List #10: GRAPHIC NOVELS
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Darwin: An exceptional voyage by Fabien Grolleau and Jérémie Royer         $35
An exceptionally good graphic novel account of the voyage of the Beagle. From the creators of the equally wonderful Audubon: On the wings of the world. 

Eileen Gray: A house under the sun by Zosia Dzierżawska and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes      $33
An exquisite graphic novel about the architect and designer's life and work in the 1920s on her exemplary Modernist Villa E-1027.
>>Visit Villa E-1027

The Tenderness of Stones by Marion Fayolle         $55
Marion Fayolle’s beautifully strange graphic novel is an exploration of a family’s attempts at grappling with the grief and loss of a loved one bears a surreal, fairy-tale quality. The graphic novel depicts the father figure of this particular family succumbing to an undisclosed illness with a focused yet fragile sense of retrospective narration. Parts of the father's body are gradually and carefully stripped away from him — starting with one of his lungs, he proceeds to lose his mouth, his nose, and ultimately rescinds into a childlike state. With the narrator’s father now trapped in a permanently pre-pubescent form, Fayolle’s narrative and visual style come into full play as her introspective storytelling and whimsical yet enlightened art carry the graphic novel’s emotions to the end.
"Handsome, delicate, masterful." —Starburst

Passing for Human by Liana Finck          $48
A subtle and perceptive graphic memoir of a young artist struggling against what is expected of her - as an artist, as a woman, and as a human generally. 
"Passing for Human is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I've ever read. It's a story about becoming a person, about creativity, about love, all told with originality and grace. An amazing, amazing book." - Roz Chast

Hobo Mom by Charles Forsman and Max de Radigues         $27
A thoughtful, understated graphic novel. After a dangerous encounter riding the rails, Natasha chooses to show up on the doorstep of the family she abandoned years ago and finds an upset husband and a little girl yearning for a mother. Can someone who covets independence settle down?
"This is a remarkable graphic novel. Forsman and Radiguès seem to understand instinctively that while one person’s search for happiness may be the cause of another’s deep pain, accepting daily sadness as a kind of life tax won’t, in the end, make things better for anyone." —Guardian 

Deep Breaths by Chris Gooch          $38
A space bounty hunter tracks down a frog princess, a woman finds a condom where it shouldn't be, and a spoiled art student works his first freelance job. A collection of short dark-to-very-dark, strange-to-very-strange, excellent-to-superb comic strips from this outstanding graphic novelist. 

Let Me Be Frank by Sarah Laing           $35
Reading. Writing. Parenting. Angsting. A wonderful — quirkily funny and poignant — graphic memoir from the superb Sarah Laing, drawn between 2010 and 2019. 
"Let Me Be Frank is a brilliant collection of anecdotes and observations. Sarah's stories of navigating daily life in all its absurdity and mundanity are told with alarming honesty and humour." —Art Sang
"Full of incidental and profound pleasure. Audaciously, addictively honest." —Anna Smaill
>>Mansfield and Me. 

Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood          $35
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a black mass with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him. Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving towards the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.
"Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb — it is an aftertime song. It is dark, ever so dark, nimble and lethal. It is a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age. Ness is something else, and feels like it always has been." —Max Porter

Rufus Marigold by Ross Murray        $35
Rufus Marigold is a primate with a problem. He suffers acutely from anxiety and every social encounter is a harrowing ordeal. A budding artist, Rufus spends his days working in an office. As life become increasingly more of a struggle, Rufus yearns to be defined as something other than a complete nervous wreck. An intensely funny and tragic New Zealand graphic novel. Highly recommended.
"Ruefully, familiar, hilarious. Rufus Marigold delights and horrifies in equal measures in equal measure. A must-read for anyone who's ever felt award in social situations, and anyone who's had a dream." - Sarah Laing    
>>Read Thomas's review.    

Uncertain Manifesto by Frédéric Pajak        $35
The writer and artist Frederic Pajak was ten when he began to "dream of a work that would mingle words and images: bits of adventure, collected memories, sentences, phantoms, forgotten heroes, trees, the stormy sea," but it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form. This unusual book is a memoir born of reading and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and fates of some of Pajak's heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow, Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak's moody black-and-white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak's as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world more and more given over to a present without a past.

Death Wins a Goldfish: Reflections from a grim reaper's year-long sabbatical by Brian Rea         $30
Death never has a day off, so he has accumulated a lot of leave entitlement. HR insists he use it up, so off Death goes to take a break in the Land of the Living. How do the living relax and enjoy themselves? Graphic novel. 

The Book of Imprudent Flora by Claudio Romo      $55
With stunning illustrations throughout, the book is written as a travel diary by Lazaro de Sahagun, eminent naturalist and explorer and concerns his voyage to a mysterious isle and subsequent cataloguing of the astonishing life forms, each with a unique history and mode of existence. Perhaps, as Lazaro muses, if the earth is a living organism as he believes, places like this island are necessary for the planet to safeguard these marvellous species from 'future periods of global decadence.'

Moonlight Travellers by Will Self and Quentin Blake       $40
A remarkable collaboration between an outstanding illustrator and an outstanding writer. When Self saw Blake's slightly macabre illustrations of people making their ways across moonlit landscapes in eccentric vehicles, he went home and wrote a set of similarly baroquely strange and moon-saturated texts. This astounding book contains both. 

Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom       $48
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. Sjöblom's unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents, she realises her own history may not match up with the story she's been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background. An outstanding graphic memoir. Sjöblom now lives in New Zealand. 

Rusty Brown by Chris Ware         $60
Ware’s first graphic novel since 2012’s Building Stories is anchored by the inconsequential events of a single day in a school in Ware’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, in 1975. It tells the interwoven stories of the titular pre-teen bully magnet and a handful of characters with whom his life, however glancingly, intersects. 
"Mordantly melancholy and drawn and plotted with extraordinary precision." —Guardian

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List #8: HISTORY AND POLITICS
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

The Boundless Sea: A human history of the oceans by David Abulafia       $85

A magnificent book, both nicely shaped and satisfyingly detailed, surveying the way in which humans across the globe have used the sea to develop and extend their reach upon geography, through trade, travel and conquest. 

Last Witnesses: Unchildlike stories by Svetlana Alexievich       $37
A remarkable collection of accounts, collected by Alexievich since the 1970s, in which the subjects recall life as Soviet children during the upheavals and horrors of World War 2. 

Women Mean Business: Colonial businesswomen in New Zealand by Catherine Bishop       $45
From Kaitaia in Northland to Oban on Stewart Island, New Zealands nineteenth-century towns were full of entrepreneurial women. Contrary to what we might expect, colonial women were not only wives and mothers or domestic servants. A surprising number ran their own businesses, supporting themselves and their families, sometimes in productive partnership with husbands, but in other cases compensating for a spouse's incompetence, intemperance, absence or all three. The pages of this book overflow with the stories of hard-working milliners and dressmakers, teachers, boarding-house keepers and laundresses, colourful publicans, brothelkeepers and travelling performers, along with the odd taxidermist, bootmaker and butcher and Australasia's first woman chemist (Nelson's Clara Macshane).

Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age transformed the West and shaped the present by Philipp Blom         $50
"Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold." - Christopher Marlowe
From the end of the sixteenth century and through the seventeenth, Europe was profoundly altered by a drop in temperatures that affected the ways in which societies sustained and maintained themselves. Blom's excellent history of the impacts of that period of climate change shows how apocalyptic weather patterns not only destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations but also gave rise to the growth of European cities and the appearance of capitalism. 

Queer Objects edited by Chris Brickell and Judith Collard         $50
How are the experiences of gay, lesbian and transgender people embodied in objects that are associated with them? What makes an object queer? The contributors to this fascinating book take an array of objects — both ordinary and special — from throughout time and around the world, and show us how to access to the stories that give them meaning. Published by Otago University Press. 

The Music of Time: Poetry in the twentieth century by John Burnside      $60
A wonderfully idiosyncratic, wide-ranging, acute and vital consideration of the sweep of a century as snagged upon poets whose calling made them incapable of 'going with the flow'. 
"Burnside's thoroughly human prose makes him a great companion and guide. As this inspiring, persuasive book argues the case for poetry it comes close to being poetry itself." —Fiona Sampson

"A rich and pugnacious plea for the necessity of poetry which takes in autobiography, medieval Swiss irrigation channels, the viewpoint in Romantic landscape, Rilke's itineraries, cruising with Hart Crane, attacks by zoo animals." —Jonathan Meades

Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand, 1914-1920 by Jared Davidson        $35
Starting from an archive of letters that were intercepted and opened during and just after World War 1, this book provides fascinating insight into the types of persons considered a 'threat' to the country in this period: a feisty German-born socialist, a Norwegian watersider, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, a cross-dressing doctor, a nameless rural labourer, an avid letter writer with a hatred of war, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. What is remarkable is the extent of state surveillance in this period, a time when the rights to privacy and freedom of expression were seldom considered. 

