 | The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde {Reviewed by STELLA} Maja Lunde, the author of the bestseller The History of Bees, turns her attention to water in her latest novel, The End of The Ocean. Like her first book, this doesn’t feel like the distant future. As fires rage in Australia, the plight of David and his young daughter running towards relative safety is immediate and prescient. This is a book of two linked stories, each as compelling as the other, so you never feel deprived of either when the timeline changes. In 2017, Norwegian Signe, activist and sailor, is making a trip back to her home village. A witness to the chipping away of the glacier to provide special ice cubes for exclusive drinks, she is appalled and critical of her fellow past associates, particularly her ex-partner. Selling out for capital gain or to improve the financial lives of the community is an argument that has not and doesn’t sit well with Signe. On a quest to make a protest, she sails across the ocean to confront her ex-lover. She is driven, passionate and angry, as well as sad. Sad for what has been, what could have been, and what is lost. Lunde delves back into Signe's early life, revealing the circumstances that have made her the eco-warrior she is. And it’s a great story about small communities, about village politics, and being an outsider. Jump to 2041 and meet a father, David, and child, his daughter Lou, newly arrived at a refugee camp. Fleeing fire in the south of France, they are awaiting the arrival of the rest of the family, David's wife and baby son. Days pass, the food and water are depleting. The Red Cross has no information. As more people arrive, the camp becomes unstable and David, at the end of his tether, seeks release by wandering through the mostly abandoned town. David and Lou come across a boat — a small sailing boat perched on a trailer — on a property near the once water-filled river canal. Secured above ground, the boat becomes a refuge for David and a source of imaginative games for Lou. It’s a place away from the chaos of the camp and the danger of flaring tempers as the resources dwindle. In Lunde's first cli-fi book, the focus was bees; here it is fresh and clean water. In 2017, Signe is tackling the commercialisation of water: who owns it and who can sell it. Lunde is clearly sending us some very direct messages about our current behaviour. In 2041, the issue of water is survival — it’s a priority and an obsession. While this is labelled a ‘dystopia’, it doesn’t feel far from fact. Climate fiction can be unrelenting, and there are definite challenges within the pages of The End of the Ocean, but Lunde cleverly draws out characters and stories that are human — her protagonists are not perfect and don't have all the answers, but they are tough and humane, ready to seek connection and hope to survive. There are many dystopian climate-focussed novels currently circulating as this topic becomes hotter and more pressing. Some are bleaker than others. This is well-written, compelling and involving. This is the second in Lunde's climate quartet, so there is more to look forward to. Also try The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, if you like something a little more lyrical or oblique. |
 |
Essays by Lydia Davis {Reviewed by THOMAS}
An essay is a literary form but a collection of essays is not a literary form, or, rather, a collection of essays, unless written specifically as a cohesive set, which is unusual for collections of essays, and in which case they are not usually considered a collection of essays but something else, only becomes a literary form, and only if we stretch our concept of what constitutes a literary form, at the point at which the essays are assembled, selected and ordered by someone, plausibly not even the author of the essays, some time, perhaps some considerable time, after they were written, at various times perhaps over a considerable period of time, during which the author may or may not have changed her approach to whatever and however she writes and may or may not have written and had published any number of other literary forms, if she happens to be an author who also writes other literary forms. ‘Selected works’ is not a literary form, and essay collections often tend to be selected works, these works often having appeared in various periodicals or other platforms over the years preceding their collection, or, generally more accurately, selection. Reviewing a collection of essays, as an instance of a literary non-form, presents certain difficulties as the reviewer is denied the various familiar analytic tools that are dependent on form, usually ending up making some generalised statements about the author, her qualities and importance, and then garnishing these comments with snippets pulled from various of the works in the collection, each work of which could be analysed as a literary form but none of which tend to be so treated, except perhaps cursorily, due to lack of space and time, space and time being a single entity in writing as they are in physics. If a reviewer does not quite know how to approach the literary non-form of a collection of essays this is because a reader, of which a reviewer is merely a pitiful example, does not know how to approach a non-form. A reader has no obligations towards the collectedness of pieces towards which, severally, he may have obligations, but also, at least, thankfully, tools dependent upon the form of the several pieces, but what obligations does a reviewer have towards the collectedness of the pieces? It is hard to review something that you do not recognise as a thing. Lydia Davis is best known for the devastating precision of the sentences that comprise some of the shortest, sharpest stories you are likely to read, and for her subtle and precise translations of Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Leiris and others. Her economy of expression astounds, whether that economy is displayed in a single-sentence fiction, indefinitely extended in a translation, or in such various essays as are collected in this book. The essays, which are of various forms, all concern the relationship between language and lucidity; they all concern writing: either writers or the practice of writing; they are all about reading (of which the practice of writing is a peculiarly freighted subset). The essays all both demonstrate and concern what we could call ‘the mechanics of form’, the way in which language, well used, creates, sharpens or transfigures meaning in literature. Davis shows us how to narrow our linguistic aperture in order to maximise our literary depth of field. She is full of good advice, suggestions for new reading, exemplary sentences and memorable observations: “If we catch only a little of the subject, or only badly, clumsily, incoherently, perhaps we have not destroyed it.” Because a collection is not a literary form, you have no obligation as a reader towards the totality of the volume, but there is much here to enjoy and discover, much that will sharpen your writing and your reading of the writing of others, much to return to and re-read. Most likely you will read it all.
|
>>Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
>>"Life is chancier than we imagine."
>>Murmur was awarded the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize (for a book that engages with some aspect of medicine, health or illness).
>> Murmur was a joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> Murmur was short-listed for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize.
>> Hear the opening section read aloud.
>> NOTHINGINTHERULEBOOK interview with Will Eaves.
>> The author's website.
>> Will Eaves and other CB Editions authors at Shakespeare & Company.
>> 20 questions for Will Eaves.
>> A bit about Alan Turing.
>> The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing.
>> Could you pass the Turing Test?
>> Ian McEwan's new novel Machines Like Me speculates an alternative trajectory for Alan Turing and A.I.
>> Read Thomas's review of The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves.
>> Read Thomas's review of The Inevitable Gift Shop by Will Eaves.
>> Will Eaves performs from The Absent Therapist.
>>YOUR MURMUR HERE!
NEW RELEASES
Each of Eisenberg's perfectly poised, preternaturally aware, precisely composed and enjoyable stories carries the heft and resonance of novels (and take her about as long to write).
>>"Reality is not conventional."
>>"I do feel myself to be anaesthetised."
A woman begins to find unexpected meaning in her life when she accepts the opportunity to care for twin children with unusual and disturbing abilities.
"Weird, funny, but also unexpectedly moving." —Buzzfeed
"In fewer than 100 pages, Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account. She pares a single story from the chorus of condemnations, with their similarities, varieties, truths and perceptions, and through select incidents and emotional focus we see the complex details of the wider picture. It takes an expert in short fiction to condense such a difficult subject, while allowing the reader interpretive space. Gaitskill is phenomenally gifted at the metaphysical microcosmic. She makes the abstruse world clearer. There are many ways the topic will be tackled in literature. This Is Pleasure sensitively and confidently holds its fury, momentum, contrary forces and imperfect humanity within a perfect frame." —Sarah Hall, Guardian
Jones turns his spare, effective prose to good effect in this devastating climate change novel. Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.
"Urgent." —Guardian
A long-overdue, beautifully presented and thoughtfully written monograph on the seven decades of production of this New Zealand artist.
An excellent global survey, well and thoughtfully selected and discussed.
The stories in the this collection tell of determination, endeavour and perseverance against the odds. They range across wildly different contexts and cultures, from the epic to the intimate, in fiction and non-fiction, illustrating and illuminating the outer limits of human character and achievement. With contributions from Max Porter, Kamila Shamsie, Daisy Johnson, Eley Williams, Michael Donkor, David Szalay, Yan Ge, Benjamin Markovitz, Tash Aw, Peter Frankopan, and others.
