 | The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy {Reviewed by STELLA} Deborah Levy’s books are not what you expect and are better for it. A simple story-line, not predictable but understandable, is usually where she opens — but where she ends is a place of surprise and delight. And always with elegance and tenacity. Levy’s last three novels, including this one, The Man Who Saw Everything, have been long-listed for the Booker Prize. In The Man Who Saw Everything, Saul Adler is a young historian fooling around with his art student girlfriend Jennifer Moreau and readying himself to visit East Germany as part of his research. It’s 1988, just a few years before The Wall comes down. Adler is good-looking and idealistic, somewhat perplexed by his girlfriend, haunted by his mother’s death (he was twelve when she died in an accident) and tormented by his bullying father and brother. When we meet Saul has just been knocked down by a car on a pedestrian crossing. Bruised and a bit bloody he gets himself sorted and limps on to Jennifer's flat. Jennifer Moreau — photographer. Favourite subject of her final year exhibition — Saul Adler and his body. Or so he thinks: “It’s like this Saul Adler: the main subject is not always you. It’s like this Jennifer Moreau: you have made me the main subject.” In this situation, Levy turns the artist's-muse-as-role in on itself, reversing the gender stereotypes. In her work later, Jennifer Moreau is recognised for her observing eye — her ability to see a body in all its fragments through the lens. Saul is banned from saying anything about Moreau’s ‘beauty’ and must be content with the role of the observed rather than the observer. A day like any other — sex with Jennifer in the afternoon — turns out to be the last day of their relationship. Jennifer Moreau is off to America, and when Saul proposes she sends him packing. In East Germany, he meets Walter Müller and his sister Luna. He falls in love with Walter, sleeps with both Walter and Luna, and proceeds to make a hash of his time in East Germany by putting them both under suspicion with the local Stasi. Or so he thinks. There are some clues in this part of the novel to the state of Saul Alder’s mind — he is somewhat paranoid — often questioning people’s behaviour towards him, and the black telephone he sees in Mrs Stechler’s flat in London and in Walter’s mother’s flat are too similar to be ignored, especially when starts tapping the wall, looking for something, but what he is not sure. Levy is playing with her reader, but in the most humorous of ways, as she unpacks Saul for us. And when we arrive in 2016 — Saul is knocked down for a second time on the same crossing — we sense that some cogs have become undone. This time there is no brushing himself off and limping to Jennifer Moreau’s place. He's in hospital and Jennifer is there, as is Rainer the East German informer, and his brother, Matt. As this section of the novel unfolds, you are cast into confusion — not helped by our narrator’s concussion. Memory and time are flipping over each other and Saul Adler is no longer a reliable narrator, but he is our only guide — so read the prompts carefully. It will be rewarding. Excellent writing from Levy reminds me why I return to her work and am always impressed just a little bit more by her concepts of the self, of identity, memory and the impact that human action (and inaction) has on the other and oneself. In The Man Who Saw Everything, she reminds us that the truth is within our grasp but easily clouded by our own disillusion and self-importance. |
 | Exposition by Nathalie Léger {Reviewed by THOMAS} What is the relation between an atemporal — or, rather, idiotemporal — work and the temporality — or evanescence — both of its creation and of its reading? In photography, as in literature, as in any of the so-called arts — and here we turn back before proposing a ‘useful’ definition of ‘art’ — it is the relationship between passing and unpassing time that forms the unterlayer of our understanding of the work, and of what, if anything, we can see beyond it, if it can be said to have a beyond, and, as with all relationships, whether in the arts or in society, the first question must always be one of power. Who or what is affected by who or what at the instigation of who or what? Which forces are here promulgated and which forces are resisted? What is revealed and what is — perhaps by that revelation — concealed? And, more interestingly, what is concealed and what is — perhaps by that concealment — revealed? The ostensible subject, so to call it, in any work of art is of relative insignificance to these considerations, and to the mechanisms of representation to which they give rise. Ostensibly concerning a four-decades-long series of photographs taken of the Countess Virginia Oldoini Castiglione by the Parisian society photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson from the 1850s to the 1890s, Exposition reveals Léger's thinking on exposure, concealment and over-exposure, on representation and self-representation, on the politics of the gaze especially when concerning the power or otherwise of women, on the limited and limiting truths of photography, on time and history, and also, half-reluctantly but therefore crucially, on uncomfortable aspects of her own family history (for instance, on a childhood photograph of Léger that shows her face peering through some bushes was taken by her father’s lover, who was aware that Léger was gazing at their dalliance when thinking herself unseen). “They contemplated her beauty the way people enjoyed freak shows,” says Léger of Castiglione. From her youth, through her time as mistress of Napoleon III in Second Empire France, through to her declining years, Castiglione was obsessed with the way in which she was seen and conscious always of controlling her self-representation, directing Pierson in a stupefying series of lavishly staged and costumed photographs, some recreating — faking — key moments in her life. This project, with its vapid and cloying results, is the work of a woman determined at all costs to keep a gaze upon her but to reveal nothing of herself. She appears “at once defiant and imploring,” both monstrous and needy. Her self-representation is not that of Cindy Sherman for the first gaze in Sherman’s photographs is Sherman’s own, whereas for Castiglione the first gaze is that of the passive, male, invisible photographer. There is a tyranny in her command of the gaze of others but also a desperation, an existential insecurity, a sense that the subject is lost to herself and — impossibly — seeks assurance in the response of others to the fake self she presents (and long before instagram, too). Photography, “her only mask”, is what makes her both visible and impossible to be seen. There is nothing to Castiglione below the surface — or at least not as far as we can tell — she has made herself into an object, her so-called “beauty” is a characterlessness, a blandness; she is an object that demands no sympathies other than admiration, if admiration can be considered a sympathy. Léger is, rightly, not interested in Castiglione beyond her photographic project, but she is interested in the spaces, the absences, in which the ungraspable could exist if it did exist (“Like death, and one or two other little things the subject is simply the name for what cannot be spoken.”). If ellipses are a means of removing content from a sentence without altering its meaning, how much content is the greatest amount that can be removed while preserving enough meaning to at least simulate coherence? At what point does the process of ellipsis itself become the meaning? (>>Read my review of Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden here) |
>>Read Stella's review.
>>"Writing this book was a weird seance."
>>Reading.
>>"My novel is more about the space between what we see and misunderstand, rather than understand."
>>The Psychopathology of the Doppelgänger.
>>How to live with death.
>>Blurring vividly.
>>"The new generation of young women can change the world."
>>Other books by Deborah Levy.
>>Come and discuss the book on 13 February!
NEW RELEASES
Ostensibly concerning a four-decades-long series of photographs taken of the Countess Virginia Oldoini Castiglione from the 1850s to the 1890s, this subtle book reveals Léger's thinking on exposure, concealment and over-exposure, on the gaze and its relevance to the power-status of women, on the limited truths of photography, on time and history, and also, half-reluctantly on aspects of her own family history.
"In Nathalie Leger's magnificent text, everything is turned on its head, everything is paradox. Exposition is the fragile and dangerous attempt to reconstitute the self, to seek, in the secret of another woman the very thing that eludes us within ourselves. Thