the concept of judgement (where the state is sympathetic, the act is unsympathetic). “It is better to cover everything, judgement and esteem, in a cloak of ridicule.” Likewise, freedom pursued without trammel becomes a burden, and the free long for the slavery which would relieve them of choice, blame and guilt. “The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a rogue greater than oneself. When all are guilty, that will be democracy.” Although the narrator glibly justifies his monstrous behaviour, whether than be the taking of water from a dying man in a desert prison camp, or the keeping of a stolen painting or the contempt acted upon his lovers, he also reveals the initial wrongdoing (or wrongnondoing) which began his tumult into justified vice: his failure to respond (because the water was cold) when hearing a woman throw herself from a bridge into the Seine. The way to even the most horrendous actions springs from an instance of culpable inaction. “But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!" |
 | Don't Try This at Home by Angela Readman {Reviewed by THOMAS} Readman's stories in this beautifully presented collection are as savage and precisely thrown as the finest nail-bombs, full of diamond-headed nails. Whether telling of a woman who keeps cutting her boyfriend/husband in half, replicating him until she lives with a myriad possible versions of him; or of the teenager who inherits (literally) the secret of irresistible attraction, and the concomitant pleasure of walking away, from her aunt; or of the girl whose mother has a latent Elvis awakened in her by a young woman as she works at the local fish and chip shop; or of the girl with the head of a dog, Readman serves up stories that are at once surreal and subtle, funny and tragic, crazed and psychologically astute. Several of the stories remind me of those of Angela Carter: children push through into an adulthood that has not had a chance to prepare itself for them, stereotypes are worn inside-out to show their linings, characters crushed by society escape through the cracks opened by that crushing. |
SOME NEW RELEASES WE THINK YOU'LL LIKE
Warm and sharp, Camp's poems step easily from the domestic to the universal yet never stray from the personal, which gives them such buoyancy, such vigour and compassion.
The cat, Bruno, takes life as it comes. When it is too rainy to go outside, he rustles up an inside picnic with his friends. When he meets a fish swimming in the air, he follows it. Why not! When the canary forgets how to sing, Bruno helps out. Six delightful stories - a new favourite!
How short can an essay be? What seems at first an assortment of aphorisms on life, failure, &c, builds cumulative force into a kind of thesis on (or even novel-in-potentia of) life, failure, &c.
"A Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis.” - Kirkus Reviews
>> Here's a sample!
“It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.” - Alfred Jarry
What is the relationship between freakishness and art? Is creativity the deliberate courting of chaos to the verge of destruction? What else must be unleashed to unleash the new?
"Charlie Fox writes about scary and fabulous monsters, but he really writes about culture, which is the monster’s best and only escape. He is a dazzling writer, unbelievably erudite, and this book is a pleasure to read. Domesticating the difficult, he invites us as his readers to become monsters as well." — Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
>> Read a sample: 'Self-Portrait as a Werewolf'.
A fascinating and sensitive portrait of two obsessive writers: one the author of tens of thousands of urgently written pages found thrown into a skip, the other Masters himself, unable to rest in his fourteen-year search for the identity and real history of the diarist known only as "I".
"Approaches something ineffable, the span of a soul across the arc of time; the radiant, baffling grandeur of other people." - The New Yorker
“I worship at the altar of this book. Somehow Michelle Tea has managed to write a hilarious, scorching, devastatingly observed novel about addiction, sex, identity, the 90s, apocalypse, and autobiography, while also gifting us with an indispensable meditation on what it means to write about those things—indeed, on what it means to write at all. A keen portrait of a subculture, an instant classic in life-writing, a go-for-broke exemplar of queer feminist imagination, a contribution to crucial, ongoing conversations about whose lives matter, Black Wave is a rollicking triumph.” — Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
In 1994, economist Prue Hyman published Women and Economics, an overview of the status of women in the New Zealand economy. Much has changed since then - but how much?
Acerbic yet compassionate, ironic yet provocative, mordant yet generous, wide-ranging yet with a nose for minutiae, Gill was one of the outstanding journalists of our times. Some of his best work of the last five years is collected in this book.
>> We also have Gill's own account of his pickled life, Pour Me.
Understanding how democracies can fall, often by popular accord, into absolutism may help us to recognise the warning signs that similar forces threaten dearly held ideals. Can an understanding of the past prevent it from being repeated?
