BOOKS @ VOLUME #54 (16.12.17).
Find out what we've been reading and recommending.
Use the VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR and keep abreast of the latest new releases.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #54 (16.12.17).
Find out what we've been reading and recommending.
Use the VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR and keep abreast of the latest new releases.
Our Book of the Week this week is an outstanding piece of New Zealand social and artistic history, beautifully illustrated: Strangers arrive: Émigrés and the arts in New Zealand, 1930-1980 by Leonard Bell (published by Auckland University Press). 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.
>> Was this a lonely exile? (Sally Blundel in the NZ Listener)
>> Some sample pages.
>> Click and collect from VOLUME.
“New Zealand is neither a country nor a culture, it’s a branch of the Salvation Army.” - Theo Schoon
December hours: Sunday 17th: 10 - 2; Monday - Wednesday: 9 - 5; Thursday - Friday: 9 - 7; Saturday 23rd: 8:30 - 5. Sunday 24th: 9 - 5. 25th/26th: closed. 27th: normal hours resume.
 {Review by STELLA} | The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a classic that is having a revival since the very successful TV series. When a very handsome volume arrived in the bookshop (red edged hardback with a stunning black cover) it seemed like a good time to re-read this novel. (In fact, I realised on beginning to read that I knew the story but hadn’t read the book). Offred is living in the era of Gilead. She has a choice: breed or be sent to the colonies to die slowly from toxic poisoning or overwork and starvation. As a fertile woman, she is in demand and can be a handmaid - a special class of woman (both cherished and despised) whose role it is to provide their commanders and their wives with offspring. Offred’s memoir takes us into a bizarre world where women’s rights have been obliterated and arcane rules keep everyone in line, where as a woman you are either a wife, a martha (servant) or a handmaid, unless you are outcast or a jezebel. As Offred attempts to navigate her life without her husband or child (who has been taken from her) she finds herself increasingly mystified by the behaviour of those around her, particularly her commander, who behaves in unorthodox ways. Meetings and sexual contact are tightly controlled and ritualistic, so the Commander’s insistence that she meet him in his library puts her in great danger. The longer she stays in the household, the more tenuous her links to the past. Is there an escape from this situation in which she is obliterated as a person? Can she trust her fellow handmaiden Ofglen, or Nick the chauffeur? And what is Mayday? Atwood explores ideas of patriarchy, power and control over reproduction in this tautly told tale. If you’ve read this already or seen the TV series, you should read excellentThe Power by Naomi Alderman, and for younger teen readers, Maresi is worth investigating. And if you're looking for more Atwood, there’s a stunning new edition of Alias Grace. |
 | Insane by Rainald Goetz {Reviewed by THOMAS} "What do I have to think to really understand what I feel when I see what happens?" asks Rainald Goetz. Insane, first published in German in 1983 and only now appearing in English, in a translation by Adrian Nathan West published by the remarkable Fitzcarraldo Editions, interrogates the validity of the distinctions society makes between sanity and insanity, between the acceptable and the unacceptable, between what we call order and the rest of what we call chaos. If it is not the case that there is no such thing as insanity, as had been proposed by the antipsychiatry movement, it would be more reasonable to assert that there is no such thing as sanity, that in reality there is nothing but insanity, that distinctions between sanity and insanity are non-actual, an artifice wrought by the powerful privileging and ring-fencing a portion of the territory and calling it sanity, despite the irony. The border between one thing and its opposite, when laid across a continuous field, falls in the greyest area between the two, the zone of least distinction, and therefore these borders are constantly and often brutally defended. The more brutally and the more desperately they are defended the more they seem to exist, and the border is dotted with institutions which, by helping those who are held over the border, even though such distinctions are matters of scale rather than of kind, give validity to and guard that border. An institution dictates the currency of exchange within it and between it and its hinterland (or, rather, the currency of exchange dictates the institution and its relations with its hinterland), but the criteria of preference within that institution, however, are marked equally and completely upon all members of that institution, who are to some extent, because of this, interchangeable. Distinctions of scale are the most mutable distinctions. The first of the three sections that comprise Goetz’s novel contains a multitude of unattributed voices expressing metal states that would generally be classified as insane (or in any case dysfuntional) if classification were to be made, and notably in this section it is not, interspersed with others seemingly from doctors attached to a psychiatric hospital, one of the last in Germany in which electroconvulsive therapy is still practised, lecturers and theorists addressing madness and psychiatry. The classification regimes of psychiatry (“countless diagnoses but only five drugs”) are