The Scottish Clearances: A history of the dispossessed by T.M. Devine        $28
After Culloden and the ascendancy of new elites, the 'rationalisation' of land-use in Scotland (largely to serve the woollen trade) entailed the fracturing of social structures and the displacement of crofters and others. The resulting diaspora contributed to the European settlement of New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Devine's history is enlightening and overturns many myths. 

New Forms of Political Organisation edited by Campbell Jones and Shannon Walsh         $20
Could politics be anything other than the administration of the economy in the interests of the already privileged? This volume collects innovative thinking about new forms of politics, new forms of political organisation and new ways of thinking politics. Contributions include 'Nation destroying: Sovereignty and dispossession in Aotearoa New Zealand' by Ben Rosamond, 'Land, housing and capitalism: The social consequences of free markets' by Shane Malva, 'Political organisation and the environment' by Amanda Thomas, 'The resurgence of the radical left in Europe' by David Parker, 'Why we need a new left wing party' by Sue Bradford, 'Constitutional Transformation and the Matike Mai Project' a kōrero between Moana Jackson and Helen Potter. 

Nelson: Now and then by Peter Lukas        $40
When Norwegian photographer Peter Lukas visited Nelson, he was so impressed with the photographic collections at the Nelson Provincial Museum that he set out to photograph the same street views as they appear today. The result is this wonderful book: historical photographs paired with their modern equivalents.

King and Emperor: A new life of Charlemagne by Janet L. Nelson        $65
An attempt to get close to the central figure of the Carolingian renaissance, through reassessment and re-reassessment of sources and preceding histories.

The Anarchy: The relentless rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple         $33       Hardback: $40
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.  

Faber & Faber: The untold story of a great publishing house by Toby Faber       $45
A fascinating insight into how a publisher can not only publish important books (and unimportant ones), but also shift cultural conversation and change the way we engage with literature. 

Protest / Tautohetohe: Objects of resistance, persistence and defiance by Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns          $70
A superbly illustrated history of 250 years of resistance and persistence in New Zealand as told through artefacts created to further a variety of causes. 
>>Look inside!

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial resistance and British dissent by Priyamvada Gopal     $55
Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonised peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
>>The author changes the mind-set. 

The History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling       $38
Authoritative. Accessible. Covers both Western and Eastern traditions. 

An Underground Guide to Sewers, Or: Down, through and out in Paris, London, New York, &c by Stephen Halliday        $45
Cities could be mapped by their underground networks of sewers, and the history revealed by what a city gets rid of is every bit as fascinating as the history of its inputs. Superbly illustrated with photographs, plans, maps, &c. 

Our Women on the Ground: Arab women reporting from the Arab world edited by Zahra Hankir        $40
A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat — female journalists — are working to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. The nineteen essays here show that, from sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the difficulty of travelling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique — as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women at a Syrian medical clinic or attend an exclusive beauty contest for sheep in Saudi Arabia.

Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our civilisation's last chance by Srećko Horvat      $40
Capitalism and historical revisionism have constructed a new world of normalized apocalyptic politics in which our passivity is guaranteed if we believe there is no future. This is a radical manifesto for hope in democracy, union and internationalism. Horvat is an associate of Slavoj Žižek and Yanis Varoufakis. 
>>"The current system is more violent than any revolution."

The Government of No-One: The theory and practice of anarchism by Ruth Kinna           $48

"Ruth Kinna's book will be the standard text on anarchism for the twenty-first century. Written with brio, quiet insight and clarity and taking us from the nineteenth century anarchist Proudhon to Occupy and Rojava, this offering will appeal to the novice student, the activist and the grizzled professor." —Carl Levy

On Fire: The burning case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein       $35
Outlines concrete and achievable steps of policy reform to address the climate crisis. 

Underland by Robert Macfarlane           $50
Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future.
"Extraordinary and thrilling." —Guardian

Clear Bright Future: A radical defence of the human being by Paul Mason       $40
A passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism from the author of Postcapitalism. How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted by algorithms and A.I. anyway? The notion of humanity has become eroded as never before. In this book Paul Mason argues that we are still capable - through language, innovation and co-operation - of shaping our future. He offers a vision of humans as more than puppets, customers or cogs in a machine.

A House in the Mountains: The women who liberated Italy from Fascism by Caroline Moorehead         $40
The story of four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance against the German occupation of the north of Italy in 1943. Well written and interesting. 

The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa  by Vincent O'Malley         $40 
A very accessible and well illustrated history of the series of conflicts between the Crown and various groups of Maori between 1845 and 1872, conflicts that form the often unacknowledged background to much else in New Zealand history. From the author of the monumental The Great War for New Zealand.

My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy          $75
A collection of outstanding non-fiction (essays, speeches, &c) written in the two-decade gap between The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a period in which Roy found that the urgency of her political and social convictions led her to engage with a wide spectrum of issues. 
"Although Roy writes in her foreword that 'Not one iota of my anger has diminished' since the time of writing these essays, they do not come across as angry. Instead, their impact comes from their precision, research and damningly clear reportage." —Guardian

The Five: The untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold        $40
A remarkable work, shifting the focus from the criminal onto the victims, discovering rich and surprising lives and overturning preconceptions and misconceptions both about these women and about the lives of women in precarity in that period. 
Winner of the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize.

The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese time by Anna Sherman     $38
Setting of to search for the bells that were used for timekeeping before the arrival of the Jesuits, Sherman follows a fascinating path through Tokyo's history and contemporary variety.
"A completely extraordinary book, unlike anything I have read before. At once modest in tone and vast in scale and ambition, it extends in all directions, delicately wrought, precise, unfaltering, lucid and strange as a dream. I haven’t felt so excited about an investigation into place since I first read W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Like Sebald, Sherman is concerned with war, brutality, nostalgia and loss, but her search for the meaning of time is also radiant and absolutely humane." —Olivia Laing

"The Bells of Old Tokyo is part personal memoir, part cultural history, but wholly unique. The fragile, fragmentary poetry of its prose so beautifully captures the transience of Tokyo time, the constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction, and the nostalgia for that which has been lost and yet wonder at all that remains to be found. It is the best book I have read about Tokyo written this century." —David Peace

Pākehā Settlements in a Māori World: New Zealand archaeology, 1769—1960 by Ian Smith         $60
A vivid account of early European experience in these islands, through material evidence offered by the archaeological record. As European exploration in the 1770s gave way to sealing, whaling and timber-felling, Pākehā visitors first became sojourners in small, remote camps, then settlers scattered around the coast. Over time, mission stations were established, alongside farms, businesses and industries, and eventually towns and government centres. Through these decades a small but growing Pākehā population lived within and alongside a Māori world, often interacting closely. This phase drew to a close in the 1850s, as the numbers of Pākehā began to exceed the Māori population, and the wars of the 1860s brought brutal transformation to the emerging society and its economy.
>>Smith speaks. 

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden        $38
Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government's system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.

Whose Story is This? Old conflicts, new chapters by Rebecca Solnit      $30
Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of colour, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. 
>>Read Stella's review. 

The Great Unknown: Mountain journeys in the Southern Alps by Geoff Spearpoint        $60
Fifty years of tramping. Beautifully photographed. 

Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia by Christine Thompson      $35
"I found Sea People the most intelligent, empathic, engaging, wide-ranging, informative, and authoritative treatment of Polynesian mysteries that I have ever read. Christina Thompson's gorgeous writing arises from a deep well of research and succeeds in conjuring a lost world." - Dava Sobel
"To those of the western hemisphere, the Pacific represents a vast unknown, almost beyond our imagining; for its Polynesian island peoples, this fluid, shifting place is home. Christina Thompson's wonderfully researched and beautifully written narrative brings these two stories together, gloriously and excitingly." - Philip Hoare

Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and other geniuses of the Golden Age by Sara Wheeler            $40
Wheeler travelled across eight time zones, guided by the writers of the Golden Age: Pushkin to Tolstoy via Gogol and Turgenev.

