 {Reviewed by Stella} |
Ali Smith's Winter is dazzling. The second in her ‘Seasons’ quartet, she again, as in Autumn, draws richness out of desolation. Strangely, the novel opens with Sophia, lonely and retired, conversing with a detached head. Not too far along we meet Arthur, her son, who has just fallen out with his girlfriend Charlotte, who has accused him of being a fraud and politically disconnected. Charlotte, aggrieved by his uselessness, has drilled holes through his laptop, taken off and taken over his ‘art and nature’ blog, posting false and possibly libelous material. Arthur (Art as he is affectionately known to his family) has to travel to Cornwall to visit Sophia for Christmas, and he is meant to be arriving with Charlotte. In desperation, he finds a stand-in, Lux, who he pays a thousand pounds to pretend to be Charlotte for the long weekend. Arriving at Sophia's home, they find Sophia sitting huddled in layers of clothes in a cold house, not quite herself. Lux takes it upon herself to make Art contact Iris, his aunt. And here the novel starts to unfold. The fraught relationship between the sisters, one the seemingly conservative businesswoman, the other the 'wild child' activist who chained herself to the fence at Greenham Common, still protesting and aiding the disempowered. The conversations between the sisters reveal much to Arthur about his upbringing. Yet more is revealed to Lux, the stranger in the mix, who Sophia seems to trust. Lux is a recent migrant, studying English literature before she ran out of money and now making do with low-pay jobs and sleeping anywhere she isn’t noticed. Her brief interlude in this winter Christmas family tale is inspired - a catalyst for change. Ali Smith draws us in with cool, icy precision - Winter, like the season, is deep, dark and melancholic when we enter the novel - yet she gives us love and hope, and lets us see the green shoots waiting for the snow to melt. Like Autumn, Winter is a book about time and place, about now - refugees, fires in substandard towers - about what binds families and also what splits them asunder. Smith can take a simple series of events with a cast of few and tell us so much about ourselves, and the culture (art, literature, language) and choices that shape us. And she does it with intelligence, wit and style.
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NEW RELEASES
These books have lined up for your attention.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's The Supplicants, Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us.
An excellent selection of photographs from Aberhart's early career in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating his developing concerns and technique (and recording some extraordinary buildings and interiors).
A crisis in ideological values, a crisis in politics, unbridled individualism: it is hard to find anything solid in contemporary society. Does this matter? Is this liberating? Eco's last collection of essays.
"Eco brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. His irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling." - Tim Parks, Guardian
>>Just a few of his books on shelves.
Both filming and the showing of films transformed the way New Zealanders saw themselves and their world, and also how they saw the relationship between work and leisure. This book is the first time this subject has been fully documented.
A survey of Fahey's remarkable paintings of the 1970s, depicting the private realities of New Zealand women, challenging accepted archetypes of female experience and ‘appropriate’ subjects for art.
What are the stories behind the most lugubrious places in the world? Beautifully drawn maps by Kateryna Didyk.
>> Sad online.
How to feel the breeze, how to have a good sleep, how to make some music, how to be brave. Delightfully whimsical.
Johnny, forlorn and alone except for his pet chicken, meets a kind woman who gives him seeds that change his fortune, allowing him to speak with animals and sending him on a quest to rescue a stolen prince. Twain's fragmentary and never-completed tale is beautifully realised by Stead and Stead.
Fragmented, poignant, revelatory observations, both personal and societal, of the social, economic and cultural upheavals of the Bolshevik revolution, from one of Russia's outstanding poets of the twentieth century.
An exquisitely produced volume surveying the raw minimalism and clean lines of the architecture of Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty.
>> The kO website (recommended).
Snow and Rose don't realise they are in a fairy tale, but who does? So different in temperament, the sisters must enter the forest, face dangers and meet both friendly and unfriendly characters in order to solve the mystery of their father's disappearance.
Suny explores the historiographical controversies over 1917, Stalinism, and the end of 'Communism' and provides an assessment of the achievements, costs, losses and legacies of the choices made by Soviet leaders. A quarter century after the disintegration of the USSR, the story usually told is one of failure and inevitable collapse, but Suny reevaluates the promises, missed opportunities, achievements, and colossal costs of trying to build a kind of "socialism" in the inhospitable environment of peasant Russia. He ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxism and the alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois democracy.
Sentaro has failed: he has a criminal record, drinks too much, and hasn't managed to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Instead, he works in a confectionery shop selling dorayaki, a type of pancake filled with a sweet paste made of red beans. One day an elderly, handicapped woman enters the shop. Tokue makes the best bean paste imaginable, and begins to teach Sentaro her art. But as their friendship flourishes, societal prejudices become impossible to escape. A quiet, subtle novel.
"This is a wonderful book, written with clarity, precision, and passion. It takes the reader into the heart of contemporary necro-politics and calculations of "lesser evils" by powerful states and their humanitarian accomplices. Deeply learned and informative on every page, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about contemporary conditions of warfare and state-controlled violence; about the spatial practices that reinforce and regulate systemic forms of violence, such as the calculation of minimal requirements for human survival. In the spirit of Doctors Without Borders, Weizman is at home in political philosophy, military history, 'just war' theory, and the spatial systems of controlled, calculated violence that constitute Israel/Palestine, and much of the world today." - W. J. T. Mitchell
A fascinating account of the 1956 visit to the People's Republic of China by a group of prominent New Zealanders - including Roger Duff, James Bertram, Evelyn Page, Angus Ross and Ormond Wilson - and of how Canterbury Museum came to acquire the largest collection of Chinese art in New Zealand. At the centre of the book is the eloquent diary kept by Canterbury Museum director Roger Duff, detailing his efforts to bring to Christchurch the collection of antiquities gifted to the museum by long-time China resident, New Zealander Rewi Alley. Through Alley's contacts with premier Zhou Enlai and Duff's diplomatic skills they obtained the sanction of the Chinese government to circumvent its own export ban on antiquities and permit the gifting of seven crates of treasures to Christchurch (here illustrated).
Useful.
What does love make us capable of? What does it make us incapable of? What is love's relationship with loss? A long-awaited new poetry collection from the author of Fugitive Pieces.
From Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century, to the women behind the Apollo missions, from the astronauts breaking records on the International Space Station to those blazing the way in the race to get to Mars.
Astrid thinks she is imagining the quiet boy who appears in her room in the middle of the night. He's called Tamati and lives in New Zealand. Astrid lives in Sweden. What's he doing here? And why does he keep turning up?
>> Come to the New Zealand launch of Time Twins. Sally Astridge (Nelson) and Aren Norlin (Sweden) will both be speaking. Tuesday 19 December, 6 PM at VOLUME, 15 Church Street, Nelson. Find out more.
A clear and helpful board book.
Reading Nigel Slater's very personable food writing is a culinary experience in itself, and so is cooking from his recipes or applying his ideas and flavour combinations in ways of your own devising. The recipes in this book are suitable for Christmas, and suitable for the middle of winter, too: goose and turkey (and making the most of the leftovers), mincemeat and Christmas cake; ribsticker bread pudding with Comte and Taleggio, salt crust potatoes with blue cheese and goat's curd, and hot-smoked salmon, potatoes and dill; pink grapefruit marmalade, pear and pickled radish salad and rye, linseed and treacle bread.
An ingenious approach to stitching considered as a system of grids and variants, with wide applications to good effect.
Since 1965's Phalli's Field, Kusama has produced over twenty mirrored installations with an impression of infinite extent. This book surveys her career.
>> Some infinity rooms.
>> Obsessed with dots.
>> Also new: Yayoi Kusama: From here to infinity by Sarah Suzuki $35: A children's book on the Infinity Mirrors and their creator.
Can we take action that will ensure democracy's survival in the face of populists, kakistocracies and financial oligarchies?
Just long-listed for the Poetry prize in the 2018 Ockham Book Awards.
"If Allen Curnow was the stony and austere godhead of New Zealand literary modernism, then Tom Weston [is] tending to the altar and ensuring the continuation of the elder's example. It is something of a study, to observe how Weston is able to sustain the seriousness of the task - the poem-as-act-of-sacred-communion - without ever breaking down into didactic sermonising or self-consciousness parody." - Michael Steven, Landfall
Outdoes most other Bowie biographies in both scope and depth.
>> A man with a million identities.
At last, an encyclopedia of the world of the Moomins and all the other creatures who live alongside them.
The inability to established a shared narrative of their histories makes a peaceful future even more difficult to attain.
History is full of women who pressed against the boundaries that constrained them and then fell through.
"Smart, compelling, persuasive. Doyle reminds us that we shouldn't be so quick to judge women in terms of degrading stereotypes or unrealistic expectations."- New York Times
A useful pharmacopoeia with poems arranged by condition.
A young couple is about to discover that nothing is as it seems: not their bodies; not the structures they inhabit (there are no doors); and not the police who wander in and out of their lives. And, no matter how many armed standoffs and car chases there are, you can never escape your parents - or the dead body under the kitchen table. Graphic novel.
"To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron." An impassioned defence of revolutionary dictatorship written during Russia's Civil War, here introduced by Slavoj Zizek.
Learn to say hello in over 50 languages whist having fun playing this game with up to nine people.
Abortion, poverty, online behaviour, commercial sex, pornography, internet downloading, recreational drug use, social inequality, animal rights, data protection, criminal justice. Our everyday lives are an ethical minefield.
In what way does the particular mind-set of North Korean society manifest itself in 'ordinary' graphic design. This book gives insight into a design culture unlike any other. Beautiful in a new way.
"Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey." - Hyeonseo Lee
>> A sampler.
Who had the greatest last words, and what were they? Who enjoyed the slowest, most tedious death? Morbid and lots of fun.
List #8: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
Scroll this list to select from our recommendations.
Come in or click through to browse our full selection, or ask us for our recommendations for your specific needs.
Have a look at the skeletons. Can you work out which animal they belong to, and where the animal lives? Why do these animals have the skeletons they do? Full colour images with textured skeletons give an idea how the animal operates in its natural habitat.
>> Dry bones.
Min is a microbe. She is small. Very small. In fact so small that you'd need to look through a microscope to see her. Or you can simply open this book and take Min on an adventure to amazing places she's never seen before - like the icy glaciers of your tooth or the twisted, tangled jungle that is your shirt.
A breathtakingly wonderful large-format visual history of New Zealand, drawn by the inimitable Gavin Bishop. One of the outstanding New Zealand books of the year.
A beautiful and colourful menagerie of animals living in the southern hemisphere, a companion to Wild Animals of the North.
A graphic novel about a refugee boy's journey of hope and desperation.
Excellent retellings, with excellent illustrations. Crossley-Holland's versions are both enjoyable and scrupulous to the sources.
"Kevin Crossley-Holland is the master." - Neil Gaiman
From the smallest Pygmy Marmoset to the largest Mandrill, this book provides all the facts you wanted to know (and more).
Here's the human body as you've never seen it before. Clever laser cut-outs, flaps and overlays explore every detail of the organs, systems and senses.
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!
A clear and helpful board book.
How are mummies made? What's inside a pyramid? A beautifully drawn large-format lift-the-flap book, introducing the world of Ancient Egypt.
This silly, inventive picture book by the outstanding graphic designer of the protopsychedelic era will make your brain turn somersaults. Facsimile of the original 1960 edition.
A beautifully drawn and delightfully immersive maze boo with lots to find and an exciting plot. When goblins invade and then flee the house, Finn's dog gives chase - and so must Finn. Hours of fun.
A lively, beautifully illustrated survey.
"Rachel Ignotofsky provides young women with the courage and the confidence to follow the exciting paths these women have blazed before them." - Eileen Pollack
>> Also available: Women in Science.
"Well, hello. And welcome to this Planet. We call it Earth. Our world can be a bewildering place, especially if you've only just got here. Your head will be filled with questions, so let's explore what makes our planet and how we live on it. From land and sky, to people and time, these notes can be your guide and start you on your journey. And you'll figure lots of things out for yourself. Just remember to leave notes for everyone else. Some things about our planet are pretty complicated, but things can be simple, too: you've just got to be kind."
Split pages let you make a vast number of different faces from images from the British Museum collection (and have a vast amount of fun).
Just because something is impossible is no reason not to invent it. Throughout history, humans have dreamed up some improbable ideas. Some of them, while laughed at in their time, have been remarkably prescient of technology of the world centuries in their future. This wonderfully illustrated book, from the inventors of Maps, H.O.U.S.E. and D.E.S.I.G.N. rewards hours of rapt attention.
>> A comic review.
Two people and a dog sail out amongst ships of all kinds in this inventive pop-up book. There are even life-rings and mooring ropes. A lovely book.
What should we do today? Where should we go? What should we wear? What should we eat? A beautifully illustrated book (with choices!) about all the options we have available to us every day.
>> "Maybe I'll read my favourite book. Can you guess what it's about?"
A beautifully illustrated large-format book from the wonderful 'Welcome to the Museum' series. The latest facts with a retro feel.
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.
Wonderful large-format illustrations of the wonders of the human body. See 3 images at once, or use the filters to untangle them.
Animals that no longer exist are just as fascinating as animals that still do. This beautifully illustrated book introduces us to some you'll know and some you won't, and describes many of their surprising quirks.