destabalised, the writing clinically precise but without presumptive diagnoses, Goetz dealing only particulars without generalities or labels, providing a sort of anti-DSMguide to psychological dysfunction. The second section follows the path to disillusionment of a young doctor, Raspe, who learns, with increasing despair, that he is in fact incapable of helping the patients. “You must constantly stifle the burning sorrow of your helplessness. Habit grows alongside weakness in the doctor and becomes his crutch. A man erased did the work of a doctor.” The third part applies the nondiagnostic approach beyond the institution to the narrator himself (though to call him Raspe or even the narrator by this stage is problematic). “After years of differentiation I had only just learned non-differentiation,” he says. Without the institution, without diagnoses, without the prescription of medication, without the divided roles of doctor and patient, the illusion of the sane society is dissolved. And without these in this novel there can be no first person, only a mutable third person, each individual observing themselves from without in the same way they observe other persons, like persons observed in a film, unable to make adequate distinction between themselves and other persons. The pace now becomes (even more) manic, the tone pugnacious and mocking, that of a frustrated joke approaching a punchline it will never attain. The introduction in this section of the ‘Rainald’ character, appearing either as the author himself or as a character narrated by Raspe, undercuts all we had previously presumed about Raspe and destabilises the momentum, so to call it, call it vibratory energy rather, of the later part of the novel. Raspe/Goetz left psychiatric medicine when he realised that his interests were inquisitive rather than therapeutic (that he was more a writer than a doctor). “Rainald no longer believed he was capable of helping the patients. They were interesting, though. Through them, he was trying to understand how we must learn to talk about ourselves again, without psychiatry.”
>> A trailer for the 2017 film Irre (Insane).
>> Goetz cuts his head open for the 1983 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (a sort of Germany's Got Talent). |
NEW RELEASES
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.
Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artefact itself’.
New Zealand is a nation that exists on Pacific Islands, but does not, will not, perhaps cannot, see itself as a Pacific Island nation. Yet turning to the Pacific, argues Damon Salesa, enables us to grasp a fuller understanding of what life is really like on these shores. What would it mean, this far-sighted book asks, for New Zealand to recognise its Pacific talent and finally act like a Pacific nation?
What do you do if you're tired of being a fairy? Can you be a witch? Can you be both a fairy and a witch?
A remarkable piece of scholarship, unearthing the long-overlooked lives of free Africans in Renaissance England.
What modes of writing have been deemed more appropriate than others at particular times, and why? Why have some narratives been interpreted as realist when there are significant aspects of them that relate to other genres, such as romance, science fiction and Gothic? What meanings are generated by the meeting points in a text, where one mode meets another?
When the Tiger, against the advice of his mate, sets out to overthrow the current political order for the wrong reasons, things can hardly go well.
Raven, Crayfish and Horse have always been best friends. They're grown up now and would like to start a family. They want all their families to live together and start planning to build a house. But what should that house look like? Will they find a solution that works for all of them?
When a doll comes to life in a toy shop in Krakow in 1939, she must not only heal the dollmaker's heart but together they must use their magic to save Jewish children from the fate intended for them by the Nazis.
"It is not even the American dream they pursue, but rather a more modest aspiration: to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born." An impassioned and revelatory account of the experiences of children who have entered the United States illegally from Mexico and Latin America. The book concentrates on both the hardships of the originating country and the harsh reception they receive in the US.
"The first must-read book of the Trump era." - Texas Observer
"With anger and lucidity, Luiselli depicts the nightmares these children are forced to flee in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, as well as the destructive ignorance and bigotry that awaits them in America." - Chicago Tribune
An autobiographical graphic novel describing Thompson's emergence from a childhood of abuse, social isolation and evangelical Christianity through first love and into adulthood.
"A superb example of the art of cartooning: the blending of word and picture to achieve an effect that neither is capable of without the other." - Bloomsbury Review
"Thompson manages to explore adolescent social yearnings, the power of young love and the complexities of sexual attraction with a rare combination of sincerity, pictorial lyricism and taste". - Publishers' Weekly
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
When Margaret Forster was 15 she did not know she would end up writing such best-selling books as Georgy Girl and Diary of an Ordinary Woman, but she did write her own diary, brimming with detail and lively expression.