Words of a Kaumātua by Haare Williams        $50
Haare Williams grew up with his Tuhoe grandparents on the shores of Ohiwa Harbour on the East Coast in a te reo world of Tane and Tangaroa, Te Kooti and the Old Testament, myths and legends and of Nani Wai and curried cockle stew — a world that Williams left behind when he learnt English at school and moved to the city of Auckland.Over the last half-century, through the Maori arts movement, waves of protest and the rise of Maori broadcasting, Williams has witnessed and played a part in the changing shape of Māoridom. And in his poetry and prose, in te reo Māori and English, Williams captures both the wisdom of te ao Māori and the transformation of that world.
"In this collection, we are privileged to obtain the wisdom of a Māori elder of the old school." —Witi Ihimaera

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power by Shoshana Zuboff         $28
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

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List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Te Hei Tiki by Dougal Austin          $60
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. 

Blooms: Contemporary floral design        $80
A survey of work by more than 70 contemporary floral designers who are truly extending the boundaries of their art. Your mouth will drop open. 
>> Have a look inside and resist if you can. 

One Year Drawn by Pete Bossley       $55
As a young architect, Bossley travelled in Europe and the Middle East, drawing the buildings and learning to 'read' them. Bossley looks back on this year, and on the practice of drawing that has become central to his working process. 

Louise Bourgeois, An intimate portrait by  Jean-François Jaussaud     $65
An outstanding collection of photographs of Bourgeois and her Brooklyn Studio and Chelsea house in New York. 
>>Now, Now, Louisson. 

Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses by Dominic Bradbury       $250
Astounding survey of 500 Mid-Century Modern house around the world. 

Crafting Aotearoa: A cultural history of making in Aotearoa and the wider Moana by  Karl Chitham, Kolokesa Mahina-Tuai and Damian Skinner        $85
Records the craft practices of Maori, Pakeha and the peoples of the Pacific. 

On the Street by Bill Cunningham           $120
Bill Cunningham was a contributor to the New York Times for many decades. He was also an incurable and eccentric chronicler of fashion, tirelessly snapping photos of and writing about interestingly attired celebrities and ordinary New Yorkers he spots on the street. This thoughtfully assembled book is the perfect record of an unparalleled eye. 

Mid-Century Living: The Butterfly House collection by Christine Fernyhough        $60
An unparalleled collection of kiwiana has been assembled in Fernyhough's extensive bach (where better?).

Olafur Eliasson in Real Life by Mark Godfrey       $45
Provides unique insight into the work and the artistic, social and environmental contexts of this exceptional artist. 

Art in Book Form           $100
A beautifully presented celebration of the history and design possibilities of the physical book, with special consideration of  LU Jingren, Stefan Sagmeister and Hubert & Fischer. 
>> See some sample pages. 

Big Ideas for Small Houses by Catherine Foster       $50
An insightful look at a range of small houses around New Zealand, clearly showing design and construction considerations, and floorplans. From the author of Small House Living and several other superb books on New Zealand domestic architecture. 

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922—1968 by William Feaver         $43
Feaver begins by conjuring Freud's early childhood: Sigmund Freud's grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho—consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret—Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age. The first of two volumes, this is an account of a century told through one of its most important artists.  

Louise Henderson: From life by Felicity Milburn et al       $65
Louise Henderson (1902-1994) worked alongside Rita Angus, John Weeks, Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich and developed a bold, colourful and distinctive abstract style. Despite her prominence there has been no comprehensive survey of her work until now.

>>Radio with pictures. 

Frances Hodgkins: European journeys edited by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler          $75
Deeply and splendidly illustrated, this book, which finds parallel expression in a touring exhibition organised by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, focuses on Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes: teaching  and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London.

Finding Frances Hodgkins by Mary Kisler          $45
When Frances Hodgkins left New Zealand in 1901, location became a key factor in her determination to succeed as an artist. Curator Mary Kisler follows Hodgkins through England, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Wales to discover the locations in which Hodgkins constantly pushed her exploration of modernism. Well illustrated, too. 

Hokusai Manga by Hokusai Katsushika        $55
In 1814, Hokusai's sketches were published in a handbook of some 4000 images. It surpassed expectations as a student reference book, and became a bestseller. Here, in a three-volume package, an expansive selection of these works is revealed, presenting all of the themes, motifs and drawing techniques found in Hokusai's art. The caricatures, satirical drawings, multi-panel illustrations and narrative depictions found in the book can clearly be seen as the basis for manga as it is understood today. 

Colour: A visual history from Newton to Pantone by Alexandra Loske        $60
Traces 400 years of art through scientific discoveries, pigment development and exemplary works. 

Colin McCahon: There is only one direction, 1919—1959 by Peter Simpson          $75
"New Zealand's foremost artist Colin McCahon is many things to many people: modernist, visionary, environmentalist, shaman, preacher, rustic provincialist, bicultural trailblazer, painter-poet, graffiti artist, teacher, maverick. Peter Simpson's account interrogates as well as accommodates all of these possibilities. Guiding us year by year through the artist's career, he offers a ground-breaking overview of the life's work of a tenacious, brilliant and endlessly fascinating figure." —Gregory O'Brien
"With a generous regard towards his subject, a magisterial command of the material, and scrupulous attention to detail, Peter Simpson has crafted an indispensable work of art-historical scholarship. Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction draws upon diaries, letters and other contemporary sources to document the artist's life from 1919 until 1959, alongside a magnificent selection of his works, many of which have not been reproduced before. It is a remarkable achievement." —Martin Edmond

McCahon Country by Justin Paton           $75
Curator Justin Paton talks us through over 200 works from the full span of McCahon's production, explaining the development of both his themes and his techniques. 
>>Come to Peter Simpson's illustrated lecture on Colin McCahon's Nelson years at The Suter: Wednesday 13 November, 6 PM. >>Find out more. 

The New Photography: New Zealand's first-generation contemporary photographers edited by Athol McCredie        $70
An incisive look at the beginnings of contemporary or art photography in New Zealand. Interviews with Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Daley, John Fields, Max Oettli, John B Turner, Len Wesney and Ans Westra, and a superb range of images.

We Are Here: An atlas of Aotearoa by Chris McDowall and Tim Denee      $70
This wonderful book will reconfigure your thinking about the country you live in. Each map shows data, from economic inequality to the movement of cats at night, in a completely absorbing way. Very impressive and endlessly fascinating. Interesting essays, too. 

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar          $30
After finishing The Return, Matar, seeking solace, travelled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists whom he had admired throughout his life, such as Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he has had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Complete with full-colour reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in Matar's life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure. 

Eileen Mayo: Nature, art and poetry by Peter Vangiani      $35
Eileen Mayo (11 September 1906 – 4 January 1994) was an English-born artist and designer who worked in England, Australia and New Zealand in almost every available medium — drawings, woodcuts, lithographs on stone and tempera, tapestry and silk screening. In addition to being a printmaker, illustrator, calligrapher and muralist, she designed coins, stamps, tapestry and posters, and wrote and illustrated eight books on natural science. She lived in New Zealand from 1962 until her death. The book is beautifully illustrated and produced.
>> Works at Te Papa. 

Always Song in the Water: An oceanic sketchbook by Gregory O'Brien       $45
Gregory O’Brien takes his metaphorical dinghy to the edges of New Zealand—starting with a road trip to the far North—and then voyages out into the Pacific, to lead us into some under-explored territories of the South Pacific imagination, art and literature. O’Brien uses the work of Janet Frame, Ralph Hotere, Robin White, John Pule, Epeli Hau’ofa and others to see whether we can re-imagine ourselves as an oceanic people on a small island in a big piece of water. O’Brien is invariably good company, and it is a pleasure to share his musings, discoveries and observations is this beautifully produced and illustrated volume. 

A Velocity of Being: Letters to young readers edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick         $50
A wonderful collection of accounts by outstanding people of how books and reading helped them become who they are. Each letter is accompanied by a full-page illustration from an outstanding book illustrator. Includes contributions from Jane Goodall, Neil Gaiman, Jerome Bruner, Shonda Rhimes, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yo-Yo Ma, Judy Blume, Lena Dunham, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jacqueline Woodson, Marianne Dubuc, Sean Qualls, Oliver Jeffers, Maira Kalman, Mo Willems, Isabelle Arsenault, Chris Ware, Liniers, Shaun Tan, Tomi Ungerer, and Art Spiegelman.
>> Preview on Brain Pickings. 

Vitamin T: Threads and textiles in contemporary art by Jenelle Porter        $120
A global survey of more than 100 artists, chosen by art-world professionals for their work with threads, stitching, and textiles.

John Scott: Works by David Straight        $70
Featuring 25 buildings by this outstanding yet hitherto underdocumented architect, with essays from Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Hana Scott, Bill McKay and Gregory O'Brien.

