BOOKS @ VOLUME # 151 (2.11.19)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending.
BOOKS @ VOLUME # 151 (2.11.19)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending.
 | Jellyfish by Janice Galloway {Reviewed by STELLA} Short story collections are appealing for many reasons. I am always surprised by some readers’ resistance to the short story form. What I like about a short story is the bite-size clarity that comes with a small moment that often has a profound or deeper layer; the sharpness of language as every sentence is and should be taut — necessary; and when it is a cohesive collection, how the characters and themes overlay each other, building resonance and subtle interlinked play that often surprisingly and suddenly take your breath away. It’s also a great way to be introduced to a new author without the commitment of a novel. At the conclusion of Janice Galloway’s collection Jellyfish, I realised I had been struck by all these elements. And I am pleased to note there are more fictions as well as memoir and art collaborations to investigate. The stories in Jellyfish deal with relationships: romantic — sex, love and commitment and discovery; parental — motherhood in particular; and internal — psychological machinations and mental health. The opening story, 'Jellyfish', is an ironic ode to motherhood on the eve of a young boy’s first day at school. It has all the tenderness and contradictions that parents feel when a child reaches a ‘milestone’. Galloway cleverly reveals the menace of change through the mother’s view of a day trip to the beach, a menace that is all to do with the parent’s internal world rather than any real external threat — other than change and abandonment of past structures and controls. These tensions between a mother and a child surface throughout the collection, either directly between child and parent or played out between parents. Most affecting in this regard is 'Distance' — a mother, to cope with her own paranoia, separates herself from her partner and child and over the years the distance between mother and child widens. When a health crisis emerges she must put her house in order and here her own past childhood comes to catch her — and the underbelly of her inability to cope is revealed, the curtain is pulled away. Several of Galloway’s stories deal with the need for women to hold back, to protect themselves from their own past parental histories, their interactions with their children and with their partners. There is a quiet unease in many of the women as they navigate life — somewhat remote — seemingly disconnected from their interactions with others due to fear, loss or the desire remain unfettered despite the contradictory impulse in seeking meaningful emotional connection. 'Gold' is powerful and memorable — about taking a chance and unwittingly creating risk. Grace as a teen is abandoned by her mother, smart and tough enough to cope. And she does, gets herself through school, further education and a sound job — always sensible and competent, her life has a predictable path as long as she does not swerve from it, but she is completely alone. A stalwart to all, but nobody to everyone. Yet a painting changes her life, like a flip of a coin — a new side is revealed with all its possibilities. Galloway writes tautly with black humour that lifts the words from the doldrums, using illuminating metaphors which give richness and depth to the text, and with a visceral passion and a lightness of touch that complement the more cerebral moments. |
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Armand V.: Footnotes to an unexcavated novel by Dag Solstad {Reviewed by THOMAS}
1] Wishing to write a review of the novel Armand V. by the Norwegian author Dag Solstad, I’ve decided the best way to realise this is not by writing a review of the novel but by allowing it instead to appear in an outpouring of footnotes to a review that will not be or can not be written. The sum of the footnotes, therefore, is my review of the novel Armand V.
1 B ] Although admittedly ludic, possibly to the point of irritation, some attempt to justify this approach could be made on the basis that it corresponds to the approach of the author Dag Solstad in this writing of his novel comprised entirely of footnotes to a novel that the author considers in some way pre-existing but which he has determined will remain “unexcavated”, a novel that he refuses to write, or feels himself incapable of writing, or a novel that is unable to be written, or that, if written, would be of no interest to the writer (and therefore unable, presumably, to be written). Solstad writes, “Wishing to write a novel about the Norwegian diplomat Armand V., I’ve decided the best way to realise this is not by writing a novel about him but by allowing him instead to appear in an outpouring of footnotes to this novel. The sum of the footnotes, therefore, is the novel about Armand V.”
1 C ] Solstad is aware of at least some of the problems inherent in this approach, but it is problems such as these that allow him to explore problems inherent in the writing of novels per se, and in the relationship of an author to her or his material. “But who wrote the novel originally, if I’m simply the one who discovered and excavated it? … It is indisputable that this novel, the sum of the footnotes of the original novel, which is invisible because the author refused to delve into it and make it his own, is about Armand V. … It is by no means certain that the theme of the novel is the same as that of the original novel. … Why this avowal? Why does the author refuse to enter into the original novel? Put more directly: why don’t I do it, since I’m the one who’s writing this?”
