NEW RELEASES
Can a person's life and identity by captured or constructed by the careful creation of a signature perfume? What would a novel be like if it was constructed according to the sense of smell? A new novel from the author of The Hut Builder, Edwin and Matilda and The Quiet Spectacular.
Singer, a thirty-four-year-old recently trained librarian, arrives by train in the small town of Notodden to begin a new and anonymous life. He falls in love with Merete, a ceramicist, and moves in with her and her young daughter. After a few years together, the relationship starts to falter, and as the couple is on the verge of separating a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer's life. T Singer is a novel about self-erasure, indomitable loneliness and other such existential questions.
"An utterly hypnotic writer." —James Wood
"Mad, sad and funny. Thrilling." —Geiff Dyer
"The drama exists in his voice." —Lydia Davis
Three aspiring concert pianists — Wertheimer, Glenn Gould, and the narrator — have dedicated their lives to achieving the status of a virtuoso. But one day, two of them overhear Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations, and his incomparable genius instantly destroys them both. They are forced to abandon their musical ambitions: Wertheimer, over a tortured process of disintegration that sees him becoming obsessed with both writing and his own sister, with whom he has a quasi-incestuous relationship culminating in death; and the narrator, instantly, retreating into obscurity to write a book that he periodically destroys and restarts. New edition, with an afterwords and cover art by Leanne Shapton.
>>Read Thomas's review.
One of Bernhard's finest and most incisive books, featuring the narrator's streams of internal invective against everyone at an artistic gathering, but, ultimately, exposing the narrator to the scrutiny of the reader. As always in Bernhard, all loathing is primarily self-loathing and only secondarily loathing of the world as it is distilled in the loather. New edition, with an afterword by Anne Enright and cover by Leanne Shapton.
>>Read Thomas's review.
It is 1967. Two men lie bedridden in separate wings of a Viennese hospital. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their friendship quickens, the two men discover in each other an antidote to their feelings of despair on the unexpected strength of what they share — a symmetry forged by their love of music, black humour, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear of mortality. New edition, with an afterwords by Ben Lerner and cover by Leanne Shapton.
"'Furious, obsessive, scathing, absolutely hilarious and oddly beautiful." —Claire Messud
Of all Maori personal adornments, the human figure pendants known as hei tiki are the most highly prized and culturally iconic. This book showcases photographs of a large selection of hei tiki, most from the taonga Maori collection at Te Papa.
One of the best-known historians of British India turns his attentions to the corporation that defeated the Mughal emperor with a private army in 1765 and installed a new regime in which the company transformed itself into an aggressive colonial power, levying taxes and by the early nineteenth century controlling most of the Indian subcontinent and parts of South East Asia with a private army twice the size of the British Army.
A collection of Kureishi's most insightful essays and stories, on everything from David Bowie to Georges Simenon to Keith Jarrett.
"No one else casts such a shrewd and gimlet eye on contemporary life." —William Boyd
When Priestley visited Antarctica in 2011, it fulfilled a life's dream but also brought her anxieties to the fore. She has visited twice since, spending time with Antarctic scientists including paleo-climatologists, biologists, geologists, glaciologists exploring the landscape, marvelling at wildlife from orca to tardigrades, and occasionally getting very cold. Her anxiety has been her constant companion, anxiety both for herself and for the future of the continent and the planet.
In this outstanding graphic novel, surfer and illustrator A.J. Dungo remembers his late partner, her battle with cancer, and their shared love of surfing that brought them strength throughout their time together.
Exemplary social and natural history, and well illustrated.
Renia Spiegel was shot dead by the Nazi's after escaping the Warsaw ghetto and hiding in an attic. For seventy years, her diary has lain in a bank vault. It has now been published.
Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile him for The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published Awakenings but the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again.
Texts in the original languages and in English translation.
Charmingly illustrated and informative.
Quick, wholesome, easy-to-make Italian recipes.
Darkly comic, surreal and full of explorations of human vulnerability and eccentricity.
Dawkins marshals science, philosophy and comparative religion to interrogate the hypocrisies of all the religious systems and explain to readers of all ages how life emerged without a Creator, how evolution works and how our world came into being.
Clear, practical and hopeful, with plenty of things to do.
Examines the link between farming animals and the climate crisis.
A history of political advertising and the sorts of subtle or clumsy ways in which political parties have attempted to influence public opinion.
>>Those were the days.