A companion volume to Amazing Animal Facts.
An absolutely stunningly beautiful large-format illustrated guide to the wonders and variety of the plant world. Seldom do we use so many adjectives to describe a book. Part of the 'Welcome to the Museum' series.
Horus, son of Isis, vows bloody revenge on his Uncle Set for the murder and usurpation of his Pharaoh father. A huge amount of fun packed into one graphic novel.
>> Before he colored it in.
An exquisite graphic novel account of the explorations and inner life of the Venetian merchant who travelled through Asia as far as Chine in the thirteenth century.
>> Have a look at Tabilio's website.
A beautifully illustrated survey of birds in nests and in art and mythology.
Kupe! Thomas Brunner! Freda du Faur! Kieran McKay! Kelly Tarlton! Other people!
The Big Book of Bugs and The Big Book of Beasts by Yuval Zommer
Giant, splendidly illustrated, satisfyingly fact-filled books in the same series as The Book of Bees!
An excellent resource for everyone from young parents to grandparents, showing how to provide developmentally rich experiences without specialist equipment.
List #7: HISTORY
Scroll through and select some of these books about the past.
Come in or click through to browse our full selection, or ask us for our recommendations for your specific needs.
From decolonisation through independence to disappointment and new hope.
"Vast and brilliant. Orderly but still managing to nip down a fascinating byway when necessary. A groundbreaking book." - Giles Foden, Guardian
The world had to reboot itself after the Second World War, but what was to be saved, what could be rebuilt, and what was to be made entirely new? In the first few years of relocations, reinventions and redirections set in place many of the tropes that have defined the world since. In 1947, production began of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior created the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, the first computer bug is discovered, the CIA is set up, Hassan Al-Banna drew up the plan that remains the goal of jihadists to this day, and a UN committee was given four months to find a solution to the problem of Palestine.
"Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown. I want to write the history of that war. A women's history." An important oral history of Russian women's experiences in World War Two, in English for the first time.
If you are free to create your own reality in the Land of the Free, what happens when this reality is contradicted by actuality? Trump's post-factual universe has deep and long precedents in American history.
"This is the indispensable book for understanding America in the age of Trump." - Walter Isaacson
The Holodomor (man-made famine) of 1932-33 killed millions of Ukrainians by starvation, and amounts to genocide. To prevent an uprising, Stalin ensured food shortages, restricted movement, confiscated foodstuffs and prevented foreign aid. Applebaum's careful account makes for horrific reading.
A grand history of China's deep and recent history told through its relationship and management of water.
When Maori were defeated at Orakau in 1864 and the Waikato War ended, Tawhiao, the second Maori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed exile in the Rohe Potae, the King Country. For the next twenty years, the King Country operated as an independent state - a land governed by the Maori King where settlers and the Crown entered at risk of their lives. For twenty years, representatives of the King and of the British Queen engaged in a dance of diplomacy involving gamesmanship, conspiracy, pageantry and hard headed politics, with the occasional act of violence or threat of it.
Where do countries go when they cease to exist? What are the histories of Biafra, New Brunswick, Labuan, Tannu Tuva, Inini and Eastern Karelia? Each of these defunct states issued their own stamps. Berge takes us to each and shows us some of the lesser-known dead ends of history.
A huge amount of documentary detail, arranged by location and by theme.
An excellent collection of oral history and context giving insight into the experience of children in one of New Zealand's health camps (to which children from the Nelson area were referred). From the late 1940s, health camps were established to provide health care and education for sickly, disadvantaged and 'at risk' children.
The far-flung Hebrides lie on the outer edge not just of Britain, but of Europe. Bunting's finely written insular psychogeography explores the relationship of the land not only to the people who have lived on it or visited it, but to those for whom it forms an island for the mind.
"Bunting's crisp and luminous prose is the ideal medium to capture the ambiguities and dichotomies of the landscape; between ever-shifting sea and unfathomably old rock; between tradition and modernity; between wilderness and depopulation; between feudal subsistence and aristocratic profligacy." - The Scotsman
Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Choudhury returned to the city as an adult he found it much unchanged from his childhood, a city of intense localism, very different from the new age of consumption that was revolutionising other Indian cities. Why?
"Beautifully observed and even more beautifully written, The Epic City marks the arrival of a major new talent." - William Dalrymple
Greed, murder, torture, colonialism and appropriation - a distillate of British colonial history.
Death is common to all people but there is huge cultural variation in our relationship to the inevitable. This splendidly illustrated volume surveys the attitudes and practices and art relating to dying and the dead, both in memory and concerning the remains, through the world and throughout history. Compelling. Forward by Will Self.
Two friends travel to Iceland to experience the settings of (and to retell!) the Icelandic sagas they are both so fond of, and to find Gislason's roots. What is the relationship between land and stories, both ancient and modern, both culture-defining and personal? Where are the Vikings now?
>> "Tales of blood feuds and dangerous women, fugitives and warrior poets."
>> How they came to write the book.
New Zealander Agnes Moncrieff was the foreign secretary to the and the YWCA in China during the Sino-Japanese War. Her first-hand accounts of the horrors taking place around her are nuanced and
valuable.
Glenny investigates the roots of the bloodshed, invasions and nationalist fervour that have come to define our understanding of the south-eastern edge of Europe, and presents portraits of its kings, guerrillas, bandits, generals, and politicians. Glenny shows that groups we think of as implacable enemies have, over the centuries, formed unlikely alliances, thereby disputing the idea that conflict in the Balkans is the ineluctable product of ancient grudges. He explores the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the rest of Europe, raising some disturbing questions about Western intervention.
Led by revolutionary foment in Europe, British intellectual and radicals in the 1790s formulated new ways of thinking, feeling and acting that would have far-reaching consequences through literature, art and social dynamics, what Edmund Burke called "the most important of all revolutions, the revolution of the sentiments." The project involved the complete rethinking of the relationship between the individual and society, between the individual and nature, between an individual's inner and outer lives.
Hoare wraps his remarkable prose for a third time around a watery subject, this time tracing poets', artists', utopians',and adventurers' all-consuming and sometimes fatal attraction to the sea.
Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States exported their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems to Africa. The colonial powers imposed administrations designed to bring stability and peace to a continent that seemed to lack both. The justification for occupation was emancipation from slavery - and the common assumption that late nineteenth-century Europe was the summit of civilisation - but the underlying motivations were about power and money and the legacies of these administrations have made the processes of independence fraught.
Surveys the black radical traditions since the nineteenth century to provide context for the new international wave of protests and awareness, tied to a critique of capitalism, privilege and power.
>> Angela Davis on TV.
A remarkable piece of scholarship, unearthing the long-overlooked lives of free Africans in Renaissance England.
Mountainous regions are home to only ten percent of the world's population yet host a strikingly disproportionate share of the world's conflicts. Mountains provide a natural refuge for those who want to elude authority, and their remoteness has allowed various practices to develop and persist in isolation, resulting in a combustible mix those in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. A new way of looking at conflict.
How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions? A fresh and incisive account by this idiosyncratic novelist.
"Of all cities St Petersburg is most like a novel. Conceived in the mind of a Tsar like a writer might give birth to a book,it has never ceased to be relentlessly dramatic, as if being like a novel is its destiny. Miles tells the tale magnificently." - Peter Pomerantsev
Centuries of people moving about have left tracks on the landscape, many of them almost erased by other land use and movement patterns. Moffat follows some Roman roads, pilgrims' ways, drove roads, turnpikes, ghost railroads and sea roads to evoke for us a different and often surprising view of landscape and history.
How does the place where writing takes place affect what is written there? What can we learn about a book by visiting there? Mourby visits fifty rooms in which fifty writers wrote fifty books, and compares the locations with what ended up on the page.
Fifty biographies of key figures in Ngai Tahu's history, up to the Deed of Settlement. Fully illustrated and fully interesting.
"Five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has even been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." - Samuel Johnson
A fascinating look at the literature and art that have been engendered or shaped by the belief or otherwise in the phenomenon, or should that be pseudophenomenon, of ghosts.
"A work of profound scholarship and imaginative engagement, beautifully written and elegantly constructed. It's the finest study of its kind I've read." - The Literary Review
A beautifully illustrated edition of Pamuk's memoir, with 450 historical photographs.
He Reo Wahine: Maori women's voices from the nineteenth century edited by Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla $50
"This book presents a rich and ranging collection of Maori women speaking from the nineteenth-century archive. The hopes, the persistence, the effort to set down a cause are all apparent in the words of women presented in these pages. It is in various measures an inspiring, instructive and agonising read." - Charlotte Macdonald, Victoria University of Wellington
"Any reader interested in horses, history, art, literature or language will love this book, and be stunned by its scope and stylish intellect. This is about the end of a relationship between man and horse that Raulff likens to the dissolution of an idiosyncratic workers’ union, and what is thrilling is that the horse becomes a subtext – a new way of considering history via the stable door. The book is beautifully and idiosyncratically illustrated, in keeping with the text." - Guardian
What are the stories behind the most lugubrious places in the world? Beautifully drawn maps by Kateryna Didyk.
>> Sad online.
Polynesian and then European settlers arrived in New Zealand bringing with them world views and modes of practice that they then began to apply and adapt to the new land. This remarkable book calibrates the varying approaches of the differing peoples who came to Aotearoa, and suggests that a deeper understanding of these mind-sets can lead towards approaches that are more harmonious, not just between cultures but towards the natural world too.
"Simon Schama takes the reader through a grand sweep of Jewish history, but he makes it so personal you begin to feel you know the men and women whose lives shine out from the pages, and their foibles, and you get a sense of the fragility of their lives and their determination to survive. It's a brilliant piece of work" - Rabbi Julia Neuberger
"Profoundly illuminating." - Guardian
Short-listed for the 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize.
>> An interview with Schama.
The outstanding psychogeographer strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. Here is a mesmerising record of secret scholars and whispering ghosts. Of disturbing encounters. Night hospitals. Pits that become cameras. Mole Man labyrinths. And privileged swimming pools, up in clouds, patrolled by surveillance helicopters. Where now are the myths, the ultimate fictions of a many times revised city?
A wonderfully unrelenting indictment of colonialism and the damage it did to what had been a thriving country. Two centuries of British rule devastated the economy, violated human rights, and introduced institutions and infrastructure that enabled Britain to thrive at India's expense.
Many New Zealand women have been left out of the histories of the First World War. As well as the 550 nurses who followed the troops and the women who 'kept the home fires burning', many other New Zealand women were involved in the war, as doctors and ambulance drivers, munitions workers and mathematicians, civil servants and servicewomen in British units, and in many other roles. Tolerton tells these stories for the first time.
Changes in our relationships with objects both manifest and underlie many of the other processes of history. This is a fascinating book.
In the lead-up to Yuri Gagarin's first space flight, small robust stray dogs were plucked from the streets of Moscow and trained to endure gravitational pressure, low oxygen levels, a constipating diet, ungainly outfits and celebrity status before being launched into orbits from which some actually returned alive. This interesting book traces their history and also records the vast array of paraphernalia, from postcards to nightlights, designed to celebrate these remarkable dogs.
>> Can you tolerate this?
>> Was Ivan Ivanovich the model master?
>> Chernushka today.
"It's not enough to say I immensely enjoyed A Strange Beautiful Excitement; it's simply splendid." - Fiona Kidman
"The best account I have ever read of Wellington and Karori as they were in Mansfield's day. Vivid and vigorous, it is a pleasure to read." - K.M. biographer Kathleen Jones
Our 52nd weekly NEWLETTER...
BOOKS@VOLUME (2.12.17)
Read our reviews, find out about the week's new releases and choose from the best FICTION books of 2017.
A man of deep ambivalences, contradictions and vulnerabilities, Edward Lear was unable to act on his deepest feelings but produced some of the oddest poetry of his time, as well as a body of art both serious and comic. Jenny Uglow, who could almost be said to specialise in biographies of odd characters who both exemplify and stand apart from their times, is Lear's perfect biographer, forensic yet sensitive to the most hidden corners of his psyche, his playfulness and his melancholy.
"Jenny Uglow has written a great life about an artist with half a life, a biography that might break your heart." - Robert McCrum, Guardian
>> David Attenborough examines some of Lear's ornithological art.
>> Some limericks written and illustrated by Lear.
>> The fine line between joy and melancholy.
>> An Exile in Paradise.
>> Lear's works have inspired many other illustrators.
>> Uglow has written a string of exemplary biographies and histories.
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Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward {Reviewed by STELLA}
In Jesmyn Ward’s book we meet thirteen-year-old Jojo, living with his grandparents, Mam and Pop, in Bois, Mississippi. He takes care of his toddler sister, Kayla, while his mother, Leonie, is out on another bender. Life in the South is much the same as it’s always been with black communities watching their backs and poor whites living on the edge. 'Do Not Trespass' signs mean what they say and can be followed up with a shotgun fired. Jojo’s Pop is a stable anchor in a life that could be erratic. Hardworking, tending their land and raising the animals, he’s at the centre of Jojo’s world, caring for Mam, who is in the last months of cancer, and watching over his grandchildren. Leonie is indulgent and selfish and it’s hard to warm to her, yet, as the novel progresses, you get a sense of what has made her behave irresponsibly. Addicted to drugs, unhealthily obsessed with Michael, the father of her children, whose white family won’t accept either Leonie nor the children on any terms, Leonie is a collision waiting to happen - in fact a devastating series of crashes. Jojo is a young man who you want to walk alongside and hold as a reader - both naive and mature, he has surprising insights and abilities in spite of his youth, an amazing capacity to ‘see’ yet still remaining baffled by society's workings. When Michael, who’s been in Parchment, the jail which was once run like a slave plantation, calls to say he’s being released, Leonie decides that she’s taking Jojo and Kayla to meet their daddy. The road trip is a nightmare, Kayla is sick, Jojo is worried and wary, and Leonie is edgy. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a story about slavery, racism and the terrible personal cost of disempowerment. It is also a beautiful story about the pain of the past that needs to be faced and forgiven, and the power of individuals, through love for each other, to carve out new existences. Ward weaves history into the novel through the ghost characters of Given and Richie - the former Leonie’s dead brother shot in a supposed hunting accident, and the latter a young boy at the penitentiary who Pop, in the past, had tried to shelter. In the hands of a lesser writer this might have seemed trite, but Ward is masterful. In November this book won the American National Book Award for Fiction. Comparisons have been made to Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. The judges described Sing, Unburied, Sing as “a narrative so beautifully taut and heartbreakingly eloquent that it stops the breath." Stunning, powerful and tender. |
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Border Districts by Gerald Murnane {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“I am not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters,” writes Gerald Murnane in this, his declared final work of what we would probably, for convenience at least, call fiction. An elderly writer, who probably no-one would object to our thinking of as Murnane, having moved to a small town inland close to the border of the Australian state he had never in his previous life left, postpones an intended trip over the border after having glanced in passing at the stained glass window of a small church and been struck by a string of associated mental images. “A glance or a sideways look often reveals more than a direct gaze.” Murnane reveals his discipline as a writer: he “guards his eyes,” not looking directly, noticing things at the edges of his vision that seem almost to be “signalling or winking”, and then recording whatever occurs to him after noticing this signalling or winking. This recording is objective and exacting, even if the mental states upon which it is applied are what people other than Murnane would generally term highly subjective. “The image in the mind is itself real, whether or not it may be said to denote some other class of entity.” For Murnane what he calls the image-world is the absolute, and the everyday world and writing and reading and music are merely modes of access to this image-world, which is itself shared by a world beyond it to which we have no access. In this book, Murnane has reduced the palette further than ever before (it is not for nothing that he invokes Robert Walser, who reduced the content of his writing to the extent that he squeezed himself out of the world common to others), dealing with the most subtle of impressions, with what he terms “the life and death of mental states”, the persistence and evanescence of images in the mind. When reading a book, for instance, Murnane is interested not in the text, but in whatever occurs to him when reading it. “My image-world was often only slightly connected with the text in front of my eyes. I decided long ago to take no further interest in the theoretical and to study only the actual, which was for me the seeming-scenery behind everything I did or thought or read.” Although he insists that he possesses no imagination, the topographies of Murnane’s image-world may have strata of associative occurrence that take them further from shared actuality than any imaginative effort, even though “this is a report of actual events and no sort of work of fiction. As I understand the matter, a writer of fiction reports events that he or she considers imaginary. The reader of fiction considers, or pretends to consider, the events actual. This piece of writing is a report of actual events only, even though many of the reported events may seem to an undiscerning reader fictional.” Murnane’s incredibly precise, deliciously pedantic recording of mental states and associations and memories, loneliness and longing (not identified by him as such) make him the closest thing yet to an Australian Proust, and he undoubtedly writes some of the most perfect sentences of any living writer in English. The key to reading his work, perhaps, is to “guard your eyes”, noticing things at the edges of the text that seem almost to be “signalling or winking”, and then following your response to this signalling or winking. At times, we begin to suspect that an identification of Murnane with the narrator of this book, and therefore the positioning of its entire contents, may be a little less straightforward than we had first suspected (despite what I said upon opening this review). The narrator is an image-Murnane in the mind of Murnane the writer, and as such has access to experiences that the writer-Murnane does not. If he were to type up his report, writes the narrator at the end of this report, and take it to the elderly woman writer whom he believes has moved into a farmhouse just over the border from where he now lives and with whom he wishes to make contact, he would add some further information (which he then proceeds to outline) but, he tells us, his “reluctance to make any sort of show of [his] interests or motives” means that this report will in any case never be read by anyone. |
List #6: FICTION
Scroll through and select some of these excellent novels*, short story collections and other fictive texts as gifts or for yourself.
Come in or click through to browse our full selection (we have a large number of interesting and unusual titles in stock), or ask us for our recommendations for your specific needs.
A splendid new edition of this excellent novel (and now a NetFlix series). A doctor specialising in amnesia interviews Grace Marks, imprisoned for the 1843 murder of her employer and his housekeeper. Grace claims to remember nothing. Was she guilty?
"Brilliant. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin." - Hilary Mantel
In this sequel to Henry James's A Portrait of a Lady, Banville assumes not only James's mantle but his eye and pen.
“When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that, in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style.” - John Banville
" Banville makes James something all his own." - Guardian
"Banville is one of the writers I admire the most - few people can create an image as beautifully or precisely." - Hanya Yanagihara (author of A Little Life)
A girl arrives at an orphanage after the deaths of her parents in a car accident. Her presence is a wound to the orphans' idea of themselves, and they also begin to have a disturbing effect upon the incomer. What role does the girl's doll play in the hazards that soon beset the inmates of the orphanage?
>> Read Thomas's review.
"Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister. Lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behaviour. It is about language, wounding, wickedness; but it is also about how fleeting and how vulnerable is the state of childhood innocence – that 'nothing which we are to perceive in this world/equals the power of its intense fragility'." - Sarah Perry, Guardian
Another remarkable novel from the author of HHhH. What if the death of Roland Barthes in 1980 was not an accident but an assassination? What if the cultural theorist's death of the was part of an international intrigue, involving the use of language as an irresistible convincer (its ultimate 'seventh function'). Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a global chase that takes them from the corridors of power and academia to seedy back streets. Both brainy and fun.
>> Read Thomas's review.
"This is a novel that establishes Laurent Binet as the clear heir to the late Umberto Eco, writing novels that are both brilliant and playful, dense with ideas while never losing sight of their need to entertain. The 7th Function of Language is one of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year." - Guardian
The stresses of yet another once-in-a-lifetime storm in Wellington and not helped by the demands put upon Tamil refugee Sita by her employer, but support comes from unexpected quarters when the usual structures of urban life and upended.
>> "A subversion of the classic quest narrative."
This fascinating (and funny) new novel from the author of The Wish Child (winner of the 2017 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize) is sieved and assembled from the great flood of words that washed over Chidgey in 2016. Both an experiment in form and an exercise in documentary rigour, this novel is revelatory of the actual texture of life and an interrogation of the processes of memory.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Like everyone, Megan Dunn had a book inside her. In Dunn's case, that book happened to be Fahrenheit 451, which had already been written by Ray Bradbury. Tinderbox is about the hold of literature on our minds and about the mechanisms by which society attempts to destroy that hold. It is about hope and failure and retail and living in the twenty-first century and failure (it's strong on failure), and it's fun to read.
>> Read an extract.
>> The 1966 film by Francis Truffaut.
>> Megan's Julie Christie slide show.
Egan follows the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad with this historical novel set in Depression era and post-Depression era New York, a period in which modern American history was put on a new track.
>> Read Stella's review.
"This is a novel that will pull you in and under and carry you away on its rip tides. Its resonances continue to wash over the reader long after the novel ends." - Guardian
Enard's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste, past and present. Enard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire zone, providing a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the area, and intimating the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them.
"Jenny Erpenbeck's magnificent novel is about the 'central moral question of our time,' and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling 'moving' stories about people who are very different from us. Erpenbeck writes about Richard, a retired German academic, whose privileged, orderly life is transformed by his growing involvement in the lives of a number of African refugees—utterly powerless, unaccommodated men, who have ended up, via the most arduous routes, in wealthy Germany. Erpenbeck uses a measured, lyrically austere prose, whose even tread barely betrays the considerable passion that drives it onward." — James Wood, New Yorker
"Profound, unsettling and subtle." - The Guardian
It's 1956 and Iola (a character both based and not based on Janet Frame) arrives on the island of Ibiza, on the fringes of Franco's Spain, with little more than a Spanish phrasebook and an imagination shaped by literature and movies. Soon she meets a fascinating American photographer who falls in and out of focus: is he really a photographer, and who exactly is the German doctor he keeps asking her about? Nothing is stable or quite as it seems, and the mysterious doctor, when he appears, takes Iola for a picnic on a salt island, where she is brought close to a brighter, harsher reality.
From the author of Gifted.
Under the house the earth moves according to its geological time, while upon it the lives and times of humans move by different rhythms. One house is the place where these forces interact. Farrell's new novel is a sort of counterpart to The Villa on the Edge of the Empire.
>> Read Stella's review.
Can a penniless writer retain any certainty, even of his own identity, when he is commissioned to ghost-write the memoir of a conman? From the author of the Booker-winning Narrow Road to the Deep North.
"Garner's stories share characteristics of the postcard: they flash before us carefully recorded images that remind us of harsher realities not pictured. And like postcards they are economically written, a bit of conversation is transcribed, a memory recalled, an event noted, scenes pass as if viewed from a train-momentarily, distinct and tantalising in their beauty.'" - New York Times
>> Also available and uniform with this volume: True Stories.
This taut depiction of a stand-up comedian falling apart on stage in front of an audience wanting entertainment won Grossman the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Why are we so transfixed by tragedy, our own and others'? In reading literature, are we like Dovaleh's audience, seeking entertainment from the miseries of others?
"Unrelentingly claustrophobic. The violence that A Horse Walks into a Bar explores is private and intimate. Its central interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the self. Searing and poignant." - New York Review of Books
As surreal and "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" (to use words written in anticipation by le Comte de Lautréamont (with particular emphasis with reference to this collection upon the sewing machine)), Grodova's stories, full of baroque detail worn via patina to a thinness that makes them dangerously sharp to handle, take place in a world governed by strange customs, where significance is found in odd conjunctions, where obsessions assume the fatal ordinariness of custom, where only misfits approach normal, and where childhood is the conduit of immense threat, to children, parents and to wider society. All that is riven will henceforth continue to diverge, but Grodova's stories, lying on an axis of mitteleuropean flavour somewhere between Grimm's tales and accounts of Soviet privations, and on another axis somewhere between the stories of Angela Carter (pleasantly close to these) and those of Ben Marcus, have as much delight (and even hope) in them as they do despair, for, after all, with an imagination as fertile (and a hand as steady) as Grudova's, anything could happen (not only the dreadful). - Thomas
What place is there for love in a world torn by crisis? From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
>> Read Stella's review.
"Exit West is a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality. It is animated by a constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future." - The Guardian
Kingdom Cons by Yuri Harrera $26
The new book from the author of the astounding Signs Preceding the End of the World. "Part surreal fable and part crime romance", the whole book is a meditation on the durability of integrity when confronted with power.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Read Stella's review.
"Yuri Herrera must be a thousand years old. Nothing else explains the vastness of his understanding." - Valeria Luiselli
>> Read an extract. 
The three-day siege of the Battle of Orakau in 1864, in which 1700 Imperial troops laid siege to a hastily constructed pa sheltering 300 Maori men, women and children, marked the end of the Waikato War. Ihimaera tells the history from the point of view of a Moetu, a boy on the side that refused to submit and fought to the end. With facing texts in English and Maori (by Hemi Kelly). First-hand accounts and documentary illustrations appended.
>> Read Stella's review.
Living is hard both physically and mentally on a small island off the Norwegian coast. Ingrid's father dreams of building a causeway to the mainland, whereas her mother dreams of moving to a smaller, even more remote island. When Ingrid is sent to work on the mainland she learns that mainland life has trials of its own.
Short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize
"Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read." - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
These short stories come up with one surreally gothic image after another: deeply resonant and affecting beyond the reach of reason.