1 D ] The air of a footnote hangs over Solstad’s entries, if a footnote can be said to have an ‘air’, giving them a greater perspective and distance from their subjects, but a greater alienation, or perhaps a resignation, also, a feeling that a narrative continues upon which we (and the author) have no control, and of which we (and the author) are only very incompletely aware. This said, we can safely say that the footnotes also provide less perspective, concentrating often, as footnotes often do, on matters of detailed fact, with a topography very different from the text to which the footnote ostensible refers. The author from time to time notes his relief from the expectations of the received novel form, comparing the unwritten novel ‘up there’ with his work in the footnotes to that novel: “Of course, the novel up there attempts to explain why their marriage failed. But not here. Here it is simply over. No comment.” The novel-as-footnotes form allows Solstad to explore aspects of the life of Armand V. (including a very long exploration of the contented blandness of a one-time school-mate, which is implicitly contrasted with the angst-ridden nullity of Armand V.’s life (about which see the footnote below)) without subjecting these explorations to an overall schema or narrative that would restrict the usefulness of these explorations.
1 E ] Some of the footnotes are very long.
1 F ] Perhaps our awareness of our life has always and only the relationship to our actual life that a footnote has to the text to which it refers. Plot and purpose are as artificial when applied to our lives as they are when used as novelistic crutches to make stories, and for much the same reasons.
1 G ] “All these footnotes seem to be suffering from one thing or another. The footnotes are suffering. The unwritten novel appears as heaven.”
2 ] Armand V. is a diplomat nearing retirement. He has “mastered the game” of concealing his personal opinions and performing his role to perfection. “He assumed that his bold way of behaving helped to divert attention from what might have been perceived as more suspect qualities that he possessed, whatever they might be.” So perfect is his performance that at no time does he act in a personal way or express his beliefs in any way that could risk their having any effect. The visible and invisible aspects of Armand V.’s life share little but his name. He is, in effect, a non-person.
2 B ] Complete separation between the invisible and the visible aspects of one’s life, or, we might say, between the inner and outer aspects of one’s life, is impossible to sustain indefinitely, but the resolution of such separation, whether this be metaphorised as lightning or as rot, is seldom satisfactory. For instance, Armand’s deep-seated hatred of the United States for its death penalty, and for the war that disabled his son (see the footnote below) is expressed in no practical way, but releases its pressure in disturbing misperception and an embarrassing slip of the tongue during an otherwise bland conversation with the American ambassador in the toilets during an official dinner.
2 C ] “Armand V. knew that he lived in a linguistic prison, and he knew that he could do nothing else but live in a linguistic prison.”
3 ] The unbridgeability of the schism between his inner life, so to call it, and his outer circumstances, so to call them, has led to an unsatisfactory personal life, so to call it, for Armand V. He was married to N, the mother of his son, but only felt close to her when he thought of her twin sister, thinking of N. as “the twin sister’s twin sister.” Other examples abound.
4 ] The novel is particularly concerned with the relationship of Armand V. with his son, who is first a student and then becomes a soldier, much to the disapproval of the father, and loses his eyesight during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The novel is particularly concerned with the alienation of Armand V. from his son.
4 B ] Armand goes regularly to pay his son’s rent, both when his son is a student and when he is a soldier and mostly absent, and is reluctant to stop doing so even when his son can easily afford it and asks his father to stop.
4 C ] Armand does not speak to his son about what is making the son unhappy but sneaks out of the apartment. When his son later expresses the idea of joining an elite army unit, Armand makes a scornful outburst which cements the son’s intention. Armand V. does not act when action is appropriate, and acts inappropriately when action is unavoidable. Armand V. feels he has sacrificed his son to the US, or God, the two malign forces becoming for Armand almost indistinguishable.
4 D ] When his son returns disabled, Armand returns him to child-like dependency, assuming the suffocating Father-provider role he had not exercised during his son’s childhood due to his separation from N.