Guestbook: Ghost stories by Leanne Shapton          $65
A wonderful, beautiful illustrated book in which Shapton demonstrates how memories accumulate and images haunt us, how stories and histories perpetuate themselves through residues that become increasingly firmly lodged in our minds. From the author of the innovative novel Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry.
“Guestbook reveals Shapton as a ventriloquist, a diviner, a medium, a force, a witness, a goof, and above all, a gift. One of the smartest, most moving, most unexpected books I have read in a very long time.” – Rivka Galchen

Tarkovsky: Films, stills, polaroids and writings by Andrey Tarkovsky        $65
Beautifully presented. Includes extracts from Sculpting in Time, and pieces by Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Paul Satre and other on Tarkovsky's particular approach to film-making. 

Postcard Stories by Richard von Sturmer        $35
Postcard Stories uses the arrangement of a collection of 100 remarkable postcards (all reproduced in slightly more than full colour) as a way of constructing stories in the form of brief sequential texts, often reaching a haiku-like intensity. Lots of slightly sad fun. "Putting a hand-tinted postcard of the Shanghai Gas Co. next to one of the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem creates a certain frisson. Places far removed in space and time suddenly form an unexpected relationship and a story begins." 
"At once sweeping and intricate, gorgeous and austere." - Gregory O'Brien
"Original, readable and charming." - Murray Edmond.
>> Read Stella's review. 
_____________________________________________

>>Browse more books in this category. 


>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR. 

List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Collected Poems by Fleur Adcock         $50
A handsome edition collecting poems from 1960 to the present. 
"Fleur Adcock has written some of the best poems in world literature." - The Spinoff

Craven by Jane Arthur        $25
Winner of the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. 
"She seems to me a poet of scale and embodiment. Her moments are informed by awe and intelligence – quick and seamless. They don’t have to try so hard. I felt novels and films in these poems. I thought: this is a poet of capacity." — Eileen Myles

James K. Baxter: Letters of a Poet     $100
James K. Baxter was not a man of few words, and his private correspondence was no exception. Letters of a Poet, edited by his friend and frequent correspondent John Weir, contains almost 900 of Baxter's letters from 1939 to 1972, covering his teenage years and entire adult life. Frank, funny, generous, sometimes filthy, packed with poems and musings on love, the Catholic faith, and how to live well and write well, they provide remarkable new insights into his life and work. The two slip-cased volumes include letters to his parents, Archibald and Millicent Baxter, the conscientious objector Noel Ginn, and many of the leading literary figures of the time, including Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, Fleur Adcock, Lawrence Baigent, Barry Crump, Maurice Shadbolt, W. H. Oliver, Robin Dudding and many more.

Lost and Somewhere Else by Jenny Bornholdt       $28
Jenny Bornholdt has the remarkable capacity to draw the subtlest insights out of the most everyday details. Her poetry is marked by the fine-grained quality of her noticing, by her sprightly wit, and by the generous access she provides to very precise states of feeling.  How does she achieve all this? 

Neon Daze by Amy Brown           $25
Neon Daze is a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood. As these poems trace the dramatic reconfiguring of one's world, they also upend genre and notions of linear time. Amy Brown's third poetry collection searches restlessly for a way to map a self that is now "part large and old, part new and small".

Listening In by Lynley Edmeades        $28
Edmeades's poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities and accidental comedy. She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening or the errors of listening in everyday communication.

Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand women's poetry by Paula Green     $45
Green explores New Zealand poetry as if it were a house, moving from room to room and through time, releasing historical female poets from definition or exclusion by traditional male gatekeepers, bringing literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. Includes biographies of 195 poets. Illustrated by Sarah Laing. 
>>Have a look inside. 

Under Glass by Gregory Kan         $25
"The things that are really big and really close are too big and too close to be seen. If the mind were a place, what might it look like?"
A superb new collection from the immensely talented Kan in the form of a dialogue between a series of prose poems tracking a progression through mysteriously affecting landscapes, and a series of verse poems compulsively trying to make sense of this experience, the whole forming a kind of  zone where inner and outer worlds contest for definition. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 

Moth Hour by Anne Kennedy          $25
Kennedy's brother Philip 'Moth' dies when he was 22. In this book Kennedy takes a poem he wrote and makes multiple versions of her own: a gripping, emotional arm-wrestle with tragedy.  

How to Live by Helen Rickerby         $25
Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women’s writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form. The poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with ‘the unsilent women’ — Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work  the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression.

La belle dame avec les mains vertes by Evangeline Riddiford Graham       $15
The future’s a disaster. Everyone knows it’s time to get proofing. But you, you’re out of energy to bolt down the bookshelf. You can’t afford a carbon-neutral kitchen. Balance the math & trash the books: you won’t ever have a house. You little worm. Do you really think you deserve your own bedroom? Fear not! If you can’t afford to be part of the problem, you can still buy into the compromise. La Belle Dame avec les mains vertes offers a solution for your every civic grievance. Set down in writing, made in New Zealand, one last blast of arts & crafts. La Belle Dame sees your plaint, & raises it. Would you like to register a charge, or a lamentation?
A green and grumpy, very funny ode to life in contemporary Tāmaki-makau-rau, in the form of a double sestina.

Sport 47 edited by Tayi Tibble, with Fergus Barrowman, Kirsten McDougall and Ashleigh Young        $30
A Wānanga with Patricia Grace and Anahera Gildea; new fiction, poetry and essays by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Hana Pera Aoake, Tusiata Avia, Airini Beautrais, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Vanessa Crofskey, Alayne Dick, Sam Duckor Jones, Anahera Gildea, Eliana Gray, Isabel Haarhaus, Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Emma Hislop, Joy Holley, Patrick Hunn, Nadine Anne Hura, Ash Davida Jane, Claudia Jardine, Erik Kennedy, Catarina de Peters Leitão, Talia Marshall, Anna McAllister, Eleanor Rose King Merton, Fardowsa Mohamed, Mikaela Nyman, Rebecca Tobo Olul, Rachel O’Neill, Sinead Overbye, Aiwa Pooamorn, Meg Prasad, Michelle Rahurahu Scott, essa may ranapiri, Amanda Jane Robinson, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Charlotte Simmonds, Carin Smeaton, Ruby Solly, Michelle Tayler, Anne Marie Te Whiu, Chris Tse, Oscar Upperton, Faith Wilson, Eefa Yasir Jauhary; cover by Miriama Grace-Smith. 

Postcard Stories by Richard von Sturmer        $35
Postcard Stories uses the arrangement of a collection of 100 remarkable postcards (all reproduced in slightly more than full colour) as a way of constructing stories in the form of brief sequential texts, often reaching a haiku-like intensity. Lots of slightly sad fun. "Putting a hand-tinted postcard of the Shanghai Gas Co. next to one of the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem creates a certain frisson. Places far removed in space and time suddenly form an unexpected relationship and a story begins." 
"At once sweeping and intricate, gorgeous and austere." - Gregory O'Brien
"Original, readable and charming." - Murray Edmond.
>>Read Stella's review. 

Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean by Sugar Magnolia Wilson      $25
"A reading treasure trove that shifts form and musical key; there are letters, confessions, flights of fancy, time shifts, bright images, surprising arrivals and compelling gaps. Lines stand out, other lines lure you in to hunt for the missing pieces. There is grief, resolve, reflection and terrific movement." - Paula Green

How I Get Ready by Ashleigh Young           $25
In her new poetry collection, Ashleigh Young (author of the Wyndham-Campbell prize-winning Can You Tolerate This?) fails to learn to drive, vanishes from the fossil record, and finally finishes writing a book.
>>Read Thomas's review. 






______________________________________

>>Browse more books in this category. 

>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #155 (30.11.19)

Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we've been reading. Use the VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR to choose your seasonal gifts and summer reading. 