"These stories do not take long to read but the images in them will be embedded in your mind for a long time, so precisely sharp are Jaeggy’s tiny burrs of observed detail." - Thomas (>> read his review)
"This book is twisted and hypnotizing and downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it's a swift, prickly undertaking and you emerge the other end bloodied all over." - The Paris Review
"Sultry, sinister, hilarious and demented, Baby blazes with intelligence and murderous black humour. Heavenly Creatures for a new generation." – Eleanor Catton
"Patricia Highsmith meets reality TV in this compelling debut. Jochems nudges up the tension until we can’t bear to look – and can’t bear to look away: thrilling, dangerous and deliciously funny." – Catherine Chidgey
"This funny, sexy, unnerving novel challenges received ideas and delivers jolts of pleasure and disquiet throughout. Jochems, like her extraordinary creation Cynthia, is a force to be reckoned with." –Emily Perkins
>> "The best novel of 2017." - Spinoff
The Iron Age by Arja Kajermo $26
Tradition and superstition clash with economic reality in this illustrated short novel telling of family's migration from rural Finland to urban Sweden. "This quiet, assiduously written short novel about a girl living in Finland among the looming shadows of war achieves the alchemy every writer would love to conjure up: it’s somehow about every childhood, every twilit life. A radiantly beautiful book." – Joseph O’Connor"So bleakly funny that it makes Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes seem idyllic." – The Irish Times
Tradition and superstition clash with economic reality in this illustrated short novel telling of family's migration from rural Finland to urban Sweden. "This quiet, assiduously written short novel about a girl living in Finland among the looming shadows of war achieves the alchemy every writer would love to conjure up: it’s somehow about every childhood, every twilit life. A radiantly beautiful book." – Joseph O’Connor"So bleakly funny that it makes Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes seem idyllic." – The Irish Times
A dazzlingly intelligent dual-narrative novel concerning, on the one hand, a retired New York lawyer who 'disappears' to Tel Aviv, and, on the other, a novelist named Nicole Krauss who comes home to find herself already there, and so sets off towards the point the narratives meet. Elegant and replete with Kraussian themes of memory, solitude and Jewishness.
"Wonderfully complex and thought-provoking." - Stella (>>read her full review and listen to her reviewing the book on RNZ National)
"Restores your faith in fiction." - Ali Smith
"Charming, tender, and wholly original." - J. M. Coetzee
>>"What is ‘real’ and what isn’t, and do such questions even apply, really, to something that is entirely a construction, from beginning to end?"
Which undoes the present more, a shadow cast by the past or one cast by the future? De Kretser's new novel gauges the dissonances between individual and collective identities.
"I so much admire Michelle de Kretser's formidable technique - her characters feel alive, and she can create a sweeping narrative which encompasses years, and yet still retain the sharp, almost hallucinatory detail." - Hilary Mantel
"Michelle de Kretser writes quickly and lightly of wonderful and terrible things. She is a master storyteller." - A.S. Byatt
"We didn't want to be like twins-we wanted to be twins. We wanted to be absolutely identical. But because we hadn't been born twins, we had to make ourselves the same-and part of that, of course, was having to go through all our most important experiences together." Rowing partners Johann and Ludwig are best friends, but that's not enough. To defeat the region's current champions, identical twins from a nearby town, they must become twins too. Ludwig has a plan: they will eat, sleep, breathe and even think in perfect harmony. Only then will they have a chance of winning. But Johann has a secret he's been keeping from his friend-and when Ludwig begins acting strangely, Johann realises that his 'twin' wants to put their bond to the ultimate test.
Mary is hired to play the part of the Emotional Girlfriend(alongside a Maternal Girlfriend, a Mundane Girlfriend, an Angry Girlfriend, &c) in a research project called The Girlfriend Experiment, which seeks to discover why two people, drawn together by forces beyond their control, can wake up one day as strangers to one another.
>> Read Stella's review.
"For Lacey’s remarkable skill to be fully embraced, we may need a new genre to categorize her work under. Lacey’s books are not really novels, in a similar way that Woolf’s The Waves, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, or Rachel Cusk’s Outline are arguably not really novels. Still, no matter how you categorise them, it seems inevitable that her books will find a larger audience. Her sentences are like reading an iconic prose style before it’s become iconic." - Los Angeles Review of Books
Lacey's previous novel Nobody is Ever Missing, set largely in New Zealand, was an international literary sensation.
>> She's got a paperclip upon her wrist.
A wonderfully written interior monologue, reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, of a difficult woman obsessed with a portrait of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and thrown off kilter by a romantic encounter with a musician.
"The best book I've read this year." - Thomas (>>read his review)
>> Read an extract.
Written in one long sentence (in which line breaks perform as a higher order of comma), McCormack’s remarkable and enjoyable book succeeds at both stretching the formal possibilities of the novel (for which it was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and in being a gentle, unassuming and thoughtful portrait of a very ordinary life in a small and unremarkable Irish town. The flow of McCormack’s prose sensitively maps the flow of thought, drawing feeling and meaning from the patterning of quotidian detail as the narrator dissolves himself in the memories of which he is comprised. This wash of memory suggests that the narrator may in fact be dead, the narrative being the residue (or cumulation) of his life, the enduring body of attachments, thoughts and feelings that comprise the person. Few novels capture so well the texture of a person’s life, and this has been achieved through a rigorous experiment in form. - Thomas
What binds a family together tears a family apart. On the run, Tess is picked up on the side of the road by middle-aged father Lewis Rose, and drawn into the complexity of his life. Tess is a gothic love story set in Masterton at the turn of the millennium.
>> Read Stella's review.
"I love novels about amelioration, about people trying to mend and fix themselves. Kirsten McDougall's brave and brilliant Tess is one of these. A novel of tender observation and deftly judged suspense, Tess imagines what it might mean for someone to really know what goes on inside others." - Elizabeth Knox
Fiction addresses itself to fact and fact addresses itself to fiction. These pieces range all over the place, occasionally observing themselves transforming from essay to fiction (or vice-versa), asking themselves, and us, what is the nature, or value, of truth?
A beautifully written novel about the relationship between a family and a landscape after the father's decision to withdraw from society.
>> Read Stella's review.
" Elmet is at once both delicately beautiful and compellingly brutal, and is entirely memorable because of this." - Thomas (>>read his full review)
The striving for a different life is one of the markers of modern existence. Can these five characters in Mumbai make better lives for themselves, or can they only achieve dislocation? From the author of The Lives of Others.
"This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity-a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece." - Edmund White
"Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you've turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work." - Karen Joy Fowler
"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden."
Seven stories of men choosing loneliness as a way of avoiding pain, even if it brings them close to self-erasure. Contains all your favourite Murakami signatures (cats, pasta, baseball, music, mysterious women).
>> Read Stella's review.
>> The playlist for this book.
When a beautifully made coffin turns up for Edvard's grandfather, whose death is nowhere in sight, Edvard begins to unravel the mystery of his lost uncle and dead parents, an unravelling that takes him from the remote Norwegian farmstead where he grew up to the Shetland Islands, to the historic battlefields of France. The novel is neatly dovetailed throughout, just like the woodwork that runs through it. From the author of the incomparable Norwegian Wood.
>> Mytting speaks with Kathryn Ryan.
A fragmentary "factless autobiography" attributed by Pessoa largely to his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares but left unedited and uncompleted (if such a project could be completed) at Pessoa's (and, by extension, Soares's) death. The book is a Modernist masterpiece of existential observation and self-observation, with musings on the scattershot distribution of meaning in everyday life.
>> "The weirdest autobiography ever."
>> "A writer in flight from his name."
>> On the destruction of the 'I'.
Almost true stories for a post-truth world. Does being an American mean anything any more?
"These bang-up-to-the-minute stories feel like essential reading as we get to grips with a bizarre new era." - Guardian
In June 1819 Henri Beyle (aka Stendhal) is rejected by the woman he loves. Beyle finds himself stranded in an afterlife populated by tourists, shoplifters and characters in novels he hasn't yet written. Footnoting a host of other writers, An Overcoat is an obsessional play upon the life and work of one of the founders of the modern novel.
"In this subtle and playful text, Charles Boyle (Boyle/Beyle), writing under his pen-name Jack Robinson, dissolves the distinction between historical fact and creative freedom, allowing each to infect or lubricate the other. Composed mostly of footnotes (and of footnotes to the footnotes), the brief impressionistic sections display and connect a wide experience of reading, thinking, feeling and writing." - Thomas (>>read his full review)"An Overcoat takes intellection as seriously as, say, being able to make a three-point turn in traffic; perhaps less so. This is the book’s charm, and possibly its point. It’s a mind at play, and Boyle’s silly pseudonym is a deliberate act of self-sabotage – as well as a nod to Stendhal’s fondness for different identities. 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
A collection of devastating short prose pieces from on of America's sharpest poets.
>> Read Thomas's review.
"The property that Ruefle deems private is the impalpable nature of the inner life we all share; it is at once ours and everyone's. Ruefle has shown a talent for elevating her acute observations and narrative inclination well above mere anecdote to create quietly disquieting moments. A literature of barbed ambiguity and unresolved disruption." - Bookforum
"Ruefle can seem like a supernally well-read person who has grown bored with what smartness looks like, and has grown attracted to the other side." - New York Times
How does a horrific act resonate along the lines of love and memory that link (and divide) a family? What changes, what endures? What can be recovered, and what must be constructed?
>> Read Stella's review.
"That an act of brutality inspires storytelling as beautiful as this is reason enough for this novel to stand out from the crowd. To discover the sheer exquisiteness of Ruskovich’s prose is an unforeseen added bonus. There’s a rare, rich plangent quality to her sentences, as present in the spaces between the words, in what’s not said, as much as in what is articulated." - Independent
A contemporary rewriting of King Lear, as part of the 'Hogarth Shakespeare' series, from the acid-tipped pen of one of the sharpest (and blackly funniest) satirists of contemporary mores. Henry Dunbar has handed over control of his global media corporation to his two eldest daughters and is stuck in his dotage in a care home in the Lake District. When he escapes into the hills, who will find him first, the two daughters keen to strip him of his estate or his youngest daughter, Florence?
"Of all the novelist and play matches in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, that of Edward St Aubyn with King Lear seems the finest. Shakespeare’s blackest, most surreal and hectic tragedy sharpened by one of our blackest, most surreal and hectic wits. Our ur-text about the decay of patriarchal aristocratic power reimagined by a writer whose central subject is the decay of male aristocratic power." - Guardian
Winner of the 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE.
Is this The American Book of the Dead? Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. This inventive and much-anticipated novel from the author of the Folio Prize-winning Tenth of December has a president, "freshly inclined toward sorrow," driven by grief into communion with the disembodied spirits of the dead in what becomes a meditation on the force of death in personal and collective histories, notably the American Civil War.
>> Read Stella's and Thomas's reviews.
A young woman lies dying in hospital. The boy at her bedside asks some questions which unleash the most terrifying of stories.
>> Read Thomas's review.
"Terrifying but brilliant, this dangerously addictive novel in which a woman’s life speeds towards doom is haunted by the bleak landscape of rural Argentina. Schweblin remorselessly cranks up the tension until every sentence seems to tremble with threat. Fever Dream’s ambiguities, and the intricate psychologies with which Schweblin invests her characters, mean that rereading proves rewarding even when the suspense is removed. Wherever you decide the truth lies, aspects of Amanda’s story will continue to puzzle and haunt you long after she stops being able to tell it." - Guardian
Family, society, love and religion clash in this modern reworking of the themes of Antigone. Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
"Home Fire left me awestruck, shaken, on the edge of my chair, filled with admiration for her courage and ambition. Recommended reading for prime ministers and presidents everywhere." - Peter Carey
In the second installment of Smith's seasonal quartet, a modern-day Scrooge reassesses her relationships in the context of Brexit Britain and the deep patterns of history and society.
"Luminously beautiful. A novel of great ferocity, tenderness, righteous anger and generosity of spirit." - Guardian
What happens when a man just walks away from his wife and children and doesn't come back? Beautifully translated by Michael Hofmann.
"This inscrutable novel is a haunting love story of subtlety and pathos. Everything is so thoughtfully put together, so gently and subtly observed, that the question of whether Thomas and Astrid will ever be reunited, if such a thing is even possible, gathers an extraordinary pathos." - Tim Parks, Guardian
Paris: books/conversation, love/politics, fidelity/infidelity.
"Edgy and lyrical, acerbic and witty, intellectually incisive but also visceral and bawdy, disarmingly direct and intricately plotted." - Andrew Bennett
We have in us a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation. Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments.
>> Read Thomas's review.
"Walsh toys with notions of realism versus fantasy and autobiography versus fiction. She exposes, and revels in, the absurdity of these boundaries, their indistinctness. Her clever, self-parodying stories capture the existential disarrangement of the writer, but also the existential disarrangement of anyone who finds real life strange and, at times, quite unreal." - Joanna Kavenna, Guardian
>> Read Thomas's review. "A genuinely original collection, sharp and sparse." - Mike McCormack
>> Read an extract, 'Exes'.
As 13-year-old Jojo approaches adulthood, how can he find his way in the U.S. South when all seems set for him and his family to fall foul of rural poverty, drug addiction, the penal system, the justice system, racism and illness? From the author of Salvage the Bones.
>> Read Stella's review.
"This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare." - Margaret Atwood
"A powerfully alive novel haunted by ghosts; a road trip where people can go but they can never leave; a visceral and intimate drama that plays out like a grand epic, Sing, Unburied, Sing is staggering." - Marlon James
The Breakstone family arrange themselves around their perfect daughter Heather, but as Heather grows she becomes the centre of other, darker orbits.
"Heather, the Totality is superb. Weiner conveys the sense that beyond the brilliantly chosen details there was a wealth of similarly truthful social and psychological perception unstated. Then there was the ice-cold mercilessness, of a kind that reminded me (oddly, I suppose, but there it was) of Evelyn Waugh. This novel is something special." - Philip Pullman
"I cringed and shuddered my way through this short, daring novel to its terrible inevitable end. Each neat, measured paragraphcarpaccios its characters to get to the book's heart - one of Boschian self-cannibalising isolation. A stunning novel. Heather, the Totality blew me away." - Nick Cave
>> Matthew Weiner, the man who made Mad Men.