>>Balvenie Distillery has a collection of whiskies to accompany the stories (or vice-versa). We incline towards the 14-year-old 'Week of Peat'.
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.
A beautifully produced and illustrated edition detailing the astounding history and cultural resonance of this most prized and various of flowers.
First published in 1969 and stylistically Burns's most radical work, Babel is written in short sections of highly condensed, often grammatically difficult prose. Burns targets the state, violence and power, dealing repeatedly with the Vietnam war, the effects of colonialism, religion, the amorality of the political class, the workplace, the violence inherent within the family, with the movement of money and state-sanctioned violence.
Our concepts of our world are severely limited by the narrowness of the sensual sliver to which we have access. Other animals share our world but, with the help of, for instance, infrared or ultraviolet or with 360-degree vision, they perceive it quite differently. This lively, fascinating book looks at ten of humans' 'blind spots' and shows us aspects of our world that we really need to take notice of before it's too late.
Approachable and interesting; good for both novices and aficionados.
LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.
A linked collection of fictional and ficto-critical stories, presenting one person's encounters with a range of birds. The birds in the stories inhabit the same space as the human, but perceive the world in different, often opposing, ways. Embedded in the fictional encounters is a philosophical and theoretical investigation into the ways humans engage with birds. The book examines myths about birds - told in fables and fairy tales, documentaries, and poetry - and their symbolic functions in contemporary culture.
In this volume of typographical poems, Alan Riddell weaves words and the very letters they're made of into shapes and patterns that heighten or, in some cases, completely undermine the professed message of the pieces.
In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General’s beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest—a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever. A classic of modern European literature, a work whose poignant evocation of the past also seems like a prophetic glimpse into the moral abyss of the present.
>>The candle that burned right down.
Some words and phrases do sound a little like some other words and phrases. From Alarm Croc to Cheepy Head, you'll enjoy Rhyme Cordial all day long!
Makes a convincing case that Rome disintegrated due to internal forces and changes rather than because of external invasions.
The most entertaining, incisive and fascinating interviews from the past five years in the Financial Times, including those with Donald Trump, Sheryl Sandberg, Richard Branson, Yanis Varoufakis, Zadie Smith, Nigel Farage, Russell Brand and David Guetta. Illustrated in colour with James Ferguson's portraits.
Providing a cover for our delicate and intricate bodies, the skin is our largest and fastest growing organ. We see it, touch it and live in it every day. It's a habitat for a mesmerizingly complex world of micro-organisms and physical functions that are vital to our health and our survival. It's also one of the first things people see about us and is crucial to our sense of identity. And yet how much do we really know about it?
An excellent mix of activities, information, biographies, illustrations and much more.
Barnetson, who is possibly a wolf, has, while working as a bookseller, drawn these wonderful comics of customer interactions that will resonate with anyone who has worked in retail or been any sort of customer.
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.
From subterranean department store food halls to luxurious top-floor hotel restaurants, and all the noodle shops, sushi bars, and yakitori shacks in between. Exciting.
Definitive, delicious, beautifully presented. 550 recipes covering a vast range of regional cuisines, street and family food.
An attractively presented and extremely appetising book, in which Darling-Gansser returns to Iran, the country of her childhood, and showcases recipes of traditional food.
Surveys the history of changing tastes in food and fine dining — what was available for people to eat, and how it was prepared and served — from prehistory to the present day. Since earliest times food has encompassed so much more than just what we eat — whole societies can be revealed and analysed by their cuisines. In this wide-ranging book, leading historians from Europe and America piece together from a myriad sources the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilisations, past and present, and the pleasures of dining.
Delicious vegetarian recipes that are easy to make and clearly and attractively illustrated.
A delightful book blending Greek and Turkish influences into a distinctive relaxed cuisine.
Features more than 400 home-cooking recipes for everyday and holiday foods from the Middle East to the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa - as well as contemporary interpretations by renowned chefs including Yotam Ottolenghi, Michael Solomonov, and Alex Raij. A definitive compendium of Jewish cuisine, introducing readers to recipes and culinary traditions from Jewish communities throughout the world.
With inspiration from a community of millers, farmers, bakers, and scientists, this book provides a fascinating look into the way artisan bread baking has evolved and continues to change — from wheat farming practices and advances in milling, to sourdough starters and the mechanics of mixing dough.
The definitive book for the flour aficionado.
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.
140 authentic yet accessible recipes highlighting the pre-Hispanic indigenous cuisine of the Oaxaca region.
Noma away from homa. Feeling stuck in his work and home life, writer Jeff Gordinier happened into a fateful meeting with Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, has been called the best in the world. A restless perfectionist, Redzepi was at the top of his game but was looking to tear it all down, to shutter his restaurant and set out for new places, flavours, and recipes. This is the story of the subsequent four years of globe-trotting culinary adventure, with Gordinier joining Redzepi as his Sancho Panza.
"Gordinier takes us into the fabulously obsessive realm of the world's most fascinating chef—and he does it with the voice of a poet." —Ruth Reichl
Using seasonal ingredients in simple preparations, Sonoko Sakai offers recipes with a gentle voice and a passion for authentic Japanese cooking. Very nicely presented.
A beautiful picture book, with recipes from all the various people that live in the apartment building.
Thoroughly delicious (no deep-fried battered Mars Bars).
Vegetable-based recipes from Slater, whose personable, thoughtful books and relaxed approach increase our appreciation of eating and cooking. The Autumn/Winter volume will appear in Spring.
Delicious, quick plant-based evening meals from this most personable of food writers.
From the author of Fresh India.
"Often we need distance and time, both to see things better and to feel closer to them. This is certainly true of the food of my home country, Russia - or Siberia, to be exact. When I think of Siberia, I hear the sound of fresh snow crunching beneath my feet. Today, whenever I crush sea salt flakes between my fingers as I cook, I think of that sound. In this book I feature recipes that are authentic to Siberia, classic Russian flavour combinations and my modern interpretations. You will find dishes from the pre-revolutionary era and the Soviet days, as well as contemporary approaches - revealing a cuisine that is vibrant, nourishing, exciting and above all relevant no matter the time or the place." Nicely done.
Food is one of life's great joys. So why has eating become such a source of anxiety and confusion? Wilson shows that in two generations the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalised ways of eating. Our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time.
There are nearly 1,400 known varieties of wine grapes in the world—from altesse to zierfandler—but 80 percent of the wine we drink is made from only 20 grapes. What are we missing?
Reliable tasting notes and potted histories make this book a good way to widen your whisky experiences.
Flavour and colour from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Sicily, Andalusia, Sardinia, and Catalonia.
______________________________
>>Browse more books in this category.
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
Barnes brings his novelist's perspicacity and his deep interest in French history to the fore in this rich and rewarding portrait of Belle Epoque, its artists, libertines and narcissists, focused on the life of pioneering surgeon and free-thinker Samuel Pozzi.
"One is not born, one rather becomes, a woman." Similarly, one is not born, one rather becomes, Simone de Beauvoir. In this important new biography, drawing on new primary sources. Kirkpatrick sheds light on some of the more complex corners of de Beauvoir's life and gives a remarkably lively reassessment of her relevance to modern feminism and autofiction (so to call it).
Until his recent release to New Zealand, Kurdish jounralist Boochani has been held by the Australian government of Manus island in contravention of international law since 2013. While there he managed to surreptitiously write this book about his experiences.
A collection of very personal essays exploring childhood, marriage, life as an All Black wife, and a poignant and strikingly honest reflection on the death of her first born, Toby.
"Lind Burgess can make you laugh and break your heart, often in the same sentence. Clear-eyed and wise, these essays are the stories we share to survive." —Diana Wichtel
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival, and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant, who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. It's all true. Follows the wildly successful The Diary of a Bookseller.
>>Sean shows us how to deal with a broken Kindle.
>>As it happens.
New Zealand musician Shayne Carter tells the story of a life in music, taking us deep behind the scenes and songs of his riotous teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys and his best-known bands Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer.