The aliens have arrived. And they're hungry for electricity. In the Earth of the future, humans are on the run from an alien force - giant blobs who suck up electrical devices wherever they can find them. Strata and her family are part of a caravan of digital rescuers, hoping to keep the memory of civilisation alive by saving electronics wherever they can. Many humans have reverted to a pre-electrical age, and others have taken advantage of the invasion to become dangerous bandits and outlaws. When Strata and her brother are separated from the caravan, they must rely on a particularly beautiful and rare robot pony to escape the outlaws and aliens - and defeat the invaders. A notable graphic novel for children.
A full exploration of the wide range of Emin's work, all assailing the division of private and public lives. Moving chronologically through a prolific decade of work from major public installations to recent reflective paintings and sculptures this book shows a coherent vision that defies the idiosyncrasies of Emin s evolution as an artist. The same mixture of anger, hope, curiosity, and vulnerability that informs her delicate drawings and handwritten neon works can be felt in the darker tones of recent monoprints and the weight of later bronze pieces.
Germany, in the final years of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau is a sound engineer obsessed with recording the human voice in all its variations-the rantings of leaders, the roar of crowds, the rasp of throats constricted in fear-and indifferent to everything else. Employed by the Nazis, his assignments take him to party rallies, to the eastern front, and into the household of Joseph Goebbels. There he meets Helga, the eldest daughter - bright, good-natured, and just beginning to suspect the horror that surrounds her. An outstanding graphic novel.
In Douglas Lilburn's famous address to the 1946 Cambridge Summer School of Music, the composer described his `search for tradition' in the music of New Zealand and spelled out his hopes that a distinctive art music might yet emerge here. Sixty years on, this collection of scholarly essays brings together various perspectives on what `tradition' means in the context of the music of Aotearoa New Zealand. Searches for Tradition presents case studies drawn from a broad spectrum of genres, cultures and historical periods, from investigations of New Zealand's colonial music to fresh consideration of Lilburn's legacy, from corners of the jazz scene to the contemporary revitalization of taonga puoro. The focus on `tradition' leads in some instances to critical issues of nationalism and biculturalism, while others uncover little-discussed aspects of local music history, performance practice or composition. It will be stimulating reading for all enthusiasts of New Zealand music's past, present and future.
Excellence and innovation applied to seasonal ingredients results in a magical array of dishes appropriate for a restaurant named after a coven of witches.
>> Visit Akalare.
Overwhelming.
A young orphan boy grows up in Naples, playing football, roaming the city's streets and hidden places. The older boys call him 'monkey' because he can climb anywhere. He is alone, apart from Don Gaetano, the apartment caretaker, who feeds him, teaches him to play scopa, and tells him stories about the dark secrets of Naples' past.
Blueprints and technical drawings from the patents office record a world obsessed with innovation.
A novel tracing the experiences of three generations of an Irish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York.
"McDermott's highly crafted writing - her poised sentences, finely wrought imagery, intricate structuring and emotionally laden detail - is not just clever, but poignant." - Sunday Times
Exciting new authors of stories, poems and novel extracts, from Cloud Ink Press.
The mental lives of fish are surprisingly complex and rich.
The French Revolution is widely celebrated as the birth of modern political society, so how should we read this justification of political violence by one of its chief architects? Slavoj Zizek gives a few pointers.
A rethinking of our concept of time would throw all our other problems into a different light. Burdick examines why we think of time as we do, and how this shapes our experience of everything else.
"In his lucid, thoughtful, and beautifully written inquiry about time Burdick offers nothing less than a new way of reconsidering what it means to be human." - Hanya Yanagihara
At the heart of French gastronomy are the recipes that have been passed down through the generations. At each generation, however, and in each region, these recipes have been rethought, re-evaluated and rewritten, still bearing the je-ne-sais-quoi that underscores their authenticity,
The cat has herpes, the kids have worms, the chicken has mites, and Bryce has an assortment of ailments beyond his digestive tract, including a spasming eye, aching knees, haemorrhoids, stiff neck, tinnitus, fleas, and, possibly, dementia. Luckily his wife is there to keep Bryce on his toes and burst his art-martyr bubble.