Wilkins' writing is both light and deft as he brings us inside the head and world of Amy, a store detective at Cutty's (for which read Kirkaldie and Stains) in the weeks leading up to the department store's closure. Why is Amy being interviewed by the police? What will change in her unremarkable life?
99 Stories of God by Joy Williams $28
99 stories, most less than a page long, each written with such sharpness and lightness of touch that they draw blood unexpectedly and without pain.
"Brevity, sparsity, clarity: these stories are distillates of novels, tragedies told as jokes, aqua vitae for anyone who reads, observes, thinks or writes." - Thomas (>>read his full review)
"Radically compressed. New territory for Williams, with a brevity and a strict whimsy you might encounter in Lydia Davis's work. Easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb." - New Yorker
"A collection of tiny, wry masterpieces." - New York Times
>> "There’s something unwholesome and self-destructive about the entire writing process."
99 stories, most less than a page long, each written with such sharpness and lightness of touch that they draw blood unexpectedly and without pain.
"Brevity, sparsity, clarity: these stories are distillates of novels, tragedies told as jokes, aqua vitae for anyone who reads, observes, thinks or writes." - Thomas (>>read his full review)
"Radically compressed. New territory for Williams, with a brevity and a strict whimsy you might encounter in Lydia Davis's work. Easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb." - New Yorker
"A collection of tiny, wry masterpieces." - New York Times
>> "There’s something unwholesome and self-destructive about the entire writing process."
Published to mark the centenary of the first Hogarth Press printing, Woolf's original story 'The Mark on the Wall' is here paired with a new story by Haddon. All the pleasures and production qualities of the original have been retained.
Centred on a community of immigrants who have traded their endangered lives as artists in China and Taiwan for the constant struggle of life on the poverty line in 1990s New York City, the stories that make up Sour Heart examine the many ways that family and history can weigh us down, but also lift us up.
"As I read, I quickly realized this was something so new and powerful that it would come to shape the world, not just the literary world, but what we know about reality. Zhang's version of honesty goes way past the familiar, with passages that burst into a bold, startling brilliance. Get ready." - Miranda July
"Obscene, beautiful, moving." - The New Yorker
>> Jenny Zhang and Lena Dunham.
A beautifully presented, various and interesting collection of twenty-first century stories by Maori and Pasifika writers, both well-known and emerging (and some artists, too).
A whole summer's worth of reading from Lydia Davis, Sarah Vowell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Diane Williams, Jesse Ball, Sheila Heti, Carrie Brownstein, Etgar Keret, Jonathan Lehtam, Valeira Luiselli, Heidi Julavits, Sherman Alexie, &c, &c, &c, &c, &c, &c (50 writers and artists).
(* including a few non-fiction novels)
List #5: POETRY
13 recent New Zealand Poetry books you might consider giving as gifts. Click through or come in to browse our full poetry section.
Ask us for our recommendations for your specific needs.
Images, moments, feelings, persons. Hoard acts as a great poetic sieve, scooped through Adcock's life in New Zealand and the UK, through her reading, dreams and relationships.
"This remarkable sequence winds and eddies like the Whanganui River, filtering the region's many histories into something rich and swimmable. Is verse the future of history?" - James Brown
Camp is adept at the interrogation of quotidian objects, surprising them into revealing dimensions of themselves to which we have been blinded by familiarity. In this book Camp tickles the objects in Aunt Mimi's kitchen to catch unexpected reflections of John Lennon.
"Simply by sailing in a new direction / You could enlarge the world." Curnow's 70-year career in the vanguard of New Zealand poetry involved the defining and redefining of poetic sensibilities, moving from an antipodean to an autochthonic focus.
>> Uniform with Terry Sturm's biography of Curnow (and also available as a slip-cased set).
Presented as a series of fragments, much in the manner of the scraps of text discovered by archeologists, these poems are partial unearthings of an emotional life as intent upon concealing itself as it is upon revealing. What are we make of these twists of words, half earnest, half mocking, leaping back and forth across millennia, overlapping past and present while simultaneously reinforcing and dissolving the distinction between the two?
>> Read Thomas's review.
"Vanishing Points concerns itself with appearance and disappearance as modes of memory, familial until we lose sight of that horizon line and must settle instead for a series of intersecting arcs. It is full of stories caught from the air and pictures made of words. It stands here and goes there, a real or an imagined place. If we can work out the navigation the rest will follow."
In the face of that of which the mind cannot conceive the senses speak with urgency, we experience simultaneously a grasping and a relinquishment, a change in contrast and in texture, if we may call them that, a new sense of purpose indistinguishable from resignation. In this book, Bill Manhire’s first collection in seven years, language dances as death presses at it from behind, agency flees into objects, images draw themselves together on the brink of their own dissolution, small things become final containers for the large. Wearing his art so lightly as at times to resemble artlessness, Manhire tests the strengths of finer and finer threads to very subtle effect. An excellent collection.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika 'poetry warrior' Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether stories really can cure the incurable.
>> This video of Marsh launching her previous collection, Dark Sparring, is worth watching again.
"This book will push you down a marble staircase, and then cheerfully bring you a couple of aspirin.' — Hera Lindsay Bird
A bilingual edition (English and Hungarian) volume of Palasti's poems, rich with the pains and pleasures of memory.
"I love the writing, the honesty of it, the search that is always there, the courage to face hard truths and at the same time imagine other lives with compassion." - Elizabeth Smither
"Elizabeth Smither's world is the people she knows, the places she visits, the animals she encounters. As they appear in her work they take on mysterious, sometimes surreal, qualities. Her imaginative world is charming and enchanted, peculiar, whimsical, and often very funny." - C. K. Stead
How can language contain the world that spills
From its torn rinds, how can my ode hold
On to language that ejects itself like birdsong
From pine trees still shady with dawn?
Five decades of word-and-brain work.
Whether it is considering the relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering or the impact of climate change on personal creativity, Wootton's restless inventiveness liberates unexpected connections.
"A richly mulled book about suffering and empowerment." - Siobhan Harvey
NEW RELEASES
The newest books aren't always the best books, but quite often they are.
Like everyone, Megan Dunn had a book inside her. In Dunn's case, that book happened to be Fahrenheit 451, which had already been written by Ray Bradbury. Tinderbox is about the hold of literature on our minds and about the mechanisms by which society attempts to destroy that hold. It is about hope and failure and retail and living in the twenty-first century and failure (it's strong on failure), and it's fun to read.
>> Read an extract.
>> The 1966 film by Francis Truffaut.
>> Megan's Julie Christie slide show.
"You can't easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change that structure." Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considers our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and advocates the overthrow of gendered templates for female advancement.
>> The woman behind the book.
A splendid new edition of this excellent novel (and now a NetFlix series). A doctor specialising in amnesia interviews Grace Marks, imprisoned for the 1843 murder of her employer and his housekeeper. Grace claims to remember nothing. Was she guilty?
"Brilliant. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin." - Hilary Mantel
Gerald Murnane writes perhaps the most perfect sentences in English of any living writer. In this, his last work of fiction (though the narrator claims it is a report of actual experience and no sort of fiction), an elderly writer, having moved to a small town close to the border of a territory he had never in his previous life left, postpones a trip over the border to consider the life and death of mental states, and persistence or evanescence of images in the mind. Murnane, the Australian Proust, has written a valedictory work of great subtlety.
>> Murnane's writing room.
"Marias is able to see and discover those things which many of us have failed to notice, as well as the things which we do recognise but have never put into words. He keeps looking at this world long after most of us have turned away." - Alexis Grohman
Wide-ranging but incisive, Marias's essays are good workouts for the cerebral muscles.
Whether he is writing graphic novels, making paintings, or building sculptures, Ware explores universal themes of social isolation, emotional torment, and depression with his trademark self-effacing voice. The end result is wry and highly empathetic. This vast and splendid volume chronicles a quarter century of remarkable and very individual creative work.
>> What is he doing now?
Everything and everyone is right where they belong. A beautifully illustrated and reassuring bedtime story.
Action is urgently needed, but what action is appropriate for a small country in the face of a global problem?
Architecture, furniture, glassware, textiles, product design: Alvar Aalto brought a clarity and humanity to every project. This lovely book surveys the full range and depth of his activities.
>> Visit the Alva Aalto Foundation.
>> Meet Alvar Aalto.
Three-course meals from some of the world's leading chefs, all using overlooked, undervalued or waste ingredients. Beautifully presented. "These dishes could change the way we feed the world, because they can be cooked by anyone, anywhere, on any budget. To feed the planet, first you have to fight the waste." - MB
>> See some spreads.
>> See some chef reducing waste.
A beautifully drawn and delightfully immersive maze boo with lots to find and an exciting plot. When goblins invade and then flee the house, Finn's dog gives chase - and so must Finn. Hours of fun.
Fifty biographies of key figures in Ngai Tahu's history, up to the Deed of Settlement. Fully illustrated and fully interesting.
A beautifully illustrated edition of Pamuk's memoir, with 450 historical photographs.
The politics, ethics, cultural and environmental considerations of resource extraction.
Where does reading end and living begin? Considering everything from Edith Wharton's novels through Alan Bennett's diaries, Virginia Woolf and the writings of twelfth century monk Aelred of Rievaulx, Susan Hill charts a year of her life through the books she has read, reread or returned to the shelf.
What should we do today? Where should we go? What should we wear? What should we eat? A beautifully illustrated book (with choices!) about all the options we have available to us every day.
>> "Maybe I'll read my favourite book. Can you guess what it's about?"
When Weston Babansky receives an extravagant engagement present from his best friend (and old flame) Jillian Frisk, he doesn't quite know what to make of it - or how to get it past his fiancee. Especially as it's a massive, handmade, intensely personal sculpture that they'd have to live with forever.
Picasso and Giacometti were addressing similar issues of form and meaning at the same time and in the same circles but in different ways. How can their work be considered a dialogue about the direction of modern art?
>> Picasso vs. Giacometti.
On a sun-drenched veranda, Australia's longest-serving prime minister and a young writer smoke choice cigars and share conversation about life, death, love, sex, religion, politics, sport, fatherhood, marriage and everything in between. Interspersed with interviews with Hawke's contemporaries, these conversations provide the deepest insight into this thinker who did not shy from controversy when pursuing his ideals.
If you are free to create your own reality in the Land of the Free, what happens when this reality is contradicted by actuality? Trump's post-factual universe has deep and long precedents in American history.
"This is the indispensable book for understanding America in the age of Trump." - Walter Isaacson
Bob Dylan was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, so here is a book of his words (without the music and the voice). You can catch all the lyrics and be awed.
>> Richard Thomas also ranks Dylan with the Classical greats.
>> Featuring all the literati (except Shakespeare).
A memoir from the author of Tales of the City, from being a conservative son of the Old South to being a gay rights pioneer and novelist.
"A book for any of us, gay or straight, who have had to find our family. Maupin is one of America's finest storytellers, and the story of his life is a story as fascinating, as delightful and as compulsive as any of the tales he has made up for us." - Neil Gaiman
Tumbling from an ice bridge to be impaled on a mammoth's tusk is a noble death for an arctic explorer, but Stella and her team have an adventure to pursue. Can they cross the Arctic wastes and live to tell the tale?
The outstanding graphic designer, best known for his book covers.
>> Portfolio.
Not only the past but the future of coffee.
Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse in 1941. Decades later, Laing walked the river from its source to the sea and wrote this fascinating book on landscape and our place within it. New edition.
"Laing's writing at its sublime best reminds me of Richard Mabey's nature prose and the poetry of Alice Oswald. Laing seems to lack a layer of skin, rendering her susceptible to the smallest vibrations of the natural world as well as to the frailties of the human psyche." - The Times
"Has a Sebaldian edge to it that lifts it out of memoir and biography and into something far more tantalizing and suggestive." - Guardian
A special Slow Food investigation into authentic regional cuisine.
Whatever happened to the hero of John Mulgan's Man Alone? Parker's novel extrapolates Johnson's life from the point at which he leaves to fight in the Spanish Civil War at the end of Mulgan's novel.
>> For a fictionalised account of Mulgan's life after he parted ways with Johnson, read Mulgan by Noel Shepherd.
An outstanding graphic novel mix of biography and fiction.
>> See some sample pages.
A handy wee incendiary volume.
"This extraordinary book is the road map for a new kind of effective activism." - Brian Eno
>> Resistance is useful.
Each week, find out who won the Booker (and who was on the short list) for a year of the prize's history. Doubles as a fifty-year history of book cover design.
What will you read next?
Click through to our latest NEWSLETTER for reviews, news, amusements, events, gift suggestions, new releases and some other things.