"Life life life. Music music music. Girls girls girls. Funny, painful, reflective and raw." - Emily Perkins
>> DoubleHappys live, Dunedin, 1984.
The author of The Queen of the Night delivers a series of superb essays investigating his development as a person and as a writer and activist, intimating how we form our identities both in life and in art. New edition.
"Alexander Chee is the very best kind of essayist, a boon companion in good times and bad, whose confiding voice you'd follow anywhere, just for the wonderful feeling of being understood like never before." - Charles D'Ambrosio
"Masterful." - Roxanne Gay
"Wonderful." - Rebecca Solnit
Essays from one of today's sharpest writers on 'Driving as Metaphor', 'On Rudeness', on parenting, disintegrating relationships and the concept of 'home',on 'women's writing', on the insights that can be gained from a range of artists and writers, and on being sent to Coventry. We highly recommend Cusk's novels Outline, Transit and Kudos.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Read Thomas's reviews of Outline, Transit and Kudos.
Fed up with being on the suffering end of the British housing crisis, Davies left Bristol for a shack in the far west of Cornwall. Rebuilding the shack, and spending more time by herself, she found a greater sense of direction and appreciation of nature.
"You will marvel at the beauty of this book, and rage at the injustice it reveals." —George Monbiot
"Incredibly moving. To find peace and a sense of home after a life so profoundly affected by the housing crisis, is truly inspirational." —Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path
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.
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.
The Diary of a Young Girl in te reo Māori.
>>Published by the New Zealand Holocaust Centre to mark what would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday.
>>Why it's significant Anne Frank's diary has been translated into Te Reo Māori.
After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. Tim Fuller was a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. He was more afraid of getting bored than of anything else. What will Alexandra Fuller draw from his life?
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.
"I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles. How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing? How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland?"
"Sinéad Gleeson has changed the Irish literary landscape, through her advocacy for the female voice. In Constellations, we finally hear her own voice, and it comes from the blood and bones of her body’s history. Sinéad Gleeson is an absolute force: if you want to know where passion and tenacity are born, read this book." - Anne Enright
”Constellations is a glitteringly brilliant book; daring in its voice, beautiful in its forms, challenging in its subjects. It dazzled me with its adventure and ambition. These essays stand as radiant single entities but also, over the book’s course, constellate into a larger structure of thought about what Gleeson calls ‘the story of a life in a body’. Political, poetic, tender and angry, this is a remarkable book." - Robert MacFarlane
"Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read." - Eimear McBride
The second volume of memoir from Ihimaera, following Maori Boy and telling of his experiences as a young writer making his way in a pakeha world, trying to find a place and a voice, exploring his identity and sexuality, and trying to put a secret in his past behind him.
Offers an almost seamless commentary on Tove Jansson's life as it unfolded within Helsinki's bohemian circles and her island home. Spanning fifty years between her art studies and the height of Moomin fame, the letters deal with the bleakness of war, the hopes for love that were dashed and renewed, and her determined attempts to establish herself as an artist.
Lynn Jenner’s deeply thoughtful book enlists the help of deceased cultural eminence Charles Brasch to explore the tensions between words and land, and between society and ecology, as a response to the recent development of the Kāpiti Expressway, a so-called ‘Road of National Significance’.
>>Read Thomas's review.
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
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.
Set around a small family farm on the edge of a bog, a few miles from the river Shannon, Minor Monuments is a collection of essays unfolding from the landscape of the Irish midlands. Taking in the physical and philosophical power of sound and music, and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on a family, Ian Maleney questions the nature of home, memory, and the complex nature of belonging.
"Minor Monuments is brilliant, pulsing with intellect and insight, with each observation composed so beautifully as to be deeply moving. This is the kind of book that changes its reader." – Lisa McInerney
Three decades of the application of Moore's sharp and quirky mind to every cultural manifestation from books to films to politics (and back to books) has left this marvelous residue of essays and criticism. Now in paperback.
>> "The route to truth and beauty is a toll road."
Excellent essays from 21 established or emerging writers. Includes Nelson's Justine Whitfield and Becky Manawatu.
Examines the epochal and cultural phenomenon that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. The manifestations of its influence in contemporary popular culture and (gulp) politics are even wider than you may have suspected.
Every Morning, So Far, I'm Alive by Wendy Parkins $35
A very well-written memoir of a descent from homesickness into depression, contamination phobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and of Parkins's tentative road to recovery. This is a book about claiming the right to tell your own story.
"Penman summons the lives and times of several extravagantly damaged musical geniuses and near-geniuses in (mainly) the brutal context of mid-century America – its racial atrocities, its venality, its murderous conformities. Penman writes an exact, evocative prose as surprising as improvised jazz in its fluid progress from music criticism to social commentary to biography and back. He’s found a way to be erudite without pedantry, entertaining without pandering. His ear for mesmerizing nuance is unmatched by any music critic alive." —Gary Indiana
"Ian Penman is popular music’s Hazlitt – its chief stylist – and his sound is often equal to what he writes about. Each of his essays is an event, so this book is indispensable." —Andrew O’Hagan
"Written with love and joy and squirt gunner’s accuracy with the adjective." —Nicholson Baker
>>Read an extract.
The Mongol Derby is the world's toughest horse race. A feat of endurance across the vast Mongolian plains once traversed by the people of Genghis Khan, competitors ride 25 horses across a distance of 1000km. Many riders don't make it to the finish line. In 2013 19-year-old Lara Prior-Palmer entered the race.
Essays covering everything from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
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.
Why did Heiða Guðný Ásgeirsdóttir turn her back on a modelling career and become a sheep farmer and green activist in Iceland?
>> Meet an Icelandic shepherd.
Spend a year inside the head of this inspired and idiosyncratic thinker, writer and musician as she moves from performances towards the solitary places both outside and inside her head.
>>2016 BTW.
A unique, restless and wide-ranging intellect, unassimilable in her own time or since, Sontag continues to reward both close and not-so-close study. Moser is best known for his outstanding biography of Clarice Lispector.
In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she was a bestselling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.
>>'On My Mind' (1983).
Fascinating and well-written investigations of the fraught interface between the personal and the collective, springing from an interrogation of five axioms: 'Give Me a Child Before the Age of 7 and I'll Give You the (Wo)Man', 'History Repeats Itself...', 'Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It', 'You Can't Enter The Same River Twice', and 'Time Heals All Wounds' - finding all to be both true and untrue, helpful and unhelpful, liberating and restricting.
>>The drowned and the saved.
From her entry into parliament in 1975 at age 23 until the epoch-changing 1984 general election that was triggered by her telling Robert Muldoon that she intended to cross the floor to vote against the National government on nuclear- free legislation.
>>Muldoon calls the snap election after consulting the Governor General and the bottle.
"A beguiling series of vignettes, by turns wry, amusing and disturbing, inspired by self-portraits by women artists and reflecting on the images they provoke. An illuminating survey of the author's various identities, in a fractured world, as mother, lover and writer." —Michèle Roberts
"A new genre is born: the short selfie collection! Lively, inventive, compassionate, aching, morally complex and troubling, I loved these self-portraits more than anything I’ve read lately." — Lauren Elkin
>>Read Thomas's review.
From June 1797 to the autumn of 1798, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth lived on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset and began to explore a new way of looking at the world — and their place in it — as devotees of nature and of the unfettered mind, effectively inventing the Romantic movement.
"The perfect marriage of poetry and place." —Robert McCrum, Guardian
________________________________
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present.
Winner of the 2019 Booker International Prize.
“What knocks me out about The Wind That Lays Waste—a novel that starts in the great pause before a storm—is how it delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension. The story centres around a reverend who is evangelising across the Argentinian countryside with his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God, or fate, leads them to an ageing, atheist mechanic and his young helper. As a long, strangely intimate day passes, curious tensions ebb and flow, until finally the storm breaks over the plains. Perfectly translated by Chris Andrews, this is a book for readers who like that metallic taste and the feeling of the hairs on the back of their necks rising.”—Barbara Epler
Unfortunately, the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale seems more plausible now than it was when the book was first published in 1985. The recent television series and the graphic novel are now followed by this sequel written by Atwood to further explore the workings of Gilead and to disclose what happens to Offred after the van door slams at the end of the first book. Atwood is one of the sharpest observers of power imbalances in human relationships and of injustice in society, and her books provide liberating ways of thinking about these issues. One of the most anticipated books of the year.
Joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize.
>>Read Stella's review.
In the wholly remarkable Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Bachmann draws the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men, who may or may not exist outside her head. Viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety — and genius.
"If I was permitted to keep only one book it would be Malina. Malina has everything." —Claire-Louise Bennett
"Malina continually reveals new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living. The best book I've read this year." —Thomas
>>Read Thomas's review.
A strange, elegant and compelling new novel from the author of the Census (one of our favourite books of 2018). What happens when a society renounces the pretence of equality, when small acts of kindness are practically unknown, when what we would see as cruelty is sanctioned? This book is a subtle, spare and affecting meditation on violence, longing and beauty.
>>Read Stella's review.
Two middle-aged Irish gangsters in a Spanish port await a ferry from Tangier in their search for the wayward daughter of one of them. Barry is brilliant at catching the voices of the two, and at capturing lives that resonate with both pathos and humour. Charlie and Maurice are Barry's equivalents of Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, opening depths of humanity despite their limitations as persons.
"A true wonder." —Max Porter
"Visionary. What distinguishes the book beyond its humour, terror and the beauty of description is its moral perception." —Guardian
"Brilliantly funny and terrifying at once, I was completely lost inside its dark craziness. Barry blends glorious voluptuous prose with entrancing storytelling." —Tessa Hadley
>>Read Thomas's review.
First published in 1949, Böll's novel centres on the story of a German soldier, Andreas, taking a train from Paris (France) to Przemyśl (Poland). The story focuses on the experience of German soldiers during the Second World War on the Eastern Front where fighting was particularly vicious and unforgiving.
A blackly comic novel about lies, love, Lagos, and how blood is thicker - and more difficult to get out of the carpet - than water.
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the fit doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other.
Short-listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
30-year-old Millie is overwhelmed by her unexpressed feelings of rancour - to the extent that she cannot express or achieve anything. "A skewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment. Butler has already proven herself a master of writing about work and its discontents, the absurdity of cubicle life and office work in all of its dead ends. The New Me takes it to a new level." -The Millions
"A definitive work of millennial literature." - The New Yorker
“A dark comedy of female rage. Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, showing us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement. Hilarious.” - Catherine Lacey
"Masterfully cringe-inducing. Makes the reader squirm and laugh out loud simultaneously.” —Chicago Tribune
a novel told in overlapping vignettes, which follow the travels of a young Argentinian woman across Europe (Malaga, Madrid, Heidelberg, Berlin) and back to Argentina (Buenos Aires, Patagonia) as she flees from situation to situation, job to job, and relationship to relationship. Within the complexity of the narrator's situation, a backstory emerges about a brutal murder in Patagonia which she may or may not be implicated in, but whether this is the cause of her flight is never entirely clear — she is driven as much by psychological concerns, her relationship with her father, uncertainty about her identity and purpose in life.
>Read Stella's review.
A completely remarkable novel providing access to the mind of Alan Turing (here 'Alec Pryor') as he undergoes chemical castration after being convicted of homosexuality. Eaves's insights into the nature of consciousness and identity, and their implications for artificial intelligence, are subtle and humane. New edition. Highly recommended.
"A really extraordinary book, unlike any other." —Max Porter
"A shining example of the moral and imaginative possibilities of the novel." —The Guardian
Winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize. Co-winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Each of Eisenberg's perfectly poised, preternaturally aware, precisely composed and enjoyable stories carries the heft and resonance of novels (and take her about as long to write).
>>"Reality is not conventional."
>>"I do feel myself to be anaesthetised."
An Ohio mother bakes pies while the the world bombards her with radioactivity and fake facts. She worries about her children, caramelisation, chickens, guns, tardigrades, medical bills, environmental disaster, mystifying confrontations at the supermarket, and the best time to plant nasturtiums. She regrets most of her past, a million tiny embarrassments, her poverty, the loss of her mother, and the genocide on which the United States was founded. Lucy Ellmann's scorching indictment of the ills of modern life is also a plea for kindness, a remarkable virtuoso sentence, and an unforgivably funny evocation of the relentlessness of one person's thoughts.
"A triumph." —Guardian
Winner of the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize.
>>Read Thomas's review.
A novel in which twelve interconnected stories chart the lives and experiences of black women in contemporary Britain.
"Bernadine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life." —Ali Smith
"Bernadine Evaristo is one of those writers who should be read by everyone, everywhere. Her tales marry down-to-earth characters with engrossing storylines about identity and the UK today." —Elif Shafak
Joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize.
Can a person's life and identity by captured or constructed by the careful creation of a signature perfume? What would a novel be like if it was constructed according to the sense of smell? A new novel from the author of The Hut Builder, Edwin and Matilda and The Quiet Spectacular.
"In fewer than 100 pages, Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account. She pares a single story from the chorus of condemnations, with their similarities, varieties, truths and perceptions, and through select incidents and emotional focus we see the complex details of the wider picture. It takes an expert in short fiction to condense such a difficult subject, while allowing the reader interpretive space. Gaitskill is phenomenally gifted at the metaphysical microcosmic. She makes the abstruse world clearer. There are many ways the topic will be tackled in literature. This Is Pleasure sensitively and confidently holds its fury, momentum, contrary forces and imperfect humanity within a perfect frame." —Sarah Hall, Guardian
The story of the body of Bwana Daudi, 'the Doctor', the explorer David Livingstone — and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country. In Petina Gappah's novel, it is those in the shadows of history — those who saved a white man's bones; his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march — whose voices are conjured.
"Engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative." —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing
Bengali legend meets history meets politics meets adventure as Ghosh breaks new ground in this novel addressing crises of our time: climate change and migration. The novel is his first since The Great Derangement, his book that examines our inability — at the level of literature, history, and politics — to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
New fiction from Andrew O'Hagan, Elif Shafak, Adam Foulds, David Means, Jem Day Calder, Magododi OuMphela Makhene, Caroline Albertine Minor, Thomas Pierce, Adam O'Fallon Price, Amor Towles. And Tom Bamforth on the refugee camp in Bangladesh known as 'Cox's Bazaar'.
A tripartite story of relationships across boundaries of age, gender, politics and nationality.
“Asymmetry is extraordinary. Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.” — The New York Times Book Review
"A scorchingly intelligent first novel...Asymmetry will make you a better reader, a more active noticer. It hones your senses." - The New York Times
"A book unlike any you've read." - Chuck Harbach
>>Read Stella's review.
First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. Hardwick's experience of living in the twentieth century is indelibly presented in the most remarkable sentences.
"A series of fleeting images and memories united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose." —Sally Rooney
"Extraordinary and haunting." —Joan Didion
""Brilliant, brittle and strange, unlike any preconceived notion of what a novel could be. Few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave." —Lauren Groff
"A novel of mental weather that enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash." —Susan Sontag
>>Read Thomas's review.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman $26
"I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.'' Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl — the fortieth prisoner — sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. A compelling feminist science fiction novel, first published in Belgium in 1997.
"A small miracle." —The New York Times
>>Read Stella's review.
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes $35
A fiercely feminist novel of the Trojan War, seen through the eyes of the women and goddesses caught up in it.
Pūrākau: Māori myths retold by Māori writers edited by Whiti Hereaka and Witi Ihimaera $38
An important new collection, written by Jacqueline Carter, David Geary, Patricia Grace, Briar Grace-Smith, Whiti Hereaka, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kelly Joseph, Hemi, Kelly, Nic Low, Tina Makereti, Kelly Ana Morey, Paula Morris, Frazer Rangihuna, Renee, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Clayton Te Kohe, Hone Tuwhare and Briar Wood.