4 E ] In the earlier footnotes, when his son is a student, Armand spends a lot of time considering the time, decades ago, when he himself was a student. When his son is blinded and at an institution in London, Armand stays in his son’s flat in Oslo. It would not be unreasonable to see a conflation between father and son, and, after the ‘sacrifice’ of the son by the father, an assumption of the son’s place by the father. This can also be seen, due to the conflation of the two, as a return to the father’s own youth, a trick against time.
5 ] “What does Armand have instead of hope? Don’t know. But: no sense of destiny, a lack of purpose … that makes a novel about him readable, or writable.” Only footnotes, then.
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>>The importance of dark sky sanctuaries.
>>The Dark Sky Project.
>>Heavens above.
>>Sky light.
>>Visit Naomi Arnold's website.
>>Your copy of the book.
>>Related titles:
Stargazer: A guide to the Southern night skies by Maggie Adern-Pocock
The World at Night by Babak Tafreshi
Dark Skies: A journey into the wild night by Tiffany Francis
An Ode to Darkness by Sigri Sandberg
Mt John: The first 50 years by Alan Gilmore and John Hearnshaw
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Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Who eats in a cage? Or with a caged mouth?” There is either writing or not-writing (even though not-writing may be as specific concerning what is not written as writing is concerning what is), and the dividing line between the two is not so much a wall as a cliff, an inequality more effective than a barrier. Anne Boyer’s collection of prose poems, Garments Against Women, is everywhere alert to the ways in which the world as experienced by those who live in it is riven by inequalities. Those who wield a power or who benefit from the wielding of that power have little perceptual overlap with those upon whom that power is wielded or who suffer from the wielding of that power, but, interestingly, the advantaged live in a world of more restricted truth, even though the disadvantaged may feel the effects of this restriction. This asymmetry acts as a constraint upon those to whom falls more heavily the burden of existing, “lives diminished by the arrangement of the world,” their time forced into objects and taken from them by what is termed an ‘economic system’. Boyer’s poems interrogate her relationship with objects, for instance the garments she sews or that she buys from thrift shops: “the fabric still contains the hours of the lives.” Can these hours have their value restored? For whose benefit have these hours been put into objects? If “writing is the manufacture of impossible desires,” can we write of or read of objects without involving ourselves in the mechanisms by which time is taken asymmetrically from workers? Is it possible for an object to not exist except as a vicarious object, “an object which exists only as it might exist to another”? Are all objects more vicarious than not? “I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs,” writes Boyer. How it is possible to write, even to imagine writing, even if one had the time to write, without writing ‘garments’ that are designed by and are to the benefit of those who have confined ‘writing’ in the narrow world of their advantage? Whose roles must be challenged and overhauled? “I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping", writes Boyer, an self-described “addict of denial”, in the poem ‘A Woman Shopping’. “It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing.” Everyone is smothered by their role: “If a woman has no purse we will imagine one for her.” “Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing,” but the real struggle is “not between actor and actor. It’s between actors and the stage.” Boyer’s poems provide subtle and often surprising insights into the relationships between individuals and their roles, desires and scripts, personal and societal misfortunes, struggle and survival, despair and surprising joy. Can writing effect real change? “I thought to have a name was to become an object,” writes Boyer. “I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.” |
>>Visit Clotilde Perrin's website.
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>>Read Stella's review of Laing's superb graphic memoir Mansfield and Me.
>>Other books by Sarah Laing.
>>Laing has illustrated—and done the cover for—Paula Green's Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand women's poetry.
>>Compostable poets.
>>And a talking mural!
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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood {Reviewed by STELLA}
Hailed as 'the book of our time', Margaret Atwood takes us back to Gilead in her much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale: The Testaments. And a testament it is. It’s fifteen years since the doors closed on Offred, and we are quickly absorbed again into the world of Gilead through the witness accounts of its fall by two women: 'Witness Testimony 369A' and 'Witness Testimony 369B'. These 'found transcripts' are now studied along with other records of the women of Gilead. As you can imagine, these are far and few considering the scant access to (and inability to read) the written word by those who lived in Gilead. The most compromising and informative manuscript is known as 'The Ardua Hall Holograph', written by Aunt Lydia — one of the four founding Aunts. And in we go, into Gilead and into the walls of the silenced. Here we are buried knee-deep in treachery, in bullying and political machinations — in a society bereft of honesty and bound by dogma. Lydia and the founding Aunts hold powerful positions within this structure, yet this substructure does little but feed the demands of the Commanders (the elite) and is at the mercy of their whims. Lydia as the appointed leader has played a poker-faced game — always wary of Commander Judd, playing her cards with humility but always (she hopes) with a trump up her sleeve. It is a dangerous game, one that she and the Aunts cannot win, but survival is possible. The strength of The Testaments is in Lydia’s voice: complex, assured and terrified, we start right at the beginning with her. The downfall of America as it was, the destruction of democracy, and the denial of human rights to all women and most men. Lydia had been a judge and the commanders see in her abilities that will be useful to them in this autocratic regime. She has the prospect of being a ‘judge’ again, albeit one that goes against all her beliefs — deciding who will be a Handmaid, an Aunt, an Econowife, a Wife; how crimes of men, as well as women, will be punished — but all this within the strict code of Gilead, one that the Commanders have designed. Aunt Lydia is both revered and feared, reflecting her status in and worth to Gilead, but she has a secret — her written record (the Holograph) hidden in the depths of the inner library of Ardua Hall. The witness testimonies are from two young women, one Agnes — a daughter of a commander — and the other,a teenager living in Canada, just over the border outside Gilead. As the story unfolds, their lives become intertwined. The codes of Gilead have affected them both. Agnes, a privileged child, is ‘schooled’ by the Aunts, along with the other commanders’ daughters. They are readied for marriage — schooled in the arts of embroidery and flower arranging and indoctrinated in the rules of Gilead. When her father takes a new wife, Paula, it is quickly decided that at thirteen Agnes is ready for marriage, something she is understandably terrified of. Rescued from this plight by announcing that she has been ‘called’, she escapes into the confines of Ardua Hall to train as a Pearl Girl on the road to being an Aunt. Here she meets Jade, a meeting that will have a profound effect on her and many others in Gilead. There is much more to the plot but you will have to read The Testaments — to say more would spoil the revealing page-turner. When The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in the 1980s it felt like a dystopia, hardly believable despite its resonances in women’s rights movement of that time. But when there was renewed interest in the last few years (partly due to the television series) it felt more prescient and urgent. The increasing power of elites, the decreasing autonomy of women and minorities (think abortion laws in America, revoking of the right to peaceful protest, increased police and military power in the face of ‘terrorism’, control of media and data to shift political opinion and influence voter behaviour) makes The Testaments (and its predecessor) more vital, and frighteningly close to the edge of what could be. Are we brave enough like the women in The Testaments to fight for a humane society or are we undone by the helplessness as part of an insane society? Or are some of us complacent — unwilling to risk our small bubble of safety and superiority? These are the challenges of Gilead. It is interesting to note that Atwood does not include anything in her ‘dystopias’ that has not already occurred. Announced this week, The Testaments is the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} "It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off:” the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt. |
NEW RELEASES
"By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit." —J.M. Coetzee
Pre-nineteenth-century Maori society was complex: rich tribal economies were built and flourished, and there was a focus on valuing the whenua and resources that supported all. The dominant form of settlement and the focal point of social and economic activities were Kainga (unfortified villages). However, colonial settlement and the discriminatory policies of successive governments disrupted social structures and severed the connections to Kainga. Today, the home ownership rate for Maori is well below the national average and Maori are over-represented in the statistics of substandard housing. Rebuilding the Kainga charts the resurgence of contemporary papakainga on whenua Maori over the last three decades. Kake draws on innovative international models to sketch out a vision where Maori are supported to build businesses and affordable homes on whanau, hapu or Treaty settlement lands and describes the policy direction needed to make this a reality.
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival, and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant, who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. It's all true. Follows the wildly successful The Diary of a Bookseller.
>>Sean shows us how to deal with a broken Kindle.
>>As it happens.