>> Being a comic book antihero is an ongoing burden.
List #10: VISUAL CULTURE
A selection of books on art, architecture, photography and design.
Come in or click through to browse our full selection, or ask us for our recommendations for your specific needs.
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.
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).
The Ukraine was once bristling with statues of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Political changes have left these toppled, broken, vandalised and stored in sheds and back rooms. Ackerman and Gobert have set about recording these statues, and the residual attitudes towards them amongst the Ukrainians.
A generous and varied survey. Some of these works you may have seen before, but many will come as a complete surprise.
Artworks selected from the Christchurch Art Gallery selected for their exemplary treatment of hair. Fun.
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.
The most comprehensive book on architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), looking in detail at all the houses, furniture, and public buildings he designed In Europe and the United States–from his beginning at the Bauhaus through his collaboration with Walter Gropius, and the establishment of his own practice in the USA.
With influences ranging from illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures, naive artists, European art history and popular culture, this Dunedin artist's distinctive work teems with figures and throngs with disconcerting detail.
>> Visit the artist's website.
A retrospective survey of the projects of this photographer in the form of 110 postcards, one for each of her experiments in the ambivalences of photography and memory.
In Known and Strange Things we learned of Cole's interest in the practices of photography, and in Blind Spot we can see what he sees from behind his camera. The results are impressive, and will add another dimension to your understanding of this interesting author.
Before Eggars was a writer he was an illustrator. In this book he presents a series of animals, both wild and domestic, with plaintive or pseudo-Biblical texts. Odd and rather touching.
A full exploration of the wide range of Emin's work, all assailing the division of private and public lives. Moving chronologically through a prolific decade of work from major public installations to recent reflective paintings and sculptures this book shows a coherent vision that defies the idiosyncrasies of Emin s evolution as an artist. The same mixture of anger, hope, curiosity, and vulnerability that informs her delicate drawings and handwritten neon works can be felt in the darker tones of recent monoprints and the weight of later bronze pieces.
The best full survey of the architecture, furniture, lighting, glass, ceramics, metalwork, woodenware, plastics, textiles, jewelry, and graphic design that has had such an impact on the world since the 1920s.
Studio kO by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty $150
An exquisitely produced volume surveying the raw minimalism and clean lines of the architecture of Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty.
>> The kO website (recommended).
An exquisitely produced volume surveying the raw minimalism and clean lines of the architecture of Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty.
>> The kO website (recommended).
For the first time, every Dior haute couture collection has been plucked from the catwalk and put into one book. Endlessly stimulating.
>> Lost in the woods.
A good survey of his work, well illustrated, with a thoughtful alphabetical exploration of themes and influences.
"Journeys between the decades to liberate Modernism from its traditional definitions and proposes its continuing presence in the work of 21st century architects. With elegant spreads and striking examples, this is an intriguing manifesto. Quotes from figures as diverse as Leonard Cohen and Kazimir Malevich reframe Modernism as a timeless dialogue." -Aesthetica
Is there a mainline from the fingers to the brain? The pencil is undergoing a resurgence in designer, artist and writer circles. This book is a collection of portraits of the very various pencils used by creative people.
Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself’.
>> See some of the photographs on the Dowse website.
Lavishly illustrated across the full six decades of Hockney's career, and across the full spectrum of media.
>> How do you paint memorable pictures?
A stupendous encyclopedia of typographical evolution and innovation, including not only typefaces but also layout, ornament and aesthetic. Full of information and inspiration.
On Kawara: 1966 $90
1966 was a pivotal year in the career of one of contemporary art's most radical and rigorous practitioners: it was the year in which the Japanese artist began his series of date paintings, which depict nothing but the date upon which they were painted (the 'Today' series numbered over 3000 on Kawara's death in 2013).
>> 'Today' discussed.
The outstanding graphic designer, best known for his book covers.
>> Portfolio.
A speculative architectural fiction and theoretical analysis of the American single-family house and its native habitat, the suburban metropolis. Mass-marketed and endlessly multiplied, and the definitive symbol of success in America and around the world, the suburban house has also become a global economic calamity and an impending environmental catastrophe. Yet, as both object and idea, it remains largely unexamined from an architectural perspective. This new book fills this gap through projects and essays that reflect upon, critique, and reformulate the equation that binds the house as an object to the American dream as a concept.