>>Read Thomas's review.
"I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.'' Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl — the fortieth prisoner — sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. A compelling feminist science fiction novel, first published in Belgium in 1997.
"A small miracle." —The New York Times
>>Read Stella's review.
A fiercely feminist novel of the Trojan War, seen through the eyes of the women and goddesses caught up in it.
An important new collection, written by Jacqueline Carter, David Geary, Patricia Grace, Briar Grace-Smith, Whiti Hereaka, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kelly Joseph, Hemi, Kelly, Nic Low, Tina Makereti, Kelly Ana Morey, Paula Morris, Frazer Rangihuna, Renee, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Clayton Te Kohe, Hone Tuwhare and Briar Wood.
When Ettie the Rabbi's daughter conjures a golem named Ava to protect Lea from the Nazis, can the three of them do more good than just survive? Can they even survive?
"Hoffman's exploration of the world of good and evil, and the constant contest between them, is unflinching. The book builds and builds, as she weaves together, seamlessly, the stories of people in the most desperate of circumstances - and then it delivers with a tremendous punch." —Elizabeth Strout
“Wilson’s Odyssey feels like a restoration of an old, familiar building that had over the years been encrusted with too much gilt. She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” - Financial Times
"This translation will change the way the poem is read in English." - The Guardian
"Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianising (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean." - NPR
The much anticipated autofictional novel from the author of What I Loved. The process by which an author looks back on her earlier self and turns their mutual regard into fiction is utterly compelling.
"Among the many riches of Siri Hustvedt's portrait of a young woman finding her way as an artist are her reflections on how acts of remembering, if they reach deep enough, can heal the broken present, as well as on the inherent uncanniness of feeling oneself brought into being by the writing hand. Her reflections are no less profound for being couched as philosophical comedy of a Shandean variety." - J. M. Coetzee
Marlon James follows his remarkable 2015 Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings with this remarkable fusion of African mythology, history and fantasy.
"Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's." —Neil Gaiman
>>Read Stella's review.
Jones turns his spare, effective prose to good effect in this devastating climate change novel. Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.
"Urgent." —Guardian
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of the American Dream. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. Until one day they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Devastated and unmoored, Celestial finds herself struggling to hold on to the love that has been her centre, taking comfort in Andre, their closest friend. When Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, he returns home ready to resume their life together.
Winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
“The prose is luminous, striking and utterly moving." —Judges' citation
Keenan's madcap and brutal novel hinges on the comradery between the members of a Provisional IRA cell in Belfast in the 1970s, whose madcap and brutal activities include kidnap, violence, arguing about the relative merits of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, and running a comics shop. Interesting to read in comparison with Anna Burns's Milkman, also set in Catholic Belfast in the 1970s.
The much-anticipated new novel from Elizabeth Knox is an epic fantasy that draws us deep into actuality, and is a book powerful on many levels.
"An angelic book, an apocalyptic book, an astounding book." —Francis Spufford
"The master is present. To read Knox on such a huge canvas – to be immersed in her worlds, wrapped in her intelligence and craft so completely – is an experience not to be missed. Lessing, Le Guin, Knox – books where the best hearts meet the best minds meet the best imaginations are few and far between. The Absolute Book is a triumph of fantasy grounded in the reality and challenges of the moment we live in." —Pip Adam
>>Read Stella's review.
An excellent, wide and thoughtful selection, beautifully presented. More than half the stories appear here in English for the first time.
Paula is lazy young woman mired in a rut. In the shallows of the internet she is pushed to a moment of profound realisation: she, too, is but a lonely Asian woman looking for fun. The debut novel of Wellington author Sharon Lam (currently living in Hong Kong) is a wildly sentimental book about a life populated by doubles and transient friends, whirrs of off-kilter bathroom fans and divinatory whiffs of chlorine. Lonely Asian Woman is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world. Funny from the first sentence on.
>> Read an excerpt.
In a not-too-distant (and, metaphorically, not-too-different) future, Britain is surrounded by a vast wall that keeps out not only the higher seas that are the result of climate change, but also the refugees and other 'Others' who want to get in. In atrocious conditions, the walls are guarded by the young, but if any Others get in , the same number of Defenders are put adrift in the sea. Will Kavanagh and Hifa survive?
"The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman
An insightful and well written novel about the impossibility of raising a son well in an age of toxic masculinity, from the author of pleasingly inventive Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04.
"A novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight and deep psychological sensitivity. The future of the novel is here." —Sally Rooney
"The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date. It's a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it's written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired." —Maggie Nelson
"In Ben Lerner's riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present. The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects but is at the very center of our country's most insidious crises. In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner lives of one white family's interconnected strengths and silences. What's revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is Lerner's most essential and provocative creation yet." —Claudia Rankine
Levy's new novel is both subtle and audacious, exposing power play on both personal and epochal levels in the story of a man hit twice by cars on the same crossing but in different decades, causing his life to turn under itself like a Möbius strip.
"Brilliant." —Sam Byers, Guardian
A family from New York take a road trip into the parts of the US that used to be Mexico as a convoy of children approach the dangerous US border from the Mexican side, and an inhumane reception.
"Beautiful, pleasurable, engrossing, beguiling, brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising." - James Wood, New Yorker
"A mould-breaking new classic. The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli's hands - electric, elastic, alluring, new." - New York Times
"Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America's border policy in this roving and rather beautiful form-busting novel. Among the tale's many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing." - Daily Mail
"A novelist of a rare vitality." - Ali Smith
From the author of The History of Bees comes another remarkable novel dealing with environmental catastrophe, this time a global shortage of water. Parallel narratives in 2019 and 2041 chart depths of human resilience, and reveal a love story, too.
When Jim Sams woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed (from a cockroach) into the most powerful man in Britain. Once reviled by all, he now sets off to enact the will of the people. Nothing — legality, decency, common sense or the rules of parliamentary democracy — will stand in his way. Does this sound somehow familiar?
>>Read the first section.
Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In this alternative 1980s London, Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. What happens when a love triangle develops between these three?
"Intelligent mischief." - Guardian
>>Read Stella's review.
Darkly comic, surreal and full of explorations of human vulnerability and eccentricity.
Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A sales assistant makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the dresses she sells. A woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest.
"Carmen Maria Machado is the best writer of cognitive dysphoria I’ve read in years. " - Tor
"Life is too short to be afraid of nothing." - Machado
Auē is the sound of sorrow. Sorrow resonates through this multivocal novel about damaged childhoods and the strength that gets children through them.
“Auē is a novel I could not stop reading” —Renée
In a 14th century England a group of quite various individuals set off for France and into the oncoming disaster of the Black Death.
"One of the many deep and destabilising pleasures Meek’s rich and strange new novel offers comes from trying to work out precisely what kind of a book – and what kind of a world – you are in at any particular moment. At the centre of this beautiful novel is an exploration of the difference between romance and true love, allegory and reality, history and the present. It plays out in unexpected and delightful ways." —Guardian
A strange old book in the library stacks sends its finder on a perplexing quest, including to a subterranean library. From the author of The Night Circus.
It is high summer in rural Northumberland. Seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents have joined an encampment run by an archaeology professor with an interest in the region's dark history of ritual sacrifice. As Silvie finds a glimpse of new freedoms with the professor's students, her relationship with her overbearing father begins to deteriorate, until the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
US National Book Award winner.
"By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit." —J.M. Coetzee
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.
Umuahia, Nigeria. Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his most prized chickens into the water below to demonstrate the severity of the fall. The woman, Ndali, is moved by his sacrifice. Bonded by this strange night on the bridge, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love. But Ndali is from a wealthy family, and when they officially object to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a small college in Cyprus. Once in Cyprus, he discovers that all is not what it seems. Furious at a world that continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further and further away from his dream, from Ndali and the place he called home. Partly based on a true story, An Orchestra of Minorities is also a contemporary twist on Homer’s Odyssey. In the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
The Wild West might well be wilder than expected in this novel in which a woman waits with her youngest son and her husband's 17-year-old cousin for her husband to return from seeking water, and for her older sons to return after an argument. Is a mysterious beast stalking the land? What lies beyond the safety of the homestead? The decision is made to set off on an expedition that will change everything.