Hendy records his attempts to 'walk the talk' on climate change: "By avoiding planes for a year, I found that I had cut my carbon dioxide emissions from travel to just over 1 tonne. This was a reduction of 95 per cent from my 2017 carbon footprint from travel. It felt good." Was this initiative merely symbolic? Did it compromise his work, his life? And has it left him feeling more optimistic that we can, indeed, reach a low-emissions future?
A novel in the form of what is ostensibly a nature diary, precisely chronicling the narrator's interest in the local flora and fauna and the passing of the seasons. Ash before Oak is also the story of a breakdown told slantwise, and of the narrator's subsequent recovery through his re-engagement with the world around him. A substantial section in the latter part of the book is set in New Zealand, and features appearances by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O'Brien.
>>Read an extract.
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls–sisters, eight and eleven–go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
Finalist for the US National Book Award.
"A nearly flawless novel." —The New York Times
"Dismantles the conventions of detective fiction." —The New Yorker
A blend of Surrealism, 'Pataphysics and mysticism, Daumal's allegorical novel tells of the climbing of a mountain, the slopes of which begin everywhere but the summit of which is forever beyond reach. >>Mountain climbing in the theatre.
>>Alejandro Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain was (somewhat loosely) inspired by the book.
>>As was this work by John Zorn.
A horrendously funny Kiwi road novel and coming-of-age story. 18 year old Andy Ingle, with his yellow typewriter called Half-Arse under his arm, embarks on one of the great Kiwi road trips, hitchhiking from Palmerston North to Dunedin, over to the West Coast and back up to Auckland. On the way falling in with drug dealers, a washed-out Professor of Literature, members of the Miss NZ Pageant, and a rag-tag collection of some of the most eccentric and entertaining characters to appear in Kiwi fiction. Enjoyable.
An excellent book for young people, deconstructing received notions of masculinity and their toxic repercussions, and reassembling masculinity in the light of the experiences of men of colour, LGBTQI men, and men whose experience of manhood is atypical in the English-speaking world. Enables young men to feel at home in their gender and thereby less vulnerable to the consolations of chauvinism as offered by the far right (for example).
An embarrassment to the Health Department, an object of pity to a few, a source of fear to many.
>>Visit Quail Island.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?
"Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defence." —Naomi Klein
Delicious, quick plant-based evening meals from this most personable of food writers.
>>Also available: Greenfeast: Spring, summer.
A quietly observant novel set in an Oslo emerging from austerity.
"The kind of novel that does not shout loudly, but is borne along by fine characterisation and wisdom disguised as sparkling gold grains, consolidating Lars Saabye Christensen's position as Oslo's premier home-town poet." —Dagsavisen
Once, the mighty tohora, or southern right whale, was a common sight in winter off the coast of Aotearoa. But it proved to be an easy target for the 19th-century whalers, and was soon driven to the edge of extinction. In the 20th century, however, it became a protected species, and once commercial whaling was virtually stopped, the southern right whale made a comeback.
Little Eepersip doesn't want to live in a house with doors and windows and a roof, so she runs away to live in the wild - first in the Meadow, then by the Sea, and finally in the Mountain. Her heartbroken parents follow her, bringing her back home to 'safety' and locking her up in the stifling square of the house. But she slips away once more, following her heart into the richness of untrammelled nature and disappearing forever. First published in 1927 and written by a child of just twelve years old, The House Without Windows is an extraordinary paean to the transcendent beauty of the natural world, and the human capacity to connect with it.
Winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Hans Christian Anderson Award.
"An enchanting book. These pages simply quiver with the beauty, happiness and vigour of forests, seas and mountains. I can safely promise joy to any reader of it. Perfection." —Eleanor Farjeon
A fascinating account of how languages emerge, change and influence the way we think.
"A rewarding and necessary read." —Guardian
Life in Bearmouth is one of hard labour in the mines, and reward will come in the next life with the benevolence of the Mayker. Newt accepts everything - that is, until Devlin arrives. Devlin starts to force Newt to ask questions, to look around, to wonder if the rules are divine or simply a way of keeping everyone under control. A powerful and original young adult novel.
Traces the entwined histories of the struggle for equality on the bases of gender, class and race, and challenges white feminists to examine race and class prejudice within their movement.