BOOKS@VOLUME #51 (25.11.17)
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Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan {Reviewed by STELLA}
Jennifer Egan’s new novel is daringly different from her previous novels as it is, at first glance, a standard work of historical fiction. From the opening pages, it will have you entranced. Egan's writing is elegant and measured. Opening in the late 1930s in New York, we are immediately drawn into the family life of the Irish Kerrigan family. Eddie Kerrigan is making a menial living running errands for an unsavoury Irish gangster and getting the odd job on the wharf, trying to earn enough in Depression-era America to keep his family housed and fed, and to provide medical care for his disabled youngest child, Lydia. Anna, his older daughter, is a feisty and charming companion, and when the book opens she is 12, accompanying her father on a visit to meet the mysterious Dexter Styles. Kerrigan is looking for a way out of his bind and sees Styles as an opportunity to change the course of his life. The relationship between Styles and Kerrigan runs a line throughout the novel, but not necessarily in a way the reader may have expected. After our initial introductions to this trio we are pushed on, and jump to the war years where we find Anna now 19 and working at the Naval yards as part of the war effort. Her father has disappeared - Anna believes he has abandoned the family because of the pressures of Lydia. Anna wants answers to her father’s disappearance and when a chance encounter with Dexter Styles occurs her determination leads her on a dangerous course of action. Spirited, intelligent and curious, Anna is a compelling character who lies at the centre of this novel, an anchor at the centre of several overlapping stories that build layers of history, meaning and emotion in her life and those around her. Both brutal - whether it is the gangster underworld, the powers of the sanctioned elite or the heirarchy of seamen - and tender - whether it is the relationships that parents have with their children, the love which springs out of a mistake or the sentimental ties that defy logic - Manhattan Beach wraps you into its arms and takes you inside the heads of Anna, Eddie and Dexter, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of each, alongside the power structures of the time, and the trials and tribulations of lives cast into the melee of economic and political turmoil. It’s a novel about what it meant to be female at this time of extraordinary change, what it meant to be on the legitimate side of society and how you had to behave if you were not. Alongside the personal and social histories, is a contemplation of the sea - of the edges that we all live on, the beaches and coastlines that define us, literally and metaphorically, and how these borders can be transcended, or how we can be free despite their power. And Egan draws us down into the depths, submerges us, just like Anna, fierce and determined, dons her diver's suit and enters the world below. |
The book, and the exhibition it accompanies, are curated by Lucy Hammonds, Julia Waite and Laurence Simmons. There are essays by these curators, and by Deidre Brown, Peter Brunt, Rex Butler, A.D.S. Donaldson, Luke Smythe and Thomas Crow. Walters is considered as a modernist innovator straddling New Zealand and transnational concerns, and opening a pathway between his influences and the artists that came after him. He is notable for his adoption of precedents and motifs from traditional and contemporary Maori art.
>> "The most important dialogue in the last century of New Zealand art, if not the only important one."
>> Curators on the radio.
>> The exhibition shows first at the Auckland Art Gallery and then at the Dunedin Art Gallery.
>> A press release.
>> Walters in Art New Zealand.
>> The book has just been long-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>> We'll be posting images from the book in our instagram gallery every day this week.
List #4: SCIENCE
A selection of books for those curious about the physical world and its workings.
Come in or click through to browse our full selection.
The latest neurological research shows how our brains are softwired (or live-wired!) rather than hardwired. This endless malleability enables us to reconceptualise our world and to construct experience. Where do new ideas come from? Eagleman, whose book The Brain is the best introduction to the philosophical and psychological implications of neurological research, teams up with composer Anthony Brandt to explore our need for novelty and our capacities to produce it like no other animal.
Why do humans keep and cherish some animals i their homes and yet regard others as a source of food or sport? Our relationship with animals tells us much about our own nature as a species and as individuals. A thoughtful and enjoyable book.
At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores - reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds' home.
"I was entranced - my mind thrilling to the veers and lifts of thought, to the beautiful deftness of the prose. This marvellous book inhabits with graceful ease both the mythic and the scientific, and remains alert to the vulnerability of these birds as well as to their wonder. It is a work that takes wing in the mind." - Robert Macfarlane
Quantum physics gets its graphic-novel explication as Bob and his dog Rick have crepes with Max Planck, chat with Einstein about atoms and hang out, uncertainly, with Heisenberg in Heligoland.
"Billed as 'Tintin meets Brian Cox', the book was created by theoretical physicist Thibault Damour and illustrator Mathieu Burniat so it's as scientifically accurate as it is beautiful." - BBC Focus
Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst by Robert Sapolsky $40
What drives human behaviours such as racism, xenophobia, tolerance, competition, morality, war, and even peace?
>> Are we hard-wired to be cruel to each other? 
The aspects of ourselves that we hold as being the most human are in fact the ones that we share most widely with other animals.
From the author of The Hidden Life of Trees.
“Thomas Morris does for the history of cardiac surgery what The Right Stuff and Hidden Figures did for the space race. The book is – appropriately – pulse-thumpingly gripping and will be enjoyed by anyone who, in any sense of the phrase, has a heart.” – Mark Lawson
“Tremendous. An exhilarating sweep through ancient history and contemporary practice in surgery of the heart. It’s rich in extraordinary detail and stories that will amaze you. A wonderful book.” – Melvyn Bragg
This biography of an English 'beech-and-bluebell' wood through the seasons and through history both natural and human, is a portrayal of the relationships of humans to nature and a demonstration that poetic writing can be scientifically precise.
"'His remarkable scientific knowledge, intense curiosity and love of nature mean entries erupt with the same richness and variety as the woods they describe. Fortey's enthusiasm for his new wonderland is infectious and illuminating, deep and interesting." - Guardian
Advances in medical science has meant not only that we live longer but that we spend more of that time dying. How has this changed our view of the world and our place in it?
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks $38
The latest advances in neuroscience have bearing on the dilemmas of both philosophy and psychology. Before he died, Sacks drew together some of his incisive essays on consciousness and on the relationship between the brain and the mind, experience and memory, to be presented as this important addition to his oeuvre.
The latest advances in neuroscience have bearing on the dilemmas of both philosophy and psychology. Before he died, Sacks drew together some of his incisive essays on consciousness and on the relationship between the brain and the mind, experience and memory, to be presented as this important addition to his oeuvre.
The most extraordinary images of the Apollo and later missions, presented in this lavish large-format slip-cased volume. Who would have thought that such images could inspire such awe and wonder?
Doudna's discovery of the genome editing capacities of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) has provided scientists with potentially the most powerful interventional tool yet in the field of genetics.
As soon as we evolved language our minds assailed us with voices that could not be heard by anyone else. What do these voices tell us about the workings of our minds, the structures and function of language, and about our conception of ourselves and our place in our world?
>> Not I.
A sumptuous collection of 300 images giving an overview of humanity's conceptions of the cosmos, from the earliest times to the latest discoveries and imaging techniques.
>> See some sample pages here.
Hares are small animals with many predators but they have no burrow or tunnel to shelter them from danger. They survive by a combination of two skills honed to unimaginable extremes: hiding in plain sight, and running fast. This handsome book deals in detail with hares, both as they are, both biochemically and behaviourally, and as they are imagined in art, mythology and legend.
The natural world is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. Convergence suggests that evolution is predictable, and if we could replay the tape of life, we would get the same outcome. But there are also many examples of contingency, cases where the tiniest change - a random mutation or an ancient butterfly sneeze - caused evolution to take a completely different course. So are we humans, and all the plants and animals in the world today, inevitabilities or evolutionary freaks?
Sound: Stories of hearing lost and found by Bella Bathurst $40
A thoughtful consideration of the place of sound and hearing in our lives and culture and identities, springing from the author's progressive deafness and the recovery of her capacities.
International Travel Bureau Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the savvy space traveller by Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich $28
The essential planning guide for the curious space adventurer, covering all of the essentials for your next voyage, how to get there, and what to do when you arrive, and a vast amount of information about the planets.
How to Survive a Plague: The story of how activists and scientists tamed AIDS by David France $30
A remarkable, passionate, brutally human account of the shifts in societal attitudes and in science that enabled humanity to turn the tide against the AIDS epidemic.
Winner of the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
Anaesthesia: The gift of oblivion and the mystery of consciousness by Kate Cole-Adams $38
A hundred and seventy years ago many people would have chosen to die rather than undergo the ordeal of surgery. Today, even major operations are routine. Anaesthesia has made them possible. But how much do we really know about what happens when we go under? Can we hear what's going on around us? Is pain still pain if we are not awake to feel it, or don't remember it afterwards? How does the unconscious mind deal with the body's experience of being cut open and ransacked?
Stalin and the Scientists: A history of triumph and tragedy, 1902-1953 by Simon Ings $28
War-torn, unstable and virtually bankrupt, revolutionary Russia tried to light its way to the future with the fitful glow of science. It succeeded through terror, folly and crime - but also through courage, imagination and even genius. Stalin believed that science should serve the state and with many disciplines having virtually unlimited funds, by the time of his death in 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history - at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.
Soonish: The emerging technologies that will improve and/or ruin everything by Kelly Weinersmith $55
From robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered-toasters - what technologies are coming? What technologies are needed? What are the impediments to useful progress? Fun.
Over the last sixty years, scientists around the world have worked together to explore the fundamental constituents of matter, and the forces that govern their behaviour. The result, so far, is the 'Standard Model' of elementary particles: a theoretical map of the basic building blocks of the universe. With the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012, the map as we know it was completed, but also extended into strange and wonderful new realms.
Beyond Infinity: An expedition to the outer limits of the mathematical universe by Eugenia Cheng $37
Numbers are infinitely extensive but also infinitely divisible. Can one sort of infinity be said to be larger than another?
Was it a coincidence that geology has a pivotal science in an age of social and political repositioning? Maddox introduces us to the diverse range of geologists who kept focussed during the geology vs. Genesis showdown.
Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no. 8 wire as fence posts on settler farms, clambered up in the Pureora protests of the 1980s: the story of New Zealand can be told through totara.
What is a person and what is not? If we rethink our notions of identity can we both include and overcome the notion of species and arrive at a more helpful model of our place on (or in) the planet?
"I have been reading Timothy Morton's books for a while and I like them a lot." - Bjork
The physics of matter receive a lot of attention, but what about the physics of nothing and of absence? Both relativity and quantum theory tell us that nothingness can't be infinitely extensive. Nothing, Weatherall shows, turns out to be very similar to something, similarly structured and describable with the same laws.
How have artists envisaged human and prehuman life in prehistoric times? Perhaps you have been moved or amused by the often poignant depictions of dinosaurs, mastodons or hominids in the books of your childhood. This vast volume collects the best of such art, in all its poignancy and ludicrosity, from 1830 to 1990. Beneath the dustwrapper, the book is bound in real dinosaur skin (or something very like it).
>> A tour through the book (then resist it if you can).
Fascinating, unsettling, wonderful. The specimens are all drawn from the Vrolik Museum in Amsterdam. Includes stereoscope.
The Reality Frame: Relativity and our place in the universe by Brian Clegg $45
From religion to philosophy, humanity has traditionally sought out absolutes to explain the world around us, but as science has developed, relativity has swept away many of these certainties, leaving only a handful of unchangeable essentials such as absolute zero, nothingness, and light, leading to better science and a new understanding of our place in the physical world.
An anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, all concerned with the birds, both native and endemic, of New Zealand.
Bee Quest by Dave Goulson $45
A hunt for the world's most elusive bees leads Dave Goulson from the Salisbury plains to the Sussex hedgerows, from Poland to Patagonia.
Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds by Cordelia Fine $33
“A cracking critique of the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ hypothesis, Cordelia Fine takes to pieces much of the science on which ‘fundamental’ gender differences are predicated. Graced with precisely focused humour, the author makes a good case that men and women are far more alike than many would claim. Feminist? Possibly. Humanist? Certainly. A compellingly good read.” - Richard Fortey
Winner of the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize.
Here's the human body as you've never seen it before. Clever laser cut-outs, flaps and overlays explore every detail of the organs, systems and senses.
The solar system is a dusty place. Every day approximately 100 metric tons of cosmic dust collides with Earth, mainly in the form of micrometeorites. Most of these mineral particles (iron, nickel, etc.) are smaller than grains of sand, and they are falling down on us all the time and all over the globe. This book shows you how to find and identify (and collect!) micrometeorites, and how to distinguish them from other microstuff.