Who gets to shape the narratives of our times? The current moment constitutes a battle over that foundational power, one in which women, people of colour, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In this week's Book of the Week, Whose Story is This?, Rebecca Solnit applies her acuity to a world in crisis, and shows us some new approaches and hopeful ways forward. 
>>"The essay is powerful again."
>>How Rebecca Solnit became the voice of the resistance. 
>>"It is absolutely about power."
>>What makes Solnit hopeful?
>>"I loved stories before I could read."
>>A conversation with Astra Taylor. 
>>"The hero is the problem."
>>Visit Solnit's website. 
>>Click and collect.
>>Other books by Solnit. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Whose Story is This? Old conflicts, new chapters by Rebecca Solnit In her latest collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit continues her discussions and observations on the political and social structures that shape power relationships. Looking at the major issues — race, gender, climate — and the major movements — #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Climate Strike — Solnit digs into the language of power and the depths of these activisms. Who gets to be heard? Who is telling the story? And where did these stories come from? The collection is sub-titled Old Conflicts, New Chapters. In her introduction, 'Cathedrals and Alarm Clocks', her tone is upbeat — she sees the recent rise in collective action as a questioning of the structures which have kept the elite, predominately men, in power and their needs protected and justified. “You can see change itself happening, if you watch and keep track of what was versus what is...the arising of new ways of naming how women have been  oppressed and erased, heard the insistence that the oppression and erasure will no longer be acceptable or invisible.” And this change comes through the power of language — words that define, record and speak out: “This project of building new cathedrals for new constituencies….the real work is not to convert those who hate us but to change the world so that haters don’t hold disproportionate power”. In the essays that follow some of the facts and figures on sexual assault, racial crimes and the legislative changes that attempt to control the autonomous body and the choices people — women — can make about their own bodies are dispiriting. Yet it is the resistance to these actions through direct protest, legal avenues and political channels that have culminated into a perfect storm — a storm that Solnit is clear to point out resides in the now and in the actions of the past. Resistance to hatred, abuse and control is not new and has not been ineffectual, even when it has been silent. While the essays focus on American politics and culture, Solnit’s observations are relevant wherever you happen to reside: the same power structures exist and persist in all places. As our societies become more diverse, so too comes the opportunity to have a more just and equal ones. In several of her essays, Solnit touches on the growing diversity of the voting population and what this means for American politics. With younger politicians, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for example (who was inspired to stand for Congress by Standing Rock), a new generation, Greta Thunberg and the School Climate Strike movement and indigenous voices holding sway in political arenas, it does feel like a time of change  even in the face of the counter megaphonic voices of Trump and Boris. Solnit’s essays are always interesting, thought-provoking and rich. Her ability to bring yesterday’s dissent into today’s realm and tie these historic important actions to what happens now and next, her clarity of thought and exploration of language and how words play an important role in acting out injustices and taking action to overcome silenced lives makes Solnit a voice to be read by everyone, especially those in positions of privilege.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Collected Stories by Diane Williams     {Reviewed by THOMAS} If it is necessary to move out to the very edge of ourselves, to the part of ourselves that is least ourselves, to be near another person, another person who has also moved out to the very edge of themselves, to the part of themselves that is least themselves, in order to be near us, what value can there be in any communication that takes place, if any communication can take place, between parties who are therefore almost strangers even to themselves? Diane Williams’s short, energetic, hugely disorienting short stories pass as sal volatile through the fug of relationships, defamiliarising the ordinary elements of everyday lives to expose the sad, ludicrous, hopeless topographies of what passes for existence. This is not a nihilistic enterprise, however, for Williams has immense sympathies and her stories themselves demonstrate the possibility of connection through the very act of delineating its impossibility. With the finest of needles, the most ordinary of details, Williams picks out the unacknowledged, unacknowledgeable but familiar hopeless longing that underlies our unreasoned and unreasonable striving for human relations, a longing that makes us more isolated the harder we strive for connection. So much is left unsaid in these stories that they act as foci for the immense unseen weight of their contexts, precisely activating pressure-points on the reader’s sensibilities.

NEW RELEASES

Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante, illustrated by Andrea Ucini       $35
For a year Ferrante (author of 'The Neapolitan Novels') wrote columns for The Guardian on a wide range of topics, from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. These columns are collected here, each with a charming illustration by Andrea Ucini, in this attractive volume. 

Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom       $48
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. Sjöblom's unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents, she realises her own history may not match up with the story she's been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background. An outstanding graphic memoir. Sjöblom now lives in New Zealand. 

Granta 149: Europe (strangers in the land) edited by Sigrid Rausing        $28
Essays and memoir by Katherine Angel, William Atkins, Tash Aw, Melitta Breznik, Lara Feigel, Joseph Leo Koerner, Andrew Miller, Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, Elif Shafak and Adam Weymouth. Fiction by Anne Carson, Caroline Albertine Minor and Antonio Muñoz Molina. Poetry by Ken Babstock, Colin Herd and Peter Mishler. Photography by Bruno Fert and Nicola Lo Calzo, introduced by Nam Le and Daisy Lafarge. Plus a symposium on Europe, with responses from Marie Darrieussecq, Laurent Gaudé, Alicja Gescinska, Romesh Gunesekera, Michael Hofmann, Srećko Horvat, Tom McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jacqueline Rose and Ludmila Ulitskaya

>>Read Rausing's introduction. 

The Penguin Book of OuLiPo edited by Philip Terry       $50
l'Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the 'workshop for potential literature') was founded in 1960 to test, strengthen and create literary forms through the application of strict compositional constraints. This anthology of 100 pieces, from Queneau, Perec, Calvino and others, shows the range of the OuLiPo's activites. 
>>See also All That is Evident is Suspect. 

Louise Henderson: From life by Felicity Milburn et al       $65
Louise Henderson (1902-1994) worked alongside Rita Angus, John Weeks, Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich and developed a bold, colourful and distinctive abstract style. Despite her prominence there has been no comprehensive survey of her work until now.
>>Radio and slide show. 

Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk       $23
Agnes Day — sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire — has discovered disconcerting gaps in her general understanding of the world. Terminally middle-class and incurably romantic, Agnes finds herself chronically confused by the most basic interactions. Life and love go on without her, but with a little façade she can pass herself off as a success. Beneath the fiction, however, the burden of truth becomes harder to bear. A reissue of Cusk's first novel, first published in 1993. 

An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo        $34
In a run-down neighbourhood, in an unnamed seaside city without amenities, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. When a terrible, macabre event rocks the neighbourhood’s bar district and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. 
"Caputo is a blazing new talent in world literature. Everyone should read this book." —Garth Greenwell

Artificial Intelligence: A guide for thinking humans by Melanie Mitchell       $40
No recent scientific enterprise has been so alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. How intelligent are the best of today's AI programs? To what extent can we entrust them with decisions that affect our lives? How human-like do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us in most, if not all, human endeavours?

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple meals, authentic flavours by Sonoko Sakai        $75
Using seasonal ingredients in simple preparations, Sonoko Sakai offers recipes with a gentle voice and a passion for authentic Japanese cooking. Very nicely presented. 

It All Adds Up: From the dim past to the uncertain future by Saul Bellow        $26
On the one hand, Bellow looks outward at forty years of American cultural history; on the other hand, this reveals what could be said to amount to an autobiography of four decades of ideas. 

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the attention economy by Jenny Odell          $37
In a world where our value is determined by our data productivity, doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. Odell sees our attention as the most precious — and overdrawn — resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humanity's role in the environment, and arrive at a more meaningful understanding of happiness and fulfilment.
>>On the "colonisation of the self by Capitalist notions of efficiency" and other matters. 

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate         $35
Heartbreak, confusion and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time.
"Honest, funny, positive, completely original and inspiring in the very best way." —George Saunders
>>Interview.

Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front by Serhii Plokhy        $50
A hitherto untold story of the co-operation between Soviet and US forces from 1943, including US Airforce bases in Soviet-controlled territory. This book changes the way you think about World War 2. 

Bowie's Books: The hundred literary heroes who changed his life by John O'Connell        $38
Three years before David Bowie died, he made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life — a list that formed something akin to an autobiography. John Connell examines each one, speculates on their effect on Bowie's creative output, and provides and exemplary playlist for each. 
>>The boy that books built. 

Casa Cacao by Ignacio Medina and Jordi Roca     $90
A search for the origins of chocolate, both historically and geographically is also a search for new ways to use the substance in irresistible desserts and baking. Perfect for the chocolate aficionado. 

One Year Drawn by Pete Bossley       $55
As a young architect, Bossley travelled in Europe and the Middle East, drawing the buildings and learning to 'read' them. Bossley looks back on this year, and on the practice of drawing that has become central to his working process. 

Monsters: A magic-lens hunt for creatures of myth, legend, fairy tale and fiction by Céline Potard     $33
Coloured lenses reveal monsters in the most unexpected places. Fun. 

Woodcut Memory Game by Bryan Nash Gill      $40
Can you find the matching pairs in this attractive game based on prints from actual cross sections of various trees?

BOOKS @ VOLUME #154 (23.11.19)

Find out what we've been reading by reading our latest newsletter.