A very appealing cookbook, packed with the delicious, fresh, approachable food characteristic of the Tuscan coast, together with plenty of information and anecdote.
In an age of populist politics, media demagogues and policy determined by opinion polls, is there a place for a longer and more considered view?
When a tiny stray kitten turns up on the doorstep, Hina and her mother take the kitten in. Hina makes a home for her and learns all about caring for a living creature. Then one day the kitten goes missing. Beautifully illustrated.
Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) was a German-Jewish artist primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings 'Life? or Theater?', consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were gassed to death by the Nazis soon after her arrival. Her life forms the basis of Foenkinos's beautiful, indignant book.
>>Some of her work can be seen here.
Who lived in the shadows of the City of Light? Sante does an excellent job of introducing us to the denizens on whom the back of history is most usually turned.
Vast, sprawling and incisive, Musil's unfinished, unfinishable, incomparable masterwork (the first part of which appeared in 1930) is a multilayered fractalising exploration of what it is like to be a human being in the modern world. Translated by Sophie Wilkins, and with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem. Intellectually, aesthetically and ultimately emotionally enthralling.
Why are there no mirrors in Thomasine's Great-Great-Aunt's old and melancholy house? One day her cousin makes a discovery: a cupboard which contains all the mirrors, through which the children reach a world where one can discover not what one most desires but perhaps what one most needs.
Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger et al meet at cafes to resolve and enlarge the discrepancies between their lives and their philosophies. Lively and informative and now in soft cover.
"A wonderfully readable combination of biography, philosophy, history, cultural analysis and personal reflection." - Independent
Thi Bui's family fled to America following the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s. Her graphic memoir is a story of identity, family, longing and home.
"A book to break your heart and heal it." - Viet Thanh Nguyen
An interesting survey of current New Zealand poetry practice, with representation from the establishment, from the fringes and from emerging voices. The featured poet is Elizabeth Morton, whose collection Wolf will be published later this year.
An obsessive love affair has long-lasting repercussions for two writers and a poet. From the author of the remarkable memoir What Lies Beneath.
Inconceivably large (actually it's 110 times the size of the earth), immeasurably hot (actually, it's 15,000,000 degrees), quite far away (even though Earth lies within its atmosphere), the sun affects everything in our lives. Although it is too bright to look at, Lucie Green shows us the wonder at the centre of our solar system.
>>Is there a sun behind the sun?
>> More on the Book Awards website.
International Women's Day: Wednesday 7.3.17
Come and choose something from our display!
 | Autumn by Ali Smith {Reviewed by STELLA} Ali Smith’s Autumn is a meditation on time, a book about a friendship, love and the surprising things that the past can reveal to us in the present. Daniel Gluck talks about time travel being real to the child, Emily, and in Autumn, Smith is taking us on a ride that is not linear, that dips us in and out of the life of Mr Gluck through the memories of Emily, and through her friendship with Daniel. The book opens with a wonderful dream sequence, one in which Daniel believed he has died. He is in fact in a care facility moving in and out of consciousness, letting his mind wander to elements of his past. In contrast, we meet Emily in the Post Office dealing with meaningless bureaucracy in her attempt to secure a new passport. As 32-year-old Emily sits at the bedside of her elderly friend we are given a window into her childhood memories of her friendship with her elderly next-door neighbour, a relationship that undoubtedly has been pivotal in Emily’s life, giving her an interest in slices of culture and history that she otherwise would have been unlikely to have had. Yet this isn’t where the success of this novel lies: Smith has cleverly laid out what it means to live in the UK, post-Brexit, by delving into the conventions of the past, by unveiling hypocrisy. Written in Smith’s lyrical yet spare style, this book has left me with plenty to think about: what does time and experience mean, and how does this impact on the way we approach our place in the histories we exist within? Autumn is the first in a ‘seasonal’ series and I’m curious to see where the other three seasons take us. |
 | The Wolves of Currumpaw by William Grill {Reviewed by STELLA} William Grill, the author and illustrator of Shacklelton's Journey, brings us another delight, The Wolves of Currumpaw. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of a wolf, Old Lobo, the wolf that no one could capture. This is a famous and fabled wolf-hunting story of The Old West, and Lobo was revered by the peoples of the Currumpaw Valley, where he was known as The King. As settlers moved across North America developing farming, wolves roamed too, attacking their cattle. Lobo and his pack of wolves were known far and wide, a pack that moved through the night, uncapturable and wreaking havoc for the ranchers. Many tried and failed, great hunters were shamed by the clever Lobo who avoided the traps, wasn’t fooled by the disguised poisons and evaded the wolf-hounds and guns, time and time again. In 1893, a respected naturalist and hunter, Ernest Thompson Seton, left New York in a bid to rid the ranchers of Old Lobo and his pack. This wasn’t as easy as Seton thought it would be and after many failed attempts he noticed another wolf, the beautiful she-wolf Blanca, and this ultimately leads to the capturing of Old Lobo. This is a beautifully told story with stunning illustrations, which also reflects on the impact of Seton’s hunt for Lobo, his regret at his success and his growing awareness of the wilderness - the importance of wild places and the animals that belong in them. |