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.
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).
Pissing Figures, 1280-2014 by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn $20
An incisive illustrated essay on urinating figures in figurative and sculptural art.
>> No urinating in the streets of Belgium.
Stunning, as you would expect. Leibovitz's sure and incisive eye captures layers of subtlety beneath each exquisite surface. Sumptuous, large-format production.
Clothing has caused illness, injury, madness and death ever since it was adopted, but in some eras more than others. This well-illustrated volume explores the hazards, both of substance and of design and ponders the social forces that have exposed humans to intimate hazards, both known and unknown.
One of the most important of the early Expressionists, Paula Moderson Becker is most remembered for her searching, sensitive self-portraits.
A compilation of Soviet counter-alcohol propaganda posters and graphic design. How does the vilification of alcohol differ from society to society?
>> Back in the USSR.
Since Michael Illingworth assumed the first fellowship in 1966, Otago University has hosted a sequence of outstanding New Zealand artists. This book surveys, therefore, the changing flavour of New Zealand art in the last half century, and is supported with reproductions, commentaries and interviews.
A beautifully presented survey of all the artworks mentioned in In Search of Lost Time, with quotes and contextual notes.
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.
200 objects from Scandinavia and Finland that exemplify those countries' contribution to modern design.
An examination of the video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected], prepared to accompany its presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale. Comprising seven essays, a conversational exchange, and insights into the career of Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu), the book provides an account of the sources that influenced the artist and how the Venice exhibition might be understood within the context of transnational indigenous art making.
>>A glimpse of the work.
Features 30 cutting-edge women photographers from around the world.
>>fire-cracker.org/
Full of inventive ideas and creative solutions to practical problems. Includes houseboats, huts, and tricked-out caravans, alongside disaster shelters, wearable structures, and futuristic prototypes.
500 images, 32 varied and outstanding contemporary artists whose practice includes making books. Impressive, and full of interesting ideas.
>> Sample pages on our website!
An excellent and enticing survey of a period of great fertility and change in dustwrapper design, which started off as a way to protect bindings but soon became the arena in which the book's design first and most effectively attracts the eye of readers and buyers.
As well as providing an excellent survey of the artist's distinctive work, Schroder helps the reader to decipher the allegorical nature of many of them and to appreciate the passions and ambivalences that drove the artist.
If "all art is theft" (Picasso), what can we make of art that deliberately appropriates, subsumes, samples or reconfigures other art? Interesting.
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.
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?
If only.
You will like these.
List #9: CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULTS' 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.
A lovely, sensitive picture book about a child's friendship with a very old dog.
When a mouse is swallowed by a wolf, a duck already resident in the wolf's belly shows it what a good life can be lived there. How can they defend their home against a hunter?
It's not easy being a tough guy. Sometimes things just don't work out. Sometimes tough guys can be frustrated and disappointed. But it's OK to show your feelings, even for tough guys.
Everyone wants something different for breakfast, but what will Malcolm give them? A lovely story.
When Virginia wakes up feeling wolfish and starts making noises that frighten the visitors, will her sister be able to charm her back to humanity by painting her a garden called Bloomsberry?
What do you do if you're tired of being a fairy? Can you be a witch? Can you be both a fairy and a witch?
A wolf who has never seen a rabbit and a rabbit who has never seen a wolf become the best of friends. What happens when they play at scaring each other?
>> And here they are!
A beautifully illustrated invocation of the wonders to be found outside on a rainy day.
Hortense is irritated by the antics of her shadow, but its ability to take on new forms can be useful when you are threatened by bandits.
A very surreal picture book written and illustrated by the Surrealist writer and artist for her own children. Meet John, who has wings for ears, Humbert the Beautiful, an insufferable kid who befriends a crocodile and grows more insufferable yet, and the awesome Janzamajoria.
Detective Gordon is on holiday, and Buffy is the sole detective at the small police station in the forest. It is not easy for a police officer to be alone. Especially when there are strange noises outside the station at night. The third in this delightful series.
At last, an encyclopedia of the world of the Moomins and all the other creatures who live alongside them.