Since the 1970s, astronomers have been aware that galaxies have far too little matter in them to account for the way they spin around: they should fly apart, but something concealed holds them together. That 'something' is dark matter — invisible material in five times the quantity of the familiar stuff of stars and planets. By the 1990s we also knew that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Something, named dark energy, is pushing it to expand faster and faster. Across the universe,this requires enough energy that the equivalent mass would be nearly fourteen times greater than all the visible material in existence.
>>Dark Matter live.
Social media have put new pressures on appearances, and new technologies have made our bodies more alterable than ever. If the way we view our bodies is very much tied in with the way in which we view ourselves, are we more fulfilled or less secure as this relationship changes?
>>"I have never encountered a novel that felt so utterly like a gift." —Anna Smaill
>>"I wasn't writing a book to be published; I was writing my way to happiness."
>> Charlotte Grimshaw on the book's "fantastic power".
>>Out of this world and into another.
>>"650 pages wasn't enough for me."
>>Knox on continuing.
>>Twittering rigours.
>>Lie down and listen! Elizabeth Knox will be at VERB Wellington in November.
>>We have a few freshly signed copies!
>>Other books by Elizabeth Knox.
 | The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman It is always with some trepidation that you approach the new books of your favourite authors. There is a sense of nervous anticipation as you open the covers. Will it be as good as the others? Will it take you to new ground? I’m happy to report that I was transported to Lyra’s world and very pleased to be back in it, so engaged with her world in The Secret Commonwealth that it proved difficult to go to work or sleep. The second 'Book of Dust' takes us twenty years on from La Belle Sauvage. Lyra Silvertongue is now a young woman completing her university studies, and her life is taking a turn for the worse: her daemon Pantalaimon is angry with her, and when Pan sees a murder committed while out walking alone at night (if you know the world of Lyra, you will know that it is not normal for people to be separated from their daemons), the seemingly safe environs of Oxford and the colleges begins to unravel at an alarming rate. Danger is pursuing Lyra — someone wants her controlled, wants something from her and not in a nice way. Escaping Oxford, which is no longer a safe haven (the new master is not sympathetic to this orphan), she finds shelter with Malcolm Polstad’s family. Finally learning about her rescue in The Great Flood by the then 11-year-old Malcolm, she is both astonished by her childhood history and angry that so many secrets have been kept from her. Yet this is a different Lyra than her eleven-year-old self of Northern Lights. While still determined, there are also the more adult emotions of doubt and fear holding her back. She is questioning her beliefs, her understanding of herself and the people around her. Quarrelling one evening with Pan, he accuses her of losing her imagination — something she scoffs at and dismisses. Pan’s frustration is palpable — they are both saddened by their ability to separate physically and this has left a gaping psychological gulf that neither Lyra nor Pan can overcome. When Pan leaves her to seek answers — to find Lyra’s ‘imagination’, Lyra begins her own journey to the East. It is dangerous for her in Brytan and she needs to flee — but where can she go? Her first step is to old friends, the Gyptains, and here we meet again some of the characters from those first books in the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. Pullman deftly pulls in the threads of Lyra's childhood and weaves in her new quests. The story-telling is as always exceptional. She must find Pan; she needs to go East. What is so special about a rose that is grown in the desert and why does the Magisterium want it so badly? Scientists and theologians alike are determined to uncover something about this material, and there seems to be a link to Dust. We follow the journeys of Pan, Lyra and Malcolm on their separate trajectories to the east: Pan in search of what is wrong at the heart of his relationship with Lyra; Lyra seeking Pan, the reason for the brutal murder and the mysteries of the invisible worlds; and Malcolm to find Lyra and, as a member of the secret organisation Oakley Street, to find out what the Magisterium is up to. Across the world, both east and west, the Magisterium has become stronger and more powerful. We see a more dictatorial state and one where political and economic machinations are affecting people adversely. There is less autonomy, a crackdown on debate and dissent, people are displaced, and inequality is on the rise, with a small elite in charge with the backing of military and police. The Secret Commonwealth is more compelling than the first in 'The Book of Dust' series but is also darker, more violent and challenging. I am awaiting with greater anticipation the third in this trilogy! If you haven’t read any of the 'Lyra' books you need to start at the beginning with Northern Lights. |