 | Occasionally you come across a book that impresses itself upon you so heavily that the next several books you read seem contrived and inconsequential by comparison. Eimear McBride’s story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, the on-going impact of his childhood brain tumour, their mother’s hysterical Catholicism and the narrator’s increasingly chaotic and self-annihilating sexuality is tremendously affecting because of the highly original (and note-perfect) way in which the author has broken and remade language to match the thought-patterns of the narrator. Short sentences like grit in the mind, snatches of unassimilable experience, syntax fractured by trauma, the uncertain, desperately repeated and painfully abandoned attempts to wring a gram of meaning or even beauty out of compound tragedy, to carry on, both living and telling, despite the impossibility of carrying on, situate the reader right inside the narrator’s head. This book is upsetting, intense, compassionate, revelatory, unflinching, and sometimes excoriatingly funny. It gives access to what you would have thought inaccessible.
>> Also in stock: McBride's more recent book The Lesser Bohemians.
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 | Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra {Reviewed by THOMAS} If texts are not completed until they are read, and if the realisation of those texts is largely dependent upon the contexts in which they are read, each reading becomes a test, both of the text and of the reader (the author by this time having taken refuge in the past (a state indistinguishable from death)). In Zambra's clever, ironic and poigant book, a series of increasingly lengthy texts are presented with accompanying multi-choice questions (modelled on the Chilean Academic Aptitude test, a multi-choice university entrance examination [!]) which demand that the reader insert, exclude, suppress, complete or 'interpret' elements of the text. Any provision of choice combined with the restriction to set choices and the impulsion to choose is not only a way of assessing an aspirant but a way of moulding that aspirant's thinking into categories set by whatever is the relevant authority. This thought-moulding, the reader's constant awareness while reading that they will be judged and categorised but not knowing for what, the constant possibility that one's experience may have aspects of it erased or re-ordered by agents of authority (with whom even the reader may be complicit under unforeseen circumstances) but not knowing in advance which aspects these may be have especial resonance with the Chilean dictatorship in which Zambra grew up, but are always all about us for, after all, is not the erasure or addition of detail concerning the past (and these stories are all written in the past tense) an inescapable part of the tussle for reality that takes place constantly all around us at all levels, personal, interpersonal, historical, political? The book is also 'about' writing stories: how does the inclusion, exclusion and ordering of detail affect the reader's understanding of and response to a text? These are considerations a writer is constantly, dauntingly faced with and which they usually in the first instance answer from their own experience as a reader (in this case the author is incapable of benefitting from criticism by being embedded in the past (a state indistinguishable from death) but has made himself immune to judgement by allowing for all possibilities and committing himself to none (or at least seemingly: is this political prevarication or subversive smokescreen?). As well as being 'about' all these sorts of things, the book is fun and funny, and it can also be read with enjoyment on the level of the spectacle. |
 | Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi {Reviewed by THOMAS} Devi does an excellent job of inhabiting the heads and capturing the patterns of thought that occur just on the brink of consciousness of the four narrators of this account of young lives in the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius. Just as a plughole communicates its force at all times to the entire contents of a basin, even to the molecules that have not yet begun to circle or descend, there is throughout the book a sense that a hopeless future is pulling upon the characters, that their descent will be at first slow and then sudden, that the world for them is tilted and greased, that their voices are impermanent, that they will become those that now harm them and are caught by harm. “One day we wake up and the future has disappeared.” In a milieu where the energies of sex and violence already run in the same channels, where currency is extracted in rape, beatings and murder, how can the voices of individuals, and how can moments of happiness and beauty, be preserved as more than corruscations swallowed, first slowly and then suddenly, by future shadow? Is to fight against your fate a way of preserving your independence from it, for a short moment at least, or does fighting it draw it more tightly entangled upon you? |
From 1945, Whites Aviation began producing exquisitely hand-coloured detailed aerial photographs of New Zealand which are prized not only as a record of the country in a different time but for their aesthetic and nostalgic qualities. This is a stunning and desirable book.