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox       {Reviewed by STELLA} There are many adjectives one could use to describe The Absolute Book. Compelling, compulsive, confusing, considered, crafty and crafted, sublime, beautiful, tragic, awesome (in all the senses of that word), clever, theatrical, hysterical and hilarious, complex, lucid, layered and rich. And these are just some of the words worth attaching to this very, very good novel. It is an immense book — 650 pages of fascination and revelation. Taryn Cornick’s sister Beatrice has been killed — murder or accident? There is no question in Taryn’s mind. Seven years on, she thinks she has moved on but a chance meeting with a hunter, the Muleskinner, who is beguiled by her and her sadness, leads to a chain of unimaginable events that will open gateways to other worlds, states of mind, story-telling and soul-searching. Cornick’s book about libraries and fires has garnered some notice, and she is due on the tour circuit when a police officer, Jacob Berger, starts getting interested in a cold case — the death of Tim Webber, the driver of the car that ran her sister down. Berger suspects foul play and starts to dig. His connection with Taryn will reveal a lot more than he bargained for. Jump back to Taryn and Bea’s childhood visits to their grandparents’ estate, Princess Gate, and a strange encounter with a young scholar, Battle, who is obsessed with finding a book known as the Firestarter. The girls playing in the library witness from behind the curtains Battle’s attempt to start a fire to reveal the mysterious object, and so begins the first glimpse of our encounters with demons, enchantments and story-telling. The Absolute Book moves seamlessly from reality to fantasy. Unlike many books that move between worlds, there is no obvious change in writing style or tone — you are just there — through the gate in the other world with nothing to jar your reading, pushed along by the action. There is much going on at all times on many levels! Knox makes the world within, beside or outside, parallel (whichever it is) believable by taking us with her characters. We are curious and fearless despite demons, the sometimes cold appraisal of the Sidhe, the changes in the landscape, the power and mystery of Shift. In previous Knox books, we have encountered mythical and magical creatures and The Absolute Book is no exception. Blending Norse mythology (the ravens play a mighty role), faerie folklore, popular culture and ancient ritual, history and religion (yes, there are angels), this book has a plethora of layers, which should sink it into a pit of confusion, but it doesn’t — it soars. The brilliance is in the craft — in the language and pace — and in the absolute beauty of the description of the lands and all that live on them (whether on Earth or in the Sidh). It’s a book with a fascinating story — you will want to read on and be taken by Taryn, Jacob and Shift to the places they (and we) must go. It’s story-telling at its best and Elizabeth Knox at her best... so far.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Motherhood by Sheila Heti     {Reviewed by THOMAS} Is flipping coins to determine answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins a good way to guide your life? no Is flipping coins to determine answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins a good way to write a book? no But isn’t this book, Motherhood, which has been written by flipping coins to determine the answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins, in this case Sheila Heti, the author of the book, a good book? yes Is Motherhood a good book, then, because it was written by Sheila Heti rather than because it was written by flipping coins? yes When Sheila—the Sheila who is a character in the book, which the reader is permitted to assume is the same person (whatever that means) as Sheila Heti the author of the book— says, “I don’t think I have a heart—a heart I can consult. Instead, I have these coins,” is that a good way for either the character in the book or the author of the book to proceed? no Is flipping coins to determine the answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins a good way to write a review of a book that has been written by flipping coins to determine the answers to questions posed by the author? no If I wrote a review in such a way, would I be able to do it without cheating, in other words, without only pretending that I had flipped coins when I had not actually flipped coins at all, or flipping the coins but then overriding the outcomes of those coins if they did not suit me? no Would it be better if I didn’t waste time looking for coins to flip, then? yes And Sheila Heti, can I be sure that she didn’t cheat when writing a book by flipping coins to determine the answers to questions she posed? no Does this matter? no In fact, might this not be a good way to compose a novel or somesuch, or find a way out of writer’s block, whatever that is, or determine a way out of any predicament, at least any fictional predicament, given that predicaments usually arise from the presence of binaries—either A or not-A, for example—and so seem to clamour for a resolution that can be expressed in a binary way? yes Just as writing conversation can be a good way to find a way out of writer’s block, whatever that is, even writer’s block visited upon the writing of a book review? yes Even if one side of the conversation says only either yes or no? yes Are the results I might achieve this way satisfactory? no Would the results be satisfactory with a different approach? no Is any of this useful in so-called real life? no But doesn’t Sheila Heti apply this approach to the real-life question—if we accept that the Sheila of the book corresponds to the real-life Sheila, the book’s author—of whether or not she wants to or should have a child, or become a mother, which may or may not imply having a child, depending on how subtly the concept of motherhood is understood or defined? yes So this approach is not useful? no You mean it is useful? yes Can you explain that? no Can Sheila Heti explain that? yes Does she do so in this passage, when she consults her coins?    “Is any of the above true?    no    Is there any use in any of this, if none of it is true?    no    Even if you said yes, it wouldn’t matter. You don’t mean anything to me. You don’t know the future, and you don’t know anything about my life, or what I should be doing. You are complete randomness, without meaning. [However] you have shown me some good things, but that is just me picking up the good in all the nothing you have shown me.” yes As Sheila approaches forty she suffers from ambivalence about whether or not to have a child before it is ‘too late’. She can’t seem to disentangle what might be the expectations of her by others because she is a woman from what might be her biological inclinations as a woman, not that this concept necessarily has any validity, and from her own expectations and inclinations. Is it even possible to disentangle these things? no Would it be true to say that the more you think about things in these terms the less sense these terms make? yes Is there any point in thinking about things in these terms? no Unless, perhaps, it is useful to get to the point at which these terms make no sense? yes Does Sheila obsess over the question of whether or not to have a child as a way of relieving herself of the question of whether or not to have a child? yes A way of avoiding having a child, even? yes Saying yes to having a child would remove the uncertainty of whether or not to have a child and the uncertainty could not be regained, at least not in that form, but saying no merely provides the opportunity for the uncertainty to resurge at the next possible moment for it to be considered. Prevarication is, therefore, such a tiring prophylactic. Is the book to some extent somehow about the deep problems of decision-making, in whatever sphere of life, about whether we can disentangle the force of what we might call ‘will’ from the force of what we might, for want of a better word, call ‘fate’ (‘determinism’ is probably a better word)? yes When Sheila says, “Sometimes I am convinced that a child will add depth to all things—just bring a background of depth and meaning to whatever it is I do. I also think I might have brain cancer. There’s something I can feel in my brain, like a finger pressing down,” is her problem really about depth and meaning rather than about having a child? yes Sheila says, “This will be a book to prevent future tears.” Is this book, Motherhood, perhaps more about depression—Sheila’s, her mother’s, perhaps the reader’s—than it is about motherhood per se? no Sheila says, “I am a blight on my own life.” She says, “Nothing harms the earth more than another person—and nothing harms a person more than being born.” She says, thinking of her decision to be a writer and all the time she has consequently spent arranging commas, “When I was younger, writing felt like more than enough, but now I feel like a drug addict, like I’m missing out on life.” Is there a sense in which writing and ‘living’ are incompatible modes of existence? yes When Sheila states that resisting urges has previously led her to more interesting places, is it useful for her to think about resisting the urge to have a child—wherever that urge originates—as a way of bringing depth and meaning to her life? yes Does she in fact find more depth and meaning by resisting the urge to have a child? yes Does this depth and meaning, or at least the finding of more depth and meaning if not the depth and meaning themselves, have some sort of tangible expression? yes This book? yes Early in the book, Heti identifies her struggles with the mythic struggles of Jacob wrestling with and withstanding the unknown being “until the breaking of the day,” and she concludes the book an altered quote from the Torah: “Then I named this wrestling-place Motherhood, for here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared.” Is that a satisfactory way to end the book? yes Is that a satisfactory way to end my review? no Should I go on? no

In this week's Book of the Week, The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes brings his novelist's perspicacity and his deep interest in French history to the fore in this rich and rewarding portrait of La belle époque, its artists, libertines and narcissists, focused on the life of pioneering surgeon and free-thinker Samuel Pozzi.
>>How is this book a commentary on the "childishness" of Brexit?
>>Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi.
>>Talking in the library.
>>Some other books by Julian Barnes. 
>>On The Noise of Time.
>>Click and collect. 

NEW RELEASES

Essays by Lydia Davis         $50
Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control — wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction.
>>"There's no such thing as no style."

The Fire Fox by Esther Remnant and Mike Gwyther      $25
What can change in a single night? Everything.
In this beautifully illustrated modern re-telling of a classic European folktale, a young boy is visited by an enigmatic creature with a beautiful secret. Together they explore the playfulness, mystery, and danger of nature, before the visitor reveals their true self. A story of joy and loss, that yearns for the endless freedom of childhood. 
>>Visit Esther Remnant's website. 