>> Stardust found.
 | The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard {Reviewed by THOMAS} “The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word,” writes Stanisław Lem in Solaris. Daisy Hildyard’s interesting book, The Second Body, addresses itself to possible reasons why, despite evidence of both the causes and mechanisms of the crises that face the planet (climate change, loss of species diversity, pollution, water precarity, overpopulation, war, refugee imperatives), we collectively choose to take what amounts to next to no action when we could be doing something that would go at least some way towards action. Hildyard models our existence as taking place in two bodies. The first is the individual body we move about in. “The second body is not so solid as the other one but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence - it is not a concept, it is your own body. You are alive in both.” It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the first body, the one we tend to think of, somewhat sloppily, as co-extensive with our individuality, is the one that is conceptual, or at least that its individuality is conceptual, and that this is why we so carefully maintain its borders, and the other borders (between bodies, between species, between social groups (sports teams!), between nations) that are part of the conceptual construct that seems to us to give it validation. Our conception of ourselves as individuals, as persons, a flavour of consciousness that we generally attempt to reserve for humans (sometimes withdrawing it from groups of humans we regard as significantly ‘other’, sometimes unthinkingly extending it to particular animals (e.g. pets) with whom we share the locations of our quotidian existence), gives us a dual existence: both correlated and individual, natural and unnatural, animal and non-animal. Because our identities are hard-won and have both pragmatic and conceptual advantages, at least on the scale immediate to that individuality, we defend them by suppressing the greater actualities of what Hildyard calls the second body. To be aware of the first body is to experience fear, the violability of the borders of that body, of its transience and mortality, generally conceptually more than physically. To the individual, the truth is a pathological state. On the scale of the second body and from an epochal viewpoint, the ledger of our consumption and output are of vastly more importance than any concern we may attach to our individuality. “The smallest half-conscious acts of your first body are transformed, by the existence of your second body, into momentous political decisions which have global impact. It becomes impossible to rule anything out of a relationship with anything else. When we look at the global body, it is impossible to relate that body to anything individual because there can be no certain borders between one thing and another. The whole of life becomes a mass. The second body appears to pose a threat to the first body - the one you live in. Any body that is global doesn’t understand that individuals exist at all.” Hildyard suggests that we are not actually as concerned with global crises as we pretend to be, because if we were we would be doing more about them. The end of the world, death and extinction are not our greatest fears. We are more afraid of our subsumption. “I am not sure that the end of the world is very horrific to humans. The threat posed to the human by its second body is not the end of the world, but the loss of individuality, which presents itself in the prospect of parity with other living beings, and possibly objects.” To expand without limits is to dissolve. To witness expansion without limits is to be overwhelmed. To be aware of the body on the vast scale is to lose sight of the body on the individual scale and to be aware of the body on the individual scale is to lose sight of the body on the vast scale. Could we find a way to be able to bridge the conceptual divide between our individual body and the global body that is also ours, without losing our individual identities? Can we build dual, or, rather, multilevel, ‘Russian-doll’ identities that synthesise our interests on every scale at which we exist, or is there always a limit, somewhere, to these sympathies? Must we always define ourselves in opposition to an ‘other’ in order to be aware of ourselves? Are we more attached to ourselves as individuals than we are to our physical survival? |
 | Goethe Dies by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} The four stories in Goethe Dies were first published in German-language periodicals in the early 1980s, and in them we can see Bernhard exercising the devices and themes he used to greater extent and effect in some of the novels written in his last decade (he died in 1989). The title story displays Bernhard’s puckish tendency to appropriate and subvert the biographies of actual people, as he did with Glenn Gould in The Loser. In this story, Goethe, on his deathbed, requests a visit from Wittgenstein, who is living in England (and, in reality, was born nearly 60 years after Goethe’s death). Apart from travelling to England and finding Wittgenstein to have died eight days previously and returning too late to report this to Goethe, who has by then himself died, the nameless narrator has no role other than to report the words of another character, or, more commonly, what one character reports of the words of another character, or, often, what one character reports of another character’s report of the words of yet another character. This device of Russian-doll narratorial passivity witnessing not so much the subject but what may well be little more than hearsay (about hearsay about hearsay) about the subject is a favourite of Bernhard’s, continually calling into question any certainty a reader may think they draw from the text. The story ‘Reunion’ destabilises the operations of memory and satirises the narrator who claims to have freed himself from the influence of the tyrannical parents who in fact still dominate him through his memories and his reistence to them in his memories, compared with the old friend who listens to his rant, who, the narrator claims, never escaped the influence of his parents, and yet who seems not to remember any of the obsessive details of the narrator’s oppressive memories and may therefore be less affected by the shared unhappiness of childhood. These and the other stories display Bernhard’s resentment of reactionary and traditional power, whether that be in a nation (his will states that his books may not be published in his native, hated "Catholic, National Socialist" Austria) or in a family (but he also portrays his resentment of family as base and ludicrous). “Parents make a child and strive above all else to destroy it, I said, my parents just like yours and every parent altogether and everywhere.” |
NEW RELEASES
These books have all arrived this week.
Best known for his positive/negative koru stacks, Walters, as this book demonstrates, was a remarkably diverse and accomplished abstract artist.
>> An exhibition by the same name is currently on display at the Auckland Art Gallery.
How can we bridge the conceptual divide between our individual body and the global body that is also our responsibility, without losing our individual identities?
"Hildyard takes us on a white-knuckle philosophical ride through identity, agency, ecology and molecular biology, leaving us vitally disconcerted, but with a strange new sense of community and solidarity. A curious, oblique, important, and fascinating book." — Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast
A whole summer's worth of reading from Lydia Davis, Sarah Vowell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Diane Williams, Jesse Ball, Sheila Heti, Carrie Brownstein, Etgar Keret, Jonathan Lehtam, Valeira Luiselli, Heidi Julavits, Sherman Alexie, &c, &c, &c, &c, &c, &c (50 writers and artists).
"Well, hello. And welcome to this Planet. We call it Earth. Our world can be a bewildering place, especially if you've only just got here. Your head will be filled with questions, so let's explore what makes our planet and how we live on it. From land and sky, to people and time, these notes can be your guide and start you on your journey. And you'll figure lots of things out for yourself. Just remember to leave notes for everyone else. Some things about our planet are pretty complicated, but things can be simple, too: you've just got to be kind."
Knausgaard's notes for living on Planet Earth. As the birth of his daughter approaches, Knausgaard continues his quartet recording what he manages to find valuable, beautiful, significant or particular in the world, or at least what he would like to find valuable, beautiful, significant or particular in the world, or least what he would like us to think he finds valuable, beautiful, significant or particular in the world. As always with Knausgaard, the profound and banal prove to be indistinguishable.
"A bit like reporting on a football match by watching the grass." - Guardian
A conversation with a talking cat starts a young man on a journey back to the Kosovo his mother fled before his birth, to confront the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family, and to find a chance to find love.
"A strange, haunting, and utterly original exploration of displacement and desire. A marvel, a remarkable achievement, and a world apart from anything you are likely to read this year." - Tea Obreht, The New York Times
"An elegant, allegorical portrait of lives lived at the margin, minorities within minorities in a new land. My Cat Yugoslavia is layered with meaning and shades of sorrow." - Kirkus
During 2000 years of exile, Jews have spread across the world, bringing their culinary traditions with them and adapting and adopting the cuisines of their host societies. This book travels from North Africa across Europe and into the Middle East and India, showing all the subtle variations and innovations of essentially Jewish dishes.
During the mid-nineteenth century at least 110 people were transported from New Zealand to serve time as convict labourers in the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).
Written in the period after the dissolution of Paris Dada but before the formalisation of Surrealism, this novel is caught between nihilistic incomprehensibility and savage lyricism. Featuring Desnos and most of other prime members of the Paris Dada movement the momentum of the narrative soon begins to act upon them like a particle accelerator, tearing them off into the impossible.
One of twentieth century art's outstanding modernist innovators, Lye's direct films, kinetic sculptures, photography, drawing, painting and poetry continue to reward new scholarship and discovery. The essays here consider Lye's importance from various perspectives and in international contexts.
>> Two steps ahead of the avant-garde.
If you have never wanted to make paper flowers you will want to after seeing this book.
>> These could be your hands.
When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, many wondered whether he even qualified for the award. Thomas makes the case for his inclusion in the literary canon.
Jane is sick of her dead-end life in the suburbs, and desperate for a change. Her old friend Natalie made it out, living in Japan as a fashion model. Now, as Natalie comes back to town on business, Jane sees a way for her friend to do her a favour - whether she likes it or not.
"Chris Gooch twists the knife in the gap between persona and self. Bottled is a slow burn of a comic where the betrayals and the dread cut deep." - Katie Skelly
Glenny investigates the roots of the bloodshed, invasions and nationalist fervour that have come to define our understanding of the south-eastern edge of Europe, and presents portraits of its kings, guerrillas, bandits, generals, and politicians. Glenny shows that groups we think of as implacable enemies have, over the centuries, formed unlikely alliances, thereby disputing the idea that conflict in the Balkans is the ineluctable product of ancient grudges. He explores the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the rest of Europe, raising some disturbing questions about Western intervention.
All of Sontag's short fiction collected for the first time. Her stories, vignettes, observations and allegories wrestle with similar concepts to her essays, but do so in ways that the essays could not reach.
The ones who keep quiet the longest are the dead, but there are echoes of them everywhere.
Driven my grand but always complicated motivations, Roosevelt harnessed public consensus to make the presidency the foremost institution in the United States of America.
The world is so full of a number of things that I'm sure we should all be terribly confused if there weren't books such as this one to give some sort of spatial pattern to our confusion. A beautiful, large-format hardback.
The stresses of yet another once-in-a-lifetime storm in Wellington and not helped by the demands put upon Tamil refugee Sita by her employer, but support comes from unexpected quarters when the usual structures of urban life and upended.
>> "A subversion of the classic quest narrative."
A graphic novel giving insight into one the tragedies of our time. Over 40,000 people have died since the start of the Syrian Arab Spring. In the wake of this, Yasmin has set up a clandestine hospital in the north of the country. The town that she lives in is controlled by Assad's regime, but is relatively stable. However, as the months pass, the situation becomes increasingly complex and violent.
Delightful.
Writing effectively is partly a matter of not making common mistakes and partly a matter of learning a few key skills.
The most extraordinary images of the Apollo and later missions, presented in this lavish large-format slip-cased volume. Who would have thought that such images could inspire such awe and wonder?
A sumptuously illustrated new gift edition with extra content.
"No wizarding household is complete without a copy." - Albus Dumbledore
To what extent has the vision and ego of one man shaped (or distorted?) popular culture over five decades?
Did Shakespeare's doctors addle his brain with mercury, leading to his early retirement? Was Jane Eyre inspired by the plagued school that claimed the Bronte clan? Did writing 1984 kill George Orwell?
>> Six famous writers injured when writing.
How do plants experience life on earth? How do they communicate? Is there any sense in which they are 'aware' or can be said to 'remember'? What is it like to be a plant?
Ice regulates the world's temperatures. It is vanishing, fast, faster than anyone predicted and the effects will make the the planet a very different place.
'Astonishing, beautiful, compelling and terrifying." - Observer
"Wadhams' writing sparkles. He has a lyrical sense of wonder at the natural world. This may be the best reader-friendly account of the greenhouse effect available." - John Burnside
>> Our time is running out.
While staying with her aunt at a fashionable spa, Else receives an unexpected telegram from her mother, begging her to save her father from debtor's jail. The only way out, it seems, is to approach an elderly acquaintance in order to borrow money from him. This stream-of-consciousness novella, written from the the point of view of a naively romantic young woman hilariously at odds with reality.
Alcohol has existed in all times and in all cultures but drunkenness and the way that is it viewed has varied tremendously across history and peoples.
An exhaustive archive of images and writings from the year the Sex Pistols detonated their load on the prevailing musical tastes.
>> "Am I not entitled to do what I want?"
>> 'Anarchy in the UK' (in Sweden).
List #3: BIOGRAPHY
2017 has produced a number of compelling books concerning the lives of people who warrant attention for one reason or another.
A man of deep ambivalences, contradictions and vulnerabilities, Edward Lear was unable to act on his deepest feelings but produced some of the oddest poetry of his time, as well as a body of art both serious and comic. Jenny Uglow, who could almost be said to specialise in biographies of odd characters who both exemplify and stand apart from their times, is Lear's perfect biographer, forensic yet sensitive to the most hidden corners of his psyche, his playfulness and his melancholy.
"Jenny Uglow has written a great life about an artist with half a life, a biography that might break your heart." - Robert McCrum, Guardian
A magical survey of 30 writers who are also women, giving insight into their verbal superpowers, biographies and principle works. Powerfully illustrated. Includes Janet Frame, 'Hermit of Hospitals, Belonging and Lost Souls'.
>> Peek at a few witches here.
One of the first Maori travellers to Europe, Tuai, a young Ngare Raumati chief from the Bay of Islands, took the opportunity in 1817 to visit England and elsewhere, observing Pakeha culture and technology in its own place. He returned in 1819, planning to integrate new European knowledge and relationships into his Ngare Raumati community, but the situation at home had changed in his absence.
"Simply by sailing in a new direction / You could enlarge the world." Curnow's 70-year career in the vanguard of New Zealand poetry involved the defining and redefining of poetic sensibilities, moving from an antipodean to an autochthonic focus.
Uniform with Curnow's Collected Poems (and available as a slipcased pair).
John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman, was born in 1881, and in 1917 he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. Julia Blackburn's account of his life is a quest which takes her in many strange directions - to fishermen's cottages in Sheringham, a grand hotel fallen on hard times in Great Yarmouth and to the isolated Watch House far out in the Blakeney estuary; to Cromer and the bizarre story of Einstein's stay there, guarded by dashing young women in jodhpurs with shotguns. Threads is a book about life and death and the strange country between the two.