Pax was only a kit when his family was killed and he was rescued by 'his boy', Peter. Now the country is at war and when his father enlists, Peter has no choice but to move in with his grandfather. Far worse than leaving home is the fact that he has to leave Pax behind. But before Peter spends even one night under his grandfather's roof he sneaks out into the night, determined to find his beloved friend.
Illustrations by John Klassen.
When 10-year-old Siri's younger sister is captured by the Captain Whitehead's Ice Sea Pirates, she must face wolves, frozen landscapes and treacherous sailors and mermaids as she journeys through the north to rescue her. Completely involving.
In Miss Carbunkle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, the groundlings (part animal and part human) toil in classroom and factory, forbidden to enjoy anything regular children have, most particularly singing and music. For the Wonderling, a one-eared, fox-like eleven-year-old with only a number rather than a proper name - a 13 etched on a medallion around his neck - it is the only home he has ever known. A bird groundling named Trinket gives the Home's loneliest inhabitant two incredible gifts: a real name and a best friend. The pair escape over the wall and embark on an adventure that will take them out into the wider world and ultimately down the path of Arthur's true destiny.
>> Read Stella's review.
"Every now and then there is published a book that raises the bar in Children and Young adult literature. This is such a book." - Bob Docherty
>> Visit the Wonderling website.
Archer B. Helmsley wants an adventure. No, he needs an adventure. His grandparents were famous explorers (until they got stuck on an iceberg). Now Archer's mother barely lets him out of the house. As if that would stop a true Helmsley. Archer enlists Adelaide—the girl who, according to rumor, lost her leg to a crocodile—and Oliver—the boy next door—to help him rescue his grandparents. Quite delightful, and with illustrations by the author.
Also available: #2 The Doldrums and the Helmsley Curse.
In 1941 Emmaline is evacuated from London to Briar Hill hospital in Shropshire. There she discovers a hopeful deep secret: there are winged horses that live in a world through the hospital mirrors.
"A remarkable book." - Michael Morpurgo
The same situation can have quite different interpretations, depending on your perspective. Read in one direction, this piece of graphic invention is a dismal when read in one direction, but full of hope when read in the other. A change of perspective (or reading direction) is all you need to turn your life around.
Morrigan Crow is cursed. Born on an unlucky day, she is blamed for all local misfortunes, from hailstorms to heart attacks - and, worst of all, the curse means that Morrigan is doomed to die at midnight on Eventide. But as Morrigan awaits her fate, a strange and remarkable man named Jupiter North appears. Chased by black-smoke hounds and shadowy hunters on horseback, he whisks her away into the safety of a secret, magical city called Nevermoor.
"Plenty of tricks, tumbles, twists and trials. Captivating, magical, daring and very good." - Stella (read her review)
Everything that was ever good about the children's annuals of the past is good about the annuals of the present compiled by Kate De Goldi and Susan Price to include the best New Zealand writing and illustration for children. Last year's Annual was hugely popular, and this year's will be, too.
A sumptuously illustrated new gift edition with extra content.
"No wizarding household is complete without a copy." - Albus Dumbledore
A thoughtful, fast-paced adventure with a wonderful heroine. The novel opens with Fliss observing some soldiers and their cannon. Never able to break through the invisible wall, they have become increasingly frustrated with their inability to colonise the other side. As mayhem breaks loose, a drummer boy runs from the soldiers only to find himself stuck between the wall and the barrel of a gun. Fliss, for reasons unknown to her, is able to pull the drummer boy through the wall. Can they journey together to rescue the Nightingale (whatever that is)? The great story-line and compelling characters, brave and stubborn, and their interactions with friends and foes will keep you entranced and leave you wanting more.
Sally Jones is not only a loyal friend, she's an extraordinary individual. In overalls or in a maharaja's turban, this unique gorilla moves among humans without speaking but understanding everything. She and the Chief are devoted comrades who operate a cargo boat. A job they are offered pays big bucks, but the deal ends badly, and the Chief is falsely convicted of murder. For Sally Jones this is the start of a harrowing quest for survival and to clear the Chief's name.