"This exquisite frontier tale from the author of The Tiger’s Wife is a timely exploration of the darkness beneath the American dream. Inland’s message is a rebuke to isolationist US policies written with a panache and heart." —Guardian
Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
A boundlessly imagined novel using fairy tale tropes, talking dolls, immigrants from forgotten countries and brushes with death to create a compelling and deeply satisfying story.
"A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam." - Ali Smith
"Exhilarating. A wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel." - The New York Times Book Review
"Is there an author working today who is comparable to Helen Oyeyemi? She might be the only contemporary author for whom it’s not hyperbole to claim she’s sui generis, and I don’t think it’s a stretch either to say she’s a genius, as opposed to talented or newsworthy or relevant or accomplished, each of her novels daring more in storytelling than the one before. After reading any of her novels or her short story collection, you emerge as if from a dream, your sense of how things work pleasurably put out of order. If we read procedurals to enjoy a sense of order restored, everything put it in its place, we read Oyeyemi for the opposite reason, yet she is no less suspenseful." - Los Angeles Review of Books
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice, and the power of place.
""Irresistible. As always, Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." —Guardian
In a radically changed Aotearoa New Zealand, Van's life in the swamp is hazardous. Sheltered by Rau and Matewai, he mines plastic and trades to survive. When a young visitor summons him to the fenced settlement on the hill, he is offered a new and frightening responsibility: a perilous inland journey that leads to a tense confrontation and the prospect of a rebuilt world.
The much anticipated new novel from the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers taps deep veins of language and folklore as it tells of a young boy who becomes the focus of a mythical force.
"It's hard to express how much I loved Lanny. Books this good don't come along very often. It's a novel like no other, an exhilarating, disquieting, joyous read. It will reach into your chest and take hold of your heart." - Maggie O'Farrell
>>Read Stella's and Thomas's reviews.
When Gilbert Silvester, a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film, awakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees - immediately, irrationally, inexplicably - for Japan. In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Suddenly, from Gilbert's directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima. Falling into step with another pilgrim - a young Japanese student called Yosa, clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide - Gilbert travels with Yosa across Basho's disappearing Japan, one in search of his perfect ending and the other the new beginning that will give his life meaning.
Short-listed for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
"Almost miraculous in its successful blending of potentially clashing tones. The Pine Islands is a story that doesn’t tie up loose ends but leaves themes scattered as needles on the forest floor, allowing the reader to spot their patterns. The best approach to this beguiling, unpredictable book is to follow Gilbert’s advice on reciting poetry: 'to let it affect you, and simply accept it in all its striking, irrational beauty'." - The Guardian
The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret "twin" tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.
Schweblin manages to bury deep into the darkest recesses of her characters' and her readers' minds and find some small detail that inverts their reading of their situations. These superb stories demonstrate how unexpected events and situations bring to the fore aspects of their characters that the characters had hitherto been unaware.
>> Read Thomas's review of Schweblin's Fever Dream.
Andreas Lehman returns to the island off the coast of Norway on which he grew up, and starts to unravel the secrets of his past. What was the island's owner's connection with the Nazis via the wartime Quisling government? What horrendous experiments were made upon the island's inhabitants? Well and tightly written, disconcerting and complex.
>> Read Stella's review.
What happens when a surgeon makes a mistake? The consequences and the contributing factors of and to misadventure reach deeply into the personal and professional lives of those involved. Elizabeth Taylor's life has been defined by her perfectionism but now it is dominated by her mistake.
>>Read Stella's review.
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.
"Her best book yet." - Observer
>>Read Stella's review.
Doggerland supposes a world in the not so distant future suffering the effects of climate change, pollution, surveillance and decay. It tells the story of an old man (who isn't really that old) and a boy (who isn't really still a boy) living alone in a post apocalyptic world tending to a vast wind farm.
"An unremittingly wet book, damp and cold and rusted, blasted by waves and tempests, but also warm, generous and often genuinely moving. It is a debut of considerable force, emotional weight and technical acumen." -Guardian
"The Road meets Waiting for Godot: powerful, unforgettable, unique." - Melissa Harrison
Smith's first short story collection showcases her restless intellect, eclectic interests and verbal prowess, ranging through forms from Chekhovian neatness to autofiction to speculative delimitation.
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
In April 1988, Valerie Solanas - the writer, radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol - was discovered dead in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco. She was 52, alone, penniless and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a voice to the writer of the SCUM Manifesto.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout $35
Strout's new novel follows the lovably blunt Olive Kitteridge through the second half of her life, as she responds to changes both in her own life and in the wider community of Crosby, Maine.
"Writing of this quality comes from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue." —Hilary Mantel
In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream.
"Muscle unfolds like a series of Russian dolls, each more Beckettian, winding and wonderful than the one before. Compelling enough to read in one gulping go." - Daisy Johnson
"Rare and accomplished - it teases out classic noir riffs and set-ups but in a language sinuous enough, and with invention ripe enough, to make them feel new." - Kevin Barry
Following his Booker Prize-winning The Underground Railroad, Whitehead unearths another shocking strand of US history, setting his novel in a hellish reform school in Jim-Crow-era Florida.
No-one's sanity is safe from the pen (or, plausibly, keyboard) of novelist Nell Zink. This novel tackles the 90s music scene, hipsterdom, climate change and political misadventures on the minimal and maximal scale. It is hugely funny, audacious, sharp and indelible (as you would expect).
"Doxology is superb. In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, it’s the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss." —The New York Times
>>Read Stella's review.
A nicely presented series of outstanding short stories from Kazuo Ishiguro, Djuna Barnes, Sally Rooney, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Aickman, Edna O'Brien, P.D. James, Akhil Sharma, Sylvia Plath, and others.
_____________________________
>>Browse more books in this category.
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
Once, the mighty tohora, or southern right whale, was a common sight in winter off the coast of Aotearoa. But it proved to be an easy target for the 19th-century whalers, and was soon driven to the edge of extinction. In the 20th century, however, it became a protected species, and once commercial whaling was virtually stopped, the southern right whale made a comeback.
Gavin Bishop's beautiful large-format book features the various animals (birds! fish! insects! mammals! reptiles!), both native and introduced, that live on land and in the waters and air of the cluster of islands that we share with them. Both browsable and readable, the book is an excellent source of information for a wide age-range, a guide to environmental concerns, and a handsome companion volume to the splendid Aotearoa: The New Zealand story.
For the next generation of green fingers there are different ways to bring nature into the home. Make your own pots, build balcony boxes, create your own bird feeders and even get friendly with worms! Each activity has been carefully chosen to create living, renewable and sustainable environments for kids and their families. Each activity has been carefully written by Kirsten Bradley, a leading practitioner in permaculture for kids and co-founder of Milkwood permaculture farm in Australia, and the book is illustrated by Romanian folk artist Aitch.
An exquisite illustrated book telling the story of Tupaia, Tahitian priest navigator, who sailed on board the Endeavour with Captain Cook on his first voyage to Aotearoa. Follow Tupaia as he grows up in Ra'iatea, becoming a high-ranking 'arioi and master navigator. Join him as he meets up with Cook in Tahiti and sails as part of the crew on the Endeavour across the Pacific to Aotearoa. Witness the encounters between tangata whenua and the crew as the ship sails around the coast, and discover the important role Tupaia plays as translator and cultural interpreter.
>>Watch the trailer!
A bilingual graphic novel accessibly exploring the history and importance of New Zealand's founding document.
Equips your whanau with the first words you need to speak te reo at home together.
Fun facts! Incredible illustrations!
Moves from children's natural curiosity to develop philosophical enquiry.