McSweeney's Twenty-First Anniversary Issue (Issue #57) edited by Claire Boyle        $65
A bumper crop of new art and writing: a 24-page full-color comic, a letters section, a fair-sized collection of stories, a graphic nonfiction experiment called American Pie Graph, and a booklet of cliffhanger tales—all packaged in an elaborate three-fold case. Featuring Oyinkan Braithwaite, Claudia Rankine, Julio Torres, Elena Passarello, Bob Odenkirk, Brian Evenson, Adrienne Celt, Lorrie Moore, Alison Bechdel, Jeff Tweedy, Jerry Saltz, Avery Trufleman, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ken Burns, and other authors, artists, musicians, podcasters, journalists, comedians, young children, lawyers, scholars, and former presidential candidates.
>>Like this!

Will by Will Self         $37
Will Self's adolescence and early adulthood were spent largely under the influence of or on the quest for drugs of some sort or other. It is also the period of his life in which his future directions in literature took form. This third-person memoir is self-excoriating and enjoyable to read. 
>>Will Self in Conversation. 

Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood          $35
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a black mass with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him. Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving towards the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.
"Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb — it is an aftertime song. It is dark, ever so dark, nimble and lethal. It is a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age. Ness is something else, and feels like it always has been." —Max Porter

Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison          $37
An exploration of the depths of longing and obsession from the author of The Empathy Exams.  Always mindful of why and how we tell stories, this book takes us into lives on the fringes — from a woman healed by the song of 'the loneliest whale in the world' to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot — and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of others' lives while striving to find a deeper understanding of the complexities of our own.
"Intelligent, compassionate, and fiercely, prodigiously brave." —Eleanor Catton

>>Reading and answering. 

Child of Glass by Beatrice Alemagna     $40
Gisele is a transparent girl. Not only can she be seen through, her feeling show for anyone to see. How will she learn to live in the world? Wonderful illustrations. 

Transcendence: How humans evolved through fire, language, beauty and time by Gaia Vince        $37
Paleontology meets neurology in this reassessment of our evolutionary history. Humans now live longer than ever before, and we are the most populous big animal on earth. Meanwhile, our closest living relatives, the now-endangered chimpanzees, continue to live as they have for millions of years. We are not like the other animals, yet we evolved through the same process. What are we then? And now we have remade the world, what are we becoming?

Transforming the Welfare State by Jonathan Boston       $15
Not only do we need to alleviate our current serious social problems, but we also need to meet the challenges of the future in a way that enhances intergenerational fairness and wellbeing. The answer, Boston argues, lies in a comprehensive package of reforms covering the benefit system, family assistance, child support, housing, and health care.

Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum worlds and the emergence of spacetime by Sean Carroll       $43
Spanning the history of quantum discoveries, from Einstein and Bohr to the present day, Carroll debunks myths that have grown up around quantum physics, reinstates the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and presents a new path to solving the apparent conflict between quantum mechanics and gravity. 

The Sky is Falling: The unexpected politics of Hollywood's heroes and zombies by Peter Biskind          $26
How the film industry made America ready for the real-life supervillains of right-wing extremism. 
"A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism." —Ruth Reichl
"You'll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn't." —Steven Soderbergh
>>President Trump or Red Skull? 

The Temporary by Rachel Cusk          $23
Ralph Loman works in an unsatisfying job, for a free London newspaper, when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party. Her beauty ignites a blaze of excitement in his troubled heart. But Francine is ravenous for attention, driven by a thirst for conquest, and when Ralph tries politely to extricate himself, he finds he is bound by chains of consequence from which it seems there is no escape. The Temporary paints a merciless portrait of the cut and thrust of modern romance, work and life.

The Last Supper: A summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk         $23
A devastatingly perceptive account of travelling in Italy with her husband and two young children. Their journey leads them to both the expected — the Piero della Francesca trail and queues at the Vatican — and the surprising — an amorous Scottish ex-pat and a longing for home. The book explores the desire to travel and to escape, art and its inspirations, beauty and ugliness, and the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity.

In the Fold by Rachel Cusk       $23
The Hanburys of Egypt Hill are the last word in bohemian living — or so they like to think. Their parties are famous, their relationships confusing, their bravado immense. To Michael, a young student arriving at the house on the hill for Caris Hanbury's eighteenth birthday party, they represent the prospect of relief from the strictures of conformity, and of an enfolding exuberance to which he feels irresistibly attracted. As an adult, Michael finds his own version of the Hanburys. The Alexanders are a wealthy, artistic family for whom moral abandon is almost a point of honour, and their fractious daughter Rebecca is now Michael's wife. While Rebecca struggles with questions of identity and self-expression, Michael becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea of virtue. Why is his life with Rebecca and their son Hamish so destructive and tumultuous? How has his existence become so tarnished, so without principle? When Michael is invited to spend a week with the Hanburys on Egypt Hill his illusions are startlingly confounded. The hill is being spoiled by development; the family are riven by jealousy and deceit; and as the days pass the rotten core of the Hanbury myth is gradually disclosed.

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk        $23
Since leaving his job to look after Alexa, his eight-year-old daughter, Thomas Bradshaw has found the structure of his daily piano practice and the study of musical form brings a nourishment to these difficult middle years. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and his in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife who has accepted a demanding full-time University job? How can this be good for Alexa and for the family as a whole? Meanwhile Tonie tunes herself out of domestic life, into the harder, headier world of work where long-since forgotten memories of herself are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle and alive to previously unimaginable possibilities.
>>Other books by Rachel Cusk!

Pākehā Settlements in a Māori World: New Zealand archaeology, 1769—1960 by Ian Smith         $60
A vivid account of early European experience in these islands, through material evidence offered by the archaeological record. As European exploration in the 1770s gave way to sealing, whaling and timber-felling, Pākehā visitors first became sojourners in small, remote camps, then settlers scattered around the coast. Over time, mission stations were established, alongside farms, businesses and industries, and eventually towns and government centres. Through these decades a small but growing Pākehā population lived within and alongside a Māori world, often interacting closely. This phase drew to a close in the 1850s, as the numbers of Pākehā began to exceed the Māori population, and the wars of the 1860s brought brutal transformation to the emerging society and its economy.
>>Smith speaks. 

I You We Them: Journeys beyond evil, The desk killers in history and today by Dan Gretton         $55
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." —Hannah Arendt

A study of the psychology of some of the least visible perpetrators of crimes against humanity, the 'desk killers' who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the last two hundred years. It is also an exploration of corporate responsibility and personal culpability today, connecting the bureaucratic blindness that created desk killing to the same moral myopia that exists now in the calm, clean offices of global capitalism.

The German House by Annette Hess         $35

A young woman working as an interpreter at a 1963 Nazi war crimes trial finds out rather more than she expected about her own family's complicity in those crimes. 

Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese travel writing from Manyoshu to Basho edited by Meredith McKinney         $30

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940—1956 [and] Volume 2: 1956—1963 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil      $45 each
Most of Plath's extensive correspondence has never before been published, and it is here presented unabridged. 2426 pp in total.

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino         $30

A beautiful new hardback edition of Calvino's early novel in which Cosimo, after a quarrel with his father, climbs a tree and swears never to set foot on the earth again. 

A House in the Mountains: The women who liberated Italy from Fascism by Caroline Moorehead         $40
The story of four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance against the German occupation of the north of Italy in 1943. Well written and interesting. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #153   (16.11.19)

Read our latest newsletter. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi   {Reviewed by STELLA}      Having a conversation over coffee may be an everyday occurrence, but what if that conversation is a pivotal moment in time or in the relationship between two people? How often have we found ourselves in trivial chatter when what we really what to discuss is something a little bit difficult or something embarrassing or a situation that might make us vulnerable? Before the Coffee Gets Cold is not a self-help book for communication! It’s a charming novel from Japanese playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Funiculi Funicula is a basement cafe in Tokyo — unassuming, small and altogether unremarkable except for a bit of urban folklore. It’s rumoured that in this cafe, one has the ability to travel back in time. But… there are rules! You must sit in a particular seat. You cannot change the future. You can only meet people who have also visited the cafe. And there is a time limit — you need to come back before the coffee gets cold. Dividing the book into four distinct stories, ‘The Lovers’, ‘Husband and Wife’, ‘The Sisters’ and ‘Mother and Child’, Kawaguchi touches on abandonment, illness, death and love. These emotional moments are played out with humour and lightness — a charm — that keeps the stories from being bogged down in tragedy. Yet the lives of these cafe visitors are not frivolous, and their conversations are sometimes feisty, confronting or upsetting. The meeting that Fumiko replays with her boyfriend Goro is revealing; that Kohtake has with her husband Fusagi, surprising; that Hirai insists on with her sister Kumi, dramatic; and Kei with her child, intense. In a 100-year-old cafe a specially brewed coffee served in a particular cup from a white kettle, if you sit in a specific seat at this table only, may take you where you need to be, through time, to reveal a deeper understanding of yourself or a loved one. It’s not surprising that this book was a best-seller in Japan, and it originated as a stage play. Add to this the lives, quirks and relationships of the cafe owners, the manager — the enigmatic Kazu — and the regulars who pass through, you have an enchanting, approachable novel with a quirky sensibility.