"I don't know when I last read a book with such pure and unalloyed pleasure. It's ingenious, it's moving, it's charming, it's beautiful, it's exciting, and most importantly the characters are people I feel I know like old friends." - Philip Pullman
If only real life could be like as magical as the stars in the night sky, as escapist as the stories of the Greek gods he tells his little brother to help him sleep at night, or as logical as a mathematical equation. Tuttle (Duncan) would rather look at stars, visit the Carter Observatory and play computer games with his mate, Attila the Pun, but life has other, more urgent things in train for our nerdy teen. Tuttle’s Dad, a once famous, now infamous, mountain climber has been missing, presumed dead in a storm on Mt. Everest, accused of leaving his paying customer to die on the mountain. Tuttle is determined to find out the truth, but more pressing still are his mother’s fall into depression, his younger brother’s anxiety, and how to make sure the family are fed, get to school on time and avoid all the hassles of the social worker and the persistent journalist.
>> Read Stella's review.
The final knuckle-whitening volume in this excellent series. Will Lucy, George and Lockwood solve the mystery of the plague of ghosts that has been afflicting London? Genuinely scary, genuinely funny, and with great characters, if you haven't read this, start with The Screaming Staircase.
"Jonathan Stroud is a genius." - Rick Riordan
The much anticipated first novel of a wonderful new series from the world of 'His Dark Materials', set ten years before Northern Lights and telling of the strange events surrounding Lyra Belacqua.
>> Also available in hardback.
>> "A Triumph." - Read Stella's review.
In a story drawn from Arthurian lore, Yvain kills a lord in battle and finds his fate entwined with that of the slain man's widow and that of her maid. Luminously drawn, this graphic novel is both an exploration of knightly virtues and of the lives of medieval women.
"A thoughtful, entertaining, and provocative presentation of this centuries-old story." - Booklist
A deliciously written and possibly brain-renovating series following the fortunes of Clod Iremonger, scion of the family that rules over the great waste-heap of London, and Lucy, an irrepressible servant, who must withstand both tradition and novelty, secure their birth-objects, retain or reattain human form and somehow achieve freedom and love despite the forces that beset them on all sides. Brimming with ideas, great characters and genuine jaw-dropping moments.
Ella is fascinated by the old house she sees from the window of her new room. "Keep Out" say the signs, but, after she sees a girl in the house's garden, Ella just has to go in. What does she find out about the house and its secrets? Will she ever be able to get back out? A chilling graphic novel.
When a creature dies, its spirit can go looking for somewhere to hide. Some people have space inside them, perfect for hiding. Makepeace, a girl with a mysterious past, defends herself nightly from the ghosts which try to possess her. Then a dreadful event causes her to drop her guard for a moment. And now there's a ghost inside her. The spirit is wild, brutish and strong, but it may be her only defence in a time of dark suspicion and fear. As the English Civil War erupts, Makepeace must decide which is worse: possession or death.
From the author of the Costa Award-winning The Lie Tree.
>> Read Stella's review.
"Everyone should read Frances Hardinge. Everyone. Right now." - Patrick Ness
In the opulent palace of Ohaddin, women have one purpose - to obey. Some were brought here as girls, captured and enslaved; some as servants; some as wives. All of them must do what the Master tells them, for he wields a deadly and secret power. But the women have powers too. One is a healer. One can control dreams. One is a warrior. One can see everything that is coming. In their golden prison, the women wait. They plan. They write down their stories. They dream of a refuge, a safe place where girls can be free. And, finally, when the moon glows red, they will have their revenge.
>> Read the excellent Maresi first (and read Stella's review)!
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.
In a near-future, war-ravaged London, impoverished inhabitants are herded into “the Strip”, surveilled constantly by drones and periodically bombed into further submission. Gripping YA dystopia.
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter is a black girl and an expert at navigating the two worlds she exists in: one at Garden Heights, her black neighborhood, and the other at Williamson Prep, her suburban, mostly white high school. Walking the line between the two becomes immensely harder when Starr is present at the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend, Khalil, by a white police officer.
Imogen is an heiress, a runaway, and a cheat. Jule is a fighter, a chameleon, and a liar. Imogen is done pretending to be perfect, and Jule refuses to go back to the person she once was. Somewhere between the mansions of Martha's Vineyard and the shores of Cabo San Lucas, their intense friendship takes a dark turn. From the author of We Were Liars.