Bend water with static power. Pack a suitcase for a trip to space. Design a new musical instrument. This wonderful book is full of activities centred on seven key scientific areas: force and motion, electricity and magnetism, earth and space, light, matter, sound, and mathematics.
Did you know that mathematics can be beautiful and that it is used in nature every single day? Have you ever wondered how prime numbers can protect us, or why bees use hexagons in their hives?
Why do grannies always tell us to speak up? Why do they have creases on their faces? Are grannies flexible? How do you cheer up a sad granny? How old are grannies, actually? All your questions are answered — and several more besides — in this delightful illustrated book.
>>Read Stella's review.
At last — an honest and funny book about sexuality, bodies, puberty, &c. All the questions came from eight- and nine-year-olds, and are answered clearly and straight-forwardly. The drawings are very funny.
A beautifully presented large-format guide to the human body and its wonders.
A fact-filled tour of the world's most wonderful winged creatures. Yuval Zommer's distinctive illustrations show off some of the most colorful, flamboyant, impressive, and wacky birds of the sky.
>>Other wonderful books by Zommer.
Follow! Point! Press! Interact with the bright, bold artwork to complete simple activities using your fingers. Follow the wiggly dog to pat him on the head, help the butterflies get to the flowers and lots more. Features tactile embossing on every page. These activities are perfect for encouraging the development of fine motor skills.
______________________________________
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
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.
When Circle, Square and Triangle play hide-and-seek, Triangle hides against the rules - in the dark. Who else is hiding there?
The te reo Māori edition of The Noisy Book is even more fun than the English-language version!
An endlessly enjoyable large hardback collection of Cowley's best poems and stories. Absolutely both giveable and haveable.
A boy finds that with some help from his nana and a costume that gives him the confidence to be himself, he is at last able to make the perfect bomb into the water.
2019 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year.
The same in te Reo.
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? Another jaw-dropping novel from the author of The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows.
>>Read Stella's review.
Once upon a time there were a frog and a toad who were very good friends. Frog was always enthusiastic — Toad wasn't so sure. All four deeply loved 'Frog and Toad' books now appear in one lovely hardback volume.
There was once a man who believed he owned everything and set out to survey what was his. "You are mine," Fausto said to the flower, the sheep, and the mountain, and they all bowed before him. But they were not enough for Fausto, so he conquered a boat and set out to sea...
>>On the making of Fausto.
An estranged family’s tragic story is incrementally revealed in this surreal young adults' novel. Family abuse and neglect and disordered substance use are part of the lives of many of the characters here, but, at the root, this white family has been poisoned by virulent racism.
"Heavily meditative, this strange and heart-wrenching tale is stunningly original." - Kirkus
At school, Selina is teased for her big, frizzy hair. Kids call her ‘mophead’. She ties her hair up this way and that way and tries to fit in. Until one day, after Sam Hunt visits her school, Selina gives up the game. She decides to let her hair out, to embrace her difference, to be WILD!
How do various animals jump? How do you jump?
War had meant that Omar must leave Afghanistan with his mother and journey across the sea. When their boat sinks, they are washed ashore and have experiences they never could have imagined. Morpurgo's riff on Gulliver's travels carries important messages in a world beset by displacement and populism.
>>"The world is getting nastier."
Do you dare to enter the house of Madame M? Who is hiding inside? Who is Madame M? A wonderfully spooky and quirky lift-the-flap book — full of surprises — from the creator of Inside the Villains.
A lively story of various goings-on told through texts, Instagram posts, emails, fliers, committee minutes, posters, diary entries, blog posts, chatrooms, school homework, raps and the reliably bonkers community noticeboard. Inventive and fun.
"Wildly inventive and a goatload of fun. A surprise triple reverse jackknife to the funny bone. I’ve never read anything like it. Tumeke!" —Toby Morris
>>Look inside!
Sixteen-year-old scholarship student Hetty was one of the first to show signs of the Tox. Over the last 18 months, she’s watched it ravage her classmates and teachers as they wait, quarantined within school grounds, for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop and deliver a cure. The Tox affects everyone differently: Hetty’s right eye sealed itself shut; her best friend, Byatt, grew a second, exterior spine; Reese has a sharp, silver-scaled left hand and glowing hair. Why is this happening? What does this mean?
In La Belle Sauvage, Lyra Belaqua, who featured in Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' series was a baby. In The Secret Commonwealth she is 20 years old and, with her daemon Pantalaimon, she is struggling to find a way through an increasingly complicated world, a world in which her loyalties and judgements are called constantly into question. Can Lyra keep her feet as her horizons expand at dizzying speed?
>>Read Stella's review.
When the artist Vincent van Gogh cuts off his ear, the ear is suddenly left alone and headless. What will become of her? Where should she go? What should she do? Acutely aware of how small and insignificant she is in the big, wide world, the ear experiences something of an identity crisis. Silly.
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.
What if you...
encountered another perspective?
Discovered another world?
Met another you?
What might you do?
A wonderfully imaginative wordless picture book.
At last! The fourth volume superbly illustrated by Jim Kay.
An exciting adventure from the author of Rooftoppers and The Wolf Wilder. "Vita set her jaw, and nodded at New York City in greeting, as a boxer greets an opponent before a fight." Fresh off the boat from England, Vita Marlowe has a job to do. Her beloved grandfather Jack has been cheated out of his home and possessions by a notorious conman with Mafia connections. Seeing Jack's spirit is broken, Vita is desperate to make him happy again, so she devises a plan to outwit his enemies and recover his home. She finds a young pickpocket, working the streets of the city. And, nearby, two boys with highly unusual skills and secrets of their own are about to be pulled into her lawless, death-defying plan.
Every evening Lampie the lighthouse keeper’s daughter must light a lantern to warn ships away from the rocks. But one stormy night disaster strikes. The lantern goes out, a ship is wrecked and an adventure begins. In disgrace, Lampie is sent to work as a maid at the Admiral’s Black House, where rumour has it that a monster lurks in the tower. But what she finds there is stranger and more beautiful than any monster. Soon Lampie is drawn into a fairytale adventure in a world of mermaids and pirates, where she must fight with all her might for friendship, freedom and the right to be different.
There are two peoples living in the city of Ursa: the Cerels and the Travesters. Travesters move freely and enjoy a fine quality of life. Cerel men are kept in wild camps and the women are no longer allowed to have children. The Director presides over all with an iron fist. Fifteen-year-old Leho can’t remember a time when Cerels lived without fear in Ursa. His parents once tried to organise an uprising – his mother was blinded, and his father was taken away. But now his world is changing. Revolution is coming. People will die. Will Leho be able to save his family?
>>Read Stella's review.
A Viking girl is swept by a storm on to a desolate English beach. Cruelly orphaned there, Ylva becomes set on revenge, tracking a killer through dangerous hinterland. She wants only the favour of the Norse gods and the comfort of her stories. But when a stranger decides to protect Ylva - seeming to understand her where others cannot - Ylva must decide if her story will end in vengeance or forgiveness.
Being small can be overwhelming in a city. People don't see you. The loud sounds of the sirens and cyclists can be scary. And the streets are so busy it can make your brain feel like there's too much stuff in it. But if you know where to find good hiding places, warm dryer vents that blow out hot steam that smells like summer, music to listen to or friends to say hi to, there can be comfort in the city, too. We follow our little protagonist, who knows all about what its like to be small in the city, as he gives his best advice for surviving there.
Grandpa’s in the hospital and hating it. He swears at the nurses and makes trouble for everyone. Dad finds it too stressful to visit, but Gottfried Junior visits Grandpa as often as he’s allowed, and when he’s not allowed, he goes anyway. Grandpa thinks only of the place he was happiest—the island where he lived with Grandma. He wants to go back one last time, but they won’t let him out of the hospital. Gottfried Junior and Grandpa take things into their own hands. If running away is the only way to the island, then they’ll be runaways.
_____________________________________________
>>Browse more books in this category.