"Oh, what a miraculous book this is: parochial, weird and inconclusive in a way that few books dare to be these days, and illustrated so generously, with something beautiful or interesting on every other page. Buy it, and let it take you out to sea, no sou'wester required." - Rachel Cooke, Observer
"Wonderful. I lay down her book without knowing the cause of the 'mental stupors' that defined Craske's life, or understanding his relationship to his complicated family, but feeling I had inhaled the cold salt of the East Anglian coastline from which he sailed when he was well, and run my fingers across the bright wool of the embroideries he made when he was not." - Telegraph
From the 1930s to the 1950s, forced migrants - refugees from Nazism, displaced people after World War II and escapees from Communist countries - arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them were extraordinary artists and writers, photographers, designers and architects whose European Modernism radically reshaped the arts in this country. How were migrants received by New Zealanders? How did displacement and settlement in New Zealand transform their work? How did the arrival of European Modernists intersect with the burgeoning nationalist movement in the arts in New Zealand? This book introduces us to a group of `aliens' who were critical catalysts for change in New Zealand culture. An outstanding piece of social and artistic history, beautifully illustrated.
What do you report when you become uncertain of the facts, of the notion of truth and of the purpose of writing? What can you understand of yourself when you are uncertain how or if your memories can be correlated with known 'facts'? Is your idea of yourself anything other than the sum of your memories? Lara Pawson was for some years a journalist for the BBC and other media during the civil wars in Angola, and on the Ivory Coast. In this book, her experiences of societies in trauma, and her idealism for making the 'truth' known, are fragmented (as memory is always fragmented) and mixed with memory fragments of her childhood and of her relationships with the various people she encountered before, during and after the period of heightened awareness provided by war. It is this intermeshing of shared and personal perspectives, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other, always crossing over and back over the rift that separates the individual and her world, that makes this book such a fascinating description of a life. By constantly looking outwards, Pawson has conjured a portrait of the person who looks outwards, and a remarkable depiction of the act of looking outwards. Every word contributes to this pointillist self-portrait, and the reader hangs therefore on every word.
Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father by Diana Wichtel $45
When Diana Wichtel moved to New Zealand as a child with her mother and siblings, her father, a Polish Jew who had jumped off the train to the Treblinka extermination camp in World War II and who had hidden from the Nazis for the rest of the war, failed to follow them as planned. In adulthood, Wichtel began to wonder what had become of him, both before and after his brief presence in her life. Her search for answers led towards the Warsaw ghetto and to consider the ongoing consequences of trauma. Very well written.
>> Wichtel talks to Kim Hill.
Death could come to us at any time, and in a range of guises. O'Farrell builds the memoir around the times in her life when death was nearer than at other times: childhood illness, teenage misadventure, mismanaged labour. Does the proximity of death make us act differently?
"O'Farrell is a breathtakingly good writer, and brings all her elegance and poise as a novelist to the story of her own life." - Guardian
Victoria's appetite for life was expressed in her appetite for food: the queen consistently over-ate all her life. Her appetites presided over a revolution in English cuisine.
"Had me at the first sentence." - Nigel Slater
"Zingy, fresh, and unexpected: Annie Gray, the queen of food historians, finds her perfect subject." - Lucy Worsley
>> Gray on the importance of dinner to the British Empire.
When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, many wondered whether he even qualified for the award. Thomas makes the case for his inclusion in the literary canon.
1922, the year that Modernism was born.
Scott is one of New Zealand's favourite and longest-serving political cartoonists, columnists and satirists. Find out about the many unsuspected facets of his life.
Exhaustive and magisterial, this biography benefits from its author's first-hand knowledge and from his access to Hillary's personal papers. It reveals dimensions of Hillary's life not hitherto examined.
Nature writing from a professional tree-climber whose work has taken him into the upper strata of forests around the world. Beautifully written.
What happens when angry young rebels become wary older women, ageing in a leaner, meaner time: a time which exalts only the 'new', in a ruling orthodoxy daily disparaging all it portrays as the 'old'? Delving into her own life and those of others who left their mark on it, Segal tracks through time to consider her generation of female dreamers, what formed them, how they left their mark on the world, where they are now in times when pessimism seems never far from what remains of public life.
Excellent and amusing graphic biographies.
A photographer and independent woman in the London bohemian circles in the 1930s, Joan Eyres Monsell met Patrick Leigh Fermor when she was on assignment in Egypt during the Second World War. At last we have a biography of this interesting free-thinking woman, whose photographic work supported Patrick in his writing.
"Engrossing." - Guardian
"The connection between a colony and its founder, centre and margin, is always paradoxical. Where once Britain sent colonists out into the world, now the descendants of those colonists return to interrogate the centre." This book rediscovers four men, born in New Zealand, who achieved fame in Europe as they were forgotten at home: Harold Williams, journalist, linguist, Foreign Editor of The Times; Ronald Syme, spy, libertarian, historian of ancient Rome; John Platt-Mills, radical lawyer and political activist; and Joseph Burney Trapp, librarian, scholar and protector of culture. Edmond, as always, writes thoughtfully and with insight.
It was a family that fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Mazower's British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way in Soviet society. How did the confluence of these histories form the person Mark Mazower is?
In 1962, as a young zoologist, Sutherland lived for 3 months alone in Shackleton's hut in Antarctica's McMurdo Sound, alone, that is, apart from visitors (up to 40 a day) who came to see him living alone in the famous explorer's hut. One of the visitors, Graham Billing, wrote a novel, Foxbrush and the Penguins, based on Sutherland, and this was subsequently made into a film starring John Hurt as Sutherland. Sutherland's own account of his stay is now available for the first time.
200 Women by Geoff Blackwell $75
What really matters to you? What would you change in the world if you could? What brings you happiness? What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? What single word do you most identify with? Two hundred women from around the world, both famous and nonfamous, answer these same five questions. What would your answers be? This monumental book includes photographic portraits of all 200 interviewees.
How Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women's transitions from someone else's muse to mature artists in their own right. Includes Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe, Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose, Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo and Jacqueline Lamba.
In 1954, a young television presenter was offered the opportunity to travel the world finding rare and elusive animals for London Zoo's collection, and to film the expeditions for the BBC. His name was David Attenborough, and the programme, Zoo Quest, not only heralded the start of a remarkable career in broadcasting, but changed the way we viewed the natural world forever.
Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. >> Read Thomas's review.
"Reinhard Kleist, master graphic novelist and myth-maker has - yet again - blown apart the conventions of the graphic novel by concocting a terrifying conflation of Cave songs, biographical half-truths and complete fabulations and creating a complex, chilling and completely bizarre journey into Cave World. Closer to the truth than any biography, that's for sure! But for the record, I never killed Elisa Day." - Nick Cave
>> Live Mercy.
List #2: POLITICS
Just a few of the interesting books at VOLUME on political issues.
Come and browse our full selection.
Feminism if for everyone. Solnit continues the sharp and important wok she began in Men Explain Things to Me with this collection of commentary essays on feminism, misogyny, gendered binaries, masculine literary insecurity and related topics.
"No writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hop in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance." - Maria Popova
Incisive comment on social, political and environmental issues facing New Zealand from a swathe of leading writers and thinkers. Click through to find out more. Intelligent stocking-fillers.
Essays towards a better national conversation, including: Morgan Godfery on identity • Jess Berentson-Shaw on social investment • Andrew Judd on racism • Carys Goodwin on climate change • Conor Clarke on dirt • David Cohen on Popper, Plato, Hegel and Marx • Emma Espiner on a tikanga Māori world • Gilbert Wong on growing up Chinese • Giselle Byrnes on why universities matter • Jo Randerson on dying • Māmari Stephens on our threatened marae • Victor Rodger on being actually brown • Maria Majsa on Johnny Rotten • Max Harris on dreams • Mike Joy and Kyleisha Foote on dams • Raf Manji on a new progressive agenda • Sarah Laing on menstruation • Sylvia Nissen on youth and politics • Teena Brown Pulu on three Tongan funerals • Tim Watkin on explaining Trump • Simon Wilson on a radical centre.
The neoliberal experiment has brought society and the environment to the brink of disaster (and for many, over the brink). But humans are characterised not as much by competitive individualism as by altruism and co-operation. How can these be built into a politics that addresses the crises the world currently faces?
The precariat is a class-in-the-making. The precariat are our fellow citizens (if they are not us) for whom poverty, age, disability, homelessness, estrangement, mental or physical illness or estrangement from communities and cultures have resulted in uncertainty, dependency, powerlessness, perilousness and insufficiency. The precariat is very much an outcome of the dismantling of the welfare state and the violation of unwritten social contracts by the privileged.
We face unprecedented challenges - climate change, rising inequality, economic uncertainties, a rapidly changing concept of ‘work', to mention just a few. The New Zealand Project is a serious, intelligent and thoughtful vision that challenges our preconceptions, tackles the tough questions, and gives us a framework on which to think about New Zealand’s political future and how changes in political concepts are vital to creating a better society for all. Max Harris wants a discussion - he wants people to ask questions and debate concepts. This is a book that should be read, absorbed and discussed.
"Trump, as extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion - a pastiche of pretty much all the worst and most dangerous trends of the past half century. A one-man megabrand, with wife and children as spin-off brands." Klein sees Donald Trump's presidency as the conclusion of the long corporate takeover of politics, using deliberate shock tactics to generate wave after wave of crises and force through radical policies that will destroy people, the environment, the economy and national security. This book provides a toolkit for resistance, starting with clarity of perception.
"I count Naomi Klein among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today." -Arundhati Roy
"Naomi Klein as a writer is an accusing angel." - John Berger
The Best We Could Do explores the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child. Thi Bui documents her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s and the diffiulties they faced building new lives for themselves in America.
A Moral Truth: 150 years of investigative journalism in New Zealandedited by James Hollings $45
Spanning the wars in the Waikato to the present day, and including pieces from Robyn Hyde and Pat Booth to Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle, Mike White, Jon Stephenson, Nicky Hager and Phil Kitchin, the pieces in this anthology are fresh whatever their age, and remind us of the importance of the contribution made by journalists to public knowledge and discourse.
"Guy Standing has been at the forefront of the movement for nearly 4 decades, and in this superb and thorough survey he explains how it works and why it has the potential to revitalise life and democracy in our societies. This is an essential book." - Brian Eno
>> Protecting the precariat.
Why are the institutions of representative democracy seemingly unable to sustain themselves against forces they were designed to manage, and why does it matter?
Human Rights, equality, free speech, privacy, the rule of law: these dearly held principles of civilised society are under threat globally - from forces within government and without.
"Now more than ever, the world needs a book like Draw Your Weapons. With mastery, urgency and great courage, Sarah Sentilles investigates the histories of art, violence, war and human survival. In her haunting and absorbing narrative, the act of storytelling itself becomes a matter of life and death." -- Ruth Ozeki
"A beautiful, harrowing, and moving collage that portrays the making of art as a powerful response to making war." - Alice Elliott Dark
What is money and why does debt exist? Where do wealth and inequality come from? How come economics has the power to shape and destroy our lives? An excellent primer, using stories to explain and question the drivers of society.
""The reason Varoufakis seems to have captured the imaginations of so many is that his words about the European crisis speak universal truths about democracy, capitalism and social policy." - Guardian
A graphic novel giving insight into one the tragedies of out time. Over 40,000 people have died since the start of the Syrian Arab Spring. In the wake of this, Yasmin has set up a clandestine hospital in the north of the country. The town that she lives in is controlled by Assad's regime, but is relatively stable. However, as the months pass, the situation becomes increasingly complex and violent.
How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media?
"Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely. Throws light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up to transform the world we thought we knew." - John Banville
New Zealand needs a constitution that is easy to understand, reflects our shared identity and nationhood, protects rights and liberties, and prevents governments from abusing power.
Gessen follows the lives of four Russians born in the last days of the Soviet Union and considers how their prospects have dwindled as the country has descended into what is effectively a Mafia state.
Traces the history of movements to counteract far-right, authoritarian and white supremacist movements from their roots in 1920s Europe to the grass-roots response to the fascist populism of Trump-era USA. The book also is a guide to recognizing and counteracting reactionary and racist invective and behaviour wherever it is found.
26 writers (including Colum McCann, Rachel Kushner, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien and Eimear McBride) from 14 countries bear witness to the human cost of the 50-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
"Moving, heartbreaking, and infuriating, testifying to the chilling cruelty of Israel's policy toward Palestinians. Deeply unsettling and important." - Kirkus
>> Trailer.
With the internet providing instant audience for any statement, how are we preserve our freedoms and also progress to a more humane and inclusive mode of discourse?
"Garton Ash's larger project is not merely to defend freedom of expression, but to promote civil, dispassionate discourse, within and across cultures, even about the most divisive and emotive subjects." - Guardian
Everything you've ever suspected is backed up by an expert, but what is the mental health status of the nation that elected him?
In the decade since Yunus first began to articulate his ideas for a new model of economics, thousands of companies, nonprofits, and individual entrepreneurs around the world have embraced them. From Albania to Colombia, India to Germany, newly created businesses and enterprises are committed to reducing poverty, improving health care and education, cleaning up pollution, and serving other urgent human needs in ingenious, innovative ways. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in alleviating poverty.
An incomparable account from The Guaridan's refugee correspondent, who travelled to 17 countries and interviewed hundreds of refugees.
"A must-read for our times." - Yannis Varoufakis
The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a year acting dangerously by Slavoj Žižek $30
Do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of human nature, or does today's capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its infinite reproduction? Can we move beyond the perceived failure of socialism, and beyond the current wave of populist rage, and initiate radical change before the train hits?
A useful guide to the malleability of truth and the control of public opinion.