Aza Holmes is caught in the ever-tightening spirals of her own thoughts. The book also features lifelong friendship, an unexpected reunion, Star Wars fan fiction, and a tuatara. The long-awaited new novel from the author of The Fault in Our Stars (&c).
BOOKS@VOLUME #53 (9.12.17)
Find out what we've been reading.
Select seasonal gifts using the VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR.
Learn about the newest books, our December hours, our Book of the Week, and other book news and events.
Enter our sad competition.
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 Thomas's review below.
>> Read an extract.
>> Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
>> The 1966 film by Francis Truffaut.
>> - Why do you write? - I don't smoke.
>> "Is it a quirky book?" Harry: "I would say it's a very quirky book."
>> Megan's booklaunch speech.
>> Megan's Julie Christie slide show
>> Megan Dunn's blog.
>> Some films by Megan Dunn.
>> The Galley Beggar Press website.
>> Megan Dunn loves merchandise.
>> A brief biography of the author, former bookseller and former dynamo of Booksellers NZ.
>> And she's written for The Pantographic Punch.
>> And an interview with Ray Bradbury about Megan's book (just joking).
 | Tinderbox by Megan Dunn {Reviewed by THOMAS} If there had been any rain he would have opened his mouth and tasted the drops but it wasn’t raining and it hadn’t rained for some time. The vegetation everywhere was dry, what they call tinder dry because to be useful tinder needs to be dry, suggesting that dryness is a requisite quality of tinder, though what then to call it when it is wet, he wondered, wandering from the task at hand. It would take only a spark struck from a flint, he thought, trying to climb back aboard his earlier train of thought, to set the whole thing off. But even this wasn’t the thought he had started with. He had been thinking of tasting the raindrops, a sort of conceit for opening a review of the book Tinderbox by Megan Dunn, the raindrops, or rather the tasting of them, an awkward motif isolated by Dunn from the book Fahrenheit 451 and Truffaut's film based on the book upon which her book is based. What was he thinking? Perhaps he would write a story in which a character, call that character Miss Ingram for reasons outlined in Tinderbox, he won’t go into that now, writes, or attempts to write and fails, due to fatigue perhaps, or insufficient time or focus, or perhaps brain-power, a review of Tinderbox by Megan Dunn, which is an account of Dunn trying, and failing, for reasons other than those just listed, to write a novel based on the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, in one iteration a novel of Fahrenheit 451 from the point of view of its female characters, which iteration, when completed, made the Bradbury estate uncomfortable, in a legal sense, leading directly to the non-publication of this iteration and thence to the writing and subsequent publication of Tinderbox, a book about someone writing a book about a book, or, more often, a book about someone writing a book about a film about a book, or about the Spark Notes about that book, or, sometimes, about the actors who play the characters in the film of the book, in other words a metametametametametanovel, but so much fun, with each wheel within the other wheels turning and picking up, in its treads, if that’s the right extension of the metaphor, who wants it, all sorts of stuff in the life of the author-character, the putative Megan Dunn, the outer wheel, so to call it, or the outer wheel at least until the story about the pseudonymous Miss Ingram, or, indeed, the account of the writing of the story about Miss Ingram, who tries and fails to write a review of the book about the putative Megan Dunn, which includes Dunn’s employment as a bookseller in the failing Borders chain, the evanescence of a relationship, her writing of a book based on Fahrenheit 451, the failure to bring this book to readers, the writing of a novel on the NaNoWriMo scheme, a sort of reverse Alcoholics Anonymous programme for writers, and Tinderbox itself, the book about all this, and all that mentioned above, and other things, such as merchandising, that you will need to read the book to find out about, each part or layer or vector or whatever contaminating the others and yet handled so deftly by Dunn, with equal measure of attachment and detachment, to build a subtle depiction of the mutable but enduring force of literature in individual and collective lives and of the forces arrayed against it, not least of them failure, the book is strong on failure, and what could be more compassionate, even to Miss Ingram, who has failed to establish herself as a character in someone's story about failing to write a review of Tinderbox, not that the fault is hers, perhaps that conceit should be abandoned, than treating to failure in all its guises and agencies, failure being an essential quality of anything worth doing. Could writing about failure ever be anything but a success? Dunn knows what temperature books burn at. Half price. Such weighty matters should always be this lightly held. |
 {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.
|
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)