>> An introduction to the book.
>> Watch this short film about a woman who was a Whites colourist.
>> Look through the Whites Aviation archive and the National Library of New Zealand.
>>> Get one of these framable Whites Aviation prints courtesy of publishers Potton & Burton when you purchase a copy of the book!!
A DOZEN INTERESTING NEW CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULTS' BOOKS THAT HAVE ARRIVED IN THE LAST WEEK
Triangle sets out to play a mean trick on square, but square has the last laugh. The quality of the illustrations is particularly lovely, as the characters pass between the land where everything is triangular to and from the land where everything is square, through the land where the things are without shape.
Mr Postmouse can't be delivering letters all the time; sometimes he and his family like to travel. However, they can't go around the world without a few parcels to deliver...
Full of charming detail (as you'd expect).
Yoshio wants to find the most beautiful sound, the sound of silence, but everything has a noise, especially in a big city. Where will he find the sound of silence? Beautifully illustrated.
In a story drawn from Arthurian lore, Yvain kills a lord in battle and finds his fate entwined with that of the slain man's widow and that of her maid. Luminously drawn, this graphic novel is both an exploration of knightly virtues and of the lives of medieval women.
"A thoughtful, entertaining, and provocative presentation of this centuries-old story." - Booklist
Seventeen-year-old Jacob has grown up in the insular world of a separatist cult. His allegiance to the Grace starts to unravel as he develops feelings towards Lynna, a girl from the neighbouring range who he meets when patrolling Nodd's borders. As the End Days grow ever closer, will Jacob be tempted to sample forbidden Worldly Pleasures?
Eleven-year-old Noah's life suddenly changes when his parents whisk him off on a secret mission in East Berlin in 1989. With a new name and identity, he must make a new life in a city where 'they' may be listening at any time, and where his friend Claudia's parents have suddenly disappeared....
A stunningly lovely graphic novel based on the life of the man whose passion for birds drove him on an epic quest across North America at the start of the 19th century. What would the world make of his illustrations upon his return?
When Virginia wakes up feeling wolfish and starts making noises that frighten the visitors, will her sister be able to charm her back to humanity by painting her a garden called Bloomsberry?
In 1941 Emmaline is evacuated from London to Briar Hill hospital in Shropshire. There she discovers a hopeful deep secret: there are winged horses that live in a world through the hospital mirrors.
"A remarkable book." - Michael Morpurgo
Biesty's incredible cross-sections add an extra dimension to this history of exploration of the final frontier (even though we're not too sure that space is the final frontier).
When Ani is told she has tested positive for the plague that is sweeping her country, and sent to quarantine on an island (where the sufferers and condemned (supposedly) so that the populace may be saved (supposedly)), she discovers that all is not quite what it seems, neither the plague, nor the colony, nor the way in which her country functions. What is going on?
Will twelve-year-old Willow's mathematical genius help her to build a new life when everything goes wrong?
Being a dragonkeeper is a lot more difficult than Tao could have imagined. When he and Kai reach the dragon sanctuary at last, nothing is as they imagined it would be, and danger is always at their heels. Bronze Bird Tower brings to a close this wonderful series in which young protagonists in ancient China must make difficult choices in the face of immediate and structural dangers. Start with #1: Dragonkeeper. Recommended!
Match the cards and enjoy the company of Simon the cheeky rabbit. Fun.
>> "A thoughtful, fast-paced adventure with a wonderful heroine." Read Stella's review.
>> Maurice Gee gives a rare interview.
>> Read some other excellent books by Maurice Gee.
>> Maurice talks about writing The Halfmen of O.
>> Watch out for Wilberforces (at least they dress well).
We have a signed copy of The Severed Land to give away (also courtesy of Penguin Random House). To go in the draw, just let us know which book by Maurice Gee is your favourite (and, if you like, why).