Goethe Dies by Thomas Bernhard   {Reviewed by THOMAS} The four stories in Goethe Dies were first published in German-language periodicals in the early 1980s, and in them we can see Bernhard exercising the devices and themes he used to greater extent and effect in some of the novels written in his last decade. The title story displays Bernhard’s puckish tendency to appropriate and subvert the biographies of actual people, as he did with Glenn Gould in The Loser. In this story, Goethe, on his deathbed, requests a visit from Wittgenstein, who is living in England (and, in reality, was born nearly 60 years after Goethe’s death). Apart from travelling to England and finding Wittgenstein to have died eight days previously and returning too late to report this to Goethe, who has by then also died, the nameless narrator has no role other than to report the words of another character, or, more commonly, what one character reports of the words of another character, or, often, what one character reports of another character’s report of the words of yet another character. This device of narratorial passivity witnessing not so much the subject but what may well be little more than hearsay (about hearsay about hearsay) about the subject is a favourite of Bernhard’s, continually calling into question any certainty a reader may think they draw from the text. The story ‘Reunion’ destabilises the operations of memory and satirises the narrator who claims to have freed himself from the influence of the tyrannical parents who in fact still dominate him through his memories, compared with the old friend who listens to his rant, who, the narrator claims, never escaped the influence of his parents, and yet who seems not to remember any of the obsessive details of the narrator’s oppressive memories and may therefore be less affected by the shared unhappiness of childhood. These and the other stories display Bernhard’s resentment of reactionary and traditional power, whether that be in a nation (his will states that his books may not be published in his native, hated "Catholic, National Socialist" Austria) or in a family — although he also portrays his resentment is a base and ludicrous act. “Parents make a child and strive above all else to destroy it, I said, my parents just like yours and every parent altogether and everywhere.”  >>Read Thomas's reviews of others of Thomas Bernhard's books.

Our Book of the Week this week is another jaw-dropping novel from the author of The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows:  Deeplight by Frances Hardinge. The gods are dead. Decades ago, they turned on one another and tore each other apart. Nobody knows why. But are they really gone forever? When 15-year-old Hark finds the still-beating heart of a terrifying deity, he risks everything to keep it out of the hands of smugglers, military scientists, and a secret fanatical cult so that he can use it to save the life of his best friend, Jelt.  But with the heart, Jelt gradually and eerily transforms. How long should Hark stay loyal to his friend when he's becoming a monster — and what is Hark willing to sacrifice to save him? 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Stella reviews the book on the radio. 
>>Hardinge discusses Deeplight with her readers. 
>> Hardinge talks with The Sapling. 
>>Visit Frances Hardinge's Twisted City. 
>>"I enjoy the challenge of taking a particularly absurd premise, and then thinking through as many of the mundane implications as possible."
>>The Lie Tree won the Costa Book of the Year award in 2016. 
>>Other books by Frances Hardinge. 

>>We have a signed copy of the beautiful hardback edition of Deeplight to give away, courtesy of Macmillan Publishing. To go in the draw, e-mail us and tell us the name of your favourite mythological denizen of the deep. 

NEW RELEASES

All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu          $30
In these intimate and entertaining essays, Rose Lu takes us through personal history a shopping trip with her Shanghai-born grandparents, her career in the Wellington tech industry, an epic hike through the Himalayas to explore friendship, the weight of stories told and not told about diverse cultures, and the reverberations of our parents' and grandparents' choices. Frank and compassionate, Rose Lu's stories illuminate the cultural and linguistic questions that migrants face, as well as what it is to be a young person living in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand.
>>Read the title essay. 

Neon Daze by Amy Brown           $25
Neon Daze is a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood. As these poems trace the dramatic reconfiguring of one's world, they also upend genre and notions of linear time. Amy Brown's third poetry collection searches restlessly for a way to map a self that is now "part large and old, part new and small".

The Boyfriend by Laura Southgate        $30
The story of a young woman who finds herself subject to the gravitational field of a charismatic older man, The Boyfriend is a cautionary tale about blindly accepting traditional love narratives. This is a clear-eyed, dismaying and often hilarious examination of sexual desire, trauma and growth.
Winner of the 2018 Adam Foundation Prize. 
“This is a scalp-prickling dazzler of a novel, fizzing with quotable lines and remarkable characters—an astute comedy of manners combined with wrenching events that charts a new path through one of humanity’s oldest stories. Laura is an enormously exciting new writer.” —Emily Perkins

Yellow Notebook: Diaries, 1978—1986 by Helen Garner        $37
Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction.

Landfall 238 edited by Emma Neale         $30
WRITERS: John Allison, Ruth Arnison, Emma Barnes, Pera Barrett, Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Anna Kate Blair, Corrina Bland, Cindy Botha, Liz Breslin, Mark Broatch, Tobias Buck, Paolo Caccioppoli, Marisa Cappetta, Janet Charman, Whitney Cox, Mary Cresswell, Jeni Curtis, Jodie Dalgleish, Breton Dukes, David Eggleton, Johanna Emeney, Cerys Fletcher, David Geary, Miriama Gemmell, Susanna Gendall, Gail Ingram, Sam Keenan, Kerry Lane, Peter Le Baige, Helen Lehndorf, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Kirstie McKinnon, Zoe Meager, Lissa Moore, Margaret Moores, Janet Newman, Rachel O'Neill, Claire Orchard, Bob Orr, Jenny Powell, Nina Mingya Powles, Lindsay Rabbitt, Nicholas Reid, Jade Riordan, Gillian Roach, Paul Schimmel, Derek Schulz, Michael Steven, Chris Stewart, Robert Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Annie Villiers, Janet Wainscott, Louise Wallace, Albert Wendt, Iona Winter. ARTISTS: Nigel Brown, Holly Craig, Emil McAvoy.

Strong Words, 2019: The best of the Landfall Essay Competition edited by Emma Neale         $35
Excellent essays from 21 established or emerging writers. Includes Nelson's Justine Whitfield and Becky Manawatu. 

Another by Christian Robinson          $30
What if you...
encountered another perspective?
Discovered another world?
Met another you?

What might you do?
A wonderfully imaginative wordless picture book. 

Life: Selected writings by Tim Flannery           $48
Thirty years of essays, speeches and writing on palaeontology, mammology, environmental science and history, including the science of climate change and the challenges and opportunities we face in addressing this issue.

Animal Languages: The secret conversations of the natural world by Eva Meijer        $40
Are we reluctant to recognise animals as persons, to acknowledge the complexities of their interactions and emotional lives, because we would then have to grant them legal rights? How would this change our lives? 
>>Of course animals speak. The thing is, we don't listen."

Time Lived, Without its Flow by Denise Riley        $23

“I’ll not be writing about death, but an altered condition of life.” Riley's astonishing, unflinching essay on grief, and on its effect upon our perception of time, springs from her experiences after her son's death, and it full of insight. Introduction by Max Porter.  

Selected Stories by Vincent O'Sullivan             $40
Thirty-five stories from seven collections published over forty years.
"For here is the artist, who, through the wide play and finish of his art, lit as it is by the bright loveliness of the world and its humours and warmth, its pleasures of the body and the mind, and by compassion and grace, can only give – of his wisdom, erudition, sensibility – in the utter, utter precision and delicacy of every sentence." —Kirsty Gunn
>>Read Kirsty Gunn' s perceptive assessment of O'Sullivan. 

Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom     $35
"Thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less." Eight sharp essays on media, power, beauty, money, &c. 
"Transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women." —Los Angeles Review of Books 
“Transgressive, provocative, and brilliant.” —Roxane Gay
>>On thinking 'thick'.

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie         $33
From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Beautifully written. 
>>Other books by Jamie. 

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi        $40
We are either racist of antiracist — there is nothing in between. 

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922—1968 by William Feaver         $43
Feaver begins by conjuring Freud's early childhood: Sigmund Freud's grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho—consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret—Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age. The first of two volumes, this is an account of a century told through one of its most important artists. 
>>The only footage of Freud painting. 

Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch          $15
Max and Moritz is perhaps the defining classic of German children's literature. In this darkly hilarious story, two young boys exercise their talent for ingenious mischief in a variety of dazzling tricks. Whether stealing a widow's chickens through her chimney or filling their teacher's pipe with gunpowder, Max and Moritz bring chaos wherever they go.
>>1941 animation. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #152     (9.11.19)

Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, and about new books and book news.