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
Aotearoa New Zealand was founded on stargazing. It was celestial navigation that brought the first people here, and it was tatai arorangi, Maori astronomy, that helped people survive once they arrived. There is no better place on Earth to view the brilliance of other worlds. Covering eclipses, aurorae, comets and constellations, backyard observatories, traditional stargazers and world-class astrophotographers, this is the unique story of Te Whanau Marama, our family of light - the night sky that glows above us all.
The earliest evidence of a human and a pet can be traced as far back as 26,000 BC in France where a boy and his 'canid' took a walk through a cave. Their foot and paw prints were preserved together on the muddy cave floor, and smoke from the torch the boy carried was left on the walls, allowing archaeologists to carbon-date their journey. And so, the story unfolds, from these prehistoric days all the way up to the present, of our innate and undeniable need to live in the close company of animals.
Bryson has led us on discursive journeys through various places — from Britain to his house — and he is always great company. In this book he applies his anecdotal style to a wander through our own bodies.
A beautifully written journey through the phenomena (both objective and subjective) and frozen histories of the Arctic an the Antarctic via the holdings of remarkable museums (including the world's northernmost museum at Upernavik in Greenland). A subtle exploration of the relationship between humans and habitats that are both harsh and fragile.
"A wonderful book. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow - I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth. " - Dan Richards (author of Climbing Days)
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.
We have no 'inner life'. There are no 'depths' to plumb. The unconscious is a myth. There is only surface and nothing beneath. Chater challenges the bases of psychology using the latest research and a determination to show that all thought actually takes place in the moment. Fascinating, provocative and convincing.
"Light the touchpaper and stand well back." - New Scientist
Since the 1970s, astronomers have been aware that galaxies have far too little matter in them to account for the way they spin around: they should fly apart, but something concealed holds them together. That 'something' is dark matter — invisible material in five times the quantity of the familiar stuff of stars and planets. By the 1990s we also knew that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Something, named dark energy, is pushing it to expand faster and faster. Across the universe,this requires enough energy that the equivalent mass would be nearly fourteen times greater than all the visible material in existence.
Imagination is the faculty that distinguishes homo sapiens most from other species, but just how do we form images of things that are not, and then how do we convert these into things that are?
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.
Quantum physics tells us that a particle can be in two places at once. Indeed, that particle is also a wave, and everything in the quantum world can be described entirely in terms of waves, or entirely in terms of particles, whichever you prefer. All of this was clear by the end of the 1920s. But to the great distress of many physicists, let alone ordinary mortals, nobody has ever been able to come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on. Physicists have sought 'quanta of solace' in a variety of more or less convincing interpretations. Gribbin introduces us to six.
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.
A remarkably hopeful look at the coming of beneficent AI and their partnership with humans as part of an organic planetary consciousness, 'Gaia'.
Everyone knows that rockets are just toys, the stuff of cranks and pulp magazines. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, an engineering student named Frank Malina set out to prove the doubters wrong. With the help of his friend Jack Parsons, a grandiose and occult-obsessed explosives enthusiast, Malina embarked on a journey that took him from junk yards and desert lots to the heights of the military-industrial complex. Malina designed the first American rocket to reach space and established the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But trouble soon found him: the FBI suspected Malina of being a communist.
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?
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?
Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength, and the greatest reason we can trust it.
Cloudspotter Gavin Pretor-Pinney delivers a moment of calm atmospheric contemplation to members of his Cloud Appreciation Society by sharing a cloud image and story every day.
When Priestley visited Antarctica in 2011, it fulfilled a life's dream but also brought her anxieties to the fore. She has visited twice since, spending time with Antarctic scientists including paleo-climatologists, biologists, geologists, glaciologists exploring the landscape, marvelling at wildlife from orca to tardigrades, and occasionally getting very cold. Her anxiety has been her constant companion, anxiety both for herself and for the future of the continent and the planet.
Scientific information about brain plasticity shows that there is no such thing as a 'male' or 'female' brain other than what society makes them to be - there are only brains. We need to move beyond our binary thinking to fully understand the wondrous organ in our craniums.
Rutt travels to the remotest edges of the British Isles in search of the seabirds that make their homes there. In the face of a looming environmental crisis, his investigation is both personal and passionate.
Can machines be creative? Will they soon be able to learn from the art that moves us, and understand what distinguishes it from the mundane? Du Sautoy examines the nature of creativity, as well as providing an essential guide into how algorithms work, and the mathematical rules underpinning them. He asks how much of our emotional response to art is a product of our brains reacting to pattern and structure, and exactly what it is to be creative in mathematics, art, language and music.
>> Too dangerous to release?
Without calculus, there would be no computers, no microwave ovens, no GPS, no space travel. But before it gave us almost infinite powers, calculus was behind centuries of controversy, competition, and even death. One of the most anticipated books on mathematics of the year.
Out of sight, underfoot, unseen beyond fleeting scuttles or darting flights, insects occupy a hidden world, yet are essential to sustaining life on earth. Insects influence our ecosystem like a ripple effect on water. They arrived when life first moved to dry land, they preceded — and survived — the dinosaurs, they outnumber the grains of sand on all the world's beaches, and they will be here long after us. Working quietly but tirelessly, they give us food, uphold our ecosystems, can heal our wounds and even digest plastic.
Our concepts of our world are severely limited by the narrowness of the sensual sliver to which we have access. Other animals share our world but, with the help of, for instance, infrared or ultraviolet or with 360-degree vision, they perceive it quite differently. This lively, fascinating book looks at ten of humans' 'blind spots' and shows us aspects of our world that we really need to take notice of before it's too late.
A well-illustrated survey of native flora and its significance in culture, history, medicine, craft and cuisine.
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?
The effects of climate change are only beginning to be felt. Soon they will be impossible to ignore, and they will change the way we do everything. Why have we done next to nothing to avoid this?
______________________________________
>>Browse more books in this category.
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
A handsome edition collecting poems from 1960 to the present.
"Fleur Adcock has written some of the best poems in world literature." - The Spinoff
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 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.
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 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".
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
An attempt to get close to the central figure of the Carolingian renaissance, through reassessment and re-reassessment of sources and preceding histories.
One of the best-known historians of British India turns his attentions to the corporation that defeated the Mughal emperor with a private army in 1765 and installed a new regime in which the company transformed itself into an aggressive colonial power, levying taxes and by the early nineteenth century controlling most of the Indian subcontinent and parts of South East Asia with a private army twice the size of the British Army.
A 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Outlines concrete and achievable steps of policy reform to address the climate crisis.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Fifty years of tramping. Beautifully photographed.
"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
Wheeler travelled across eight time zones, guided by the writers of the Golden Age: Pushkin to Tolstoy via Gogol and Turgenev.
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 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
_____________________________________
>>Browse more books in this category.
>>Return to the GIFT SELECTOR.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An outstanding collection of photographs of Bourgeois and her Brooklyn Studio and Chelsea house in New York.
>>Now, Now, Louisson.
Astounding survey of 500 Mid-Century Modern house around the world.
Records the craft practices of Maori, Pakeha and the peoples of the Pacific.
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.
An unparalleled collection of kiwiana has been assembled in Fernyhough's extensive bach (where better?).
Provides unique insight into the work and the artistic, social and environmental contexts of this exceptional artist.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
Traces 400 years of art through scientific discoveries, pigment development and exemplary works.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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 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.
A global survey of more than 100 artists, chosen by art-world professionals for their work with threads, stitching, and textiles.
Featuring 25 buildings by this outstanding yet hitherto underdocumented architect, with essays from Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Hana Scott, Bill McKay and Gregory O'Brien.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.'
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.
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.
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
_________________________________
>>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
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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
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?
Using seasonal ingredients in simple preparations, Sonoko Sakai offers recipes with a gentle voice and a passion for authentic Japanese cooking. Very nicely presented.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coloured lenses reveal monsters in the most unexpected places. Fun.
Can you find the matching pairs in this attractive game based on prints from actual cross sections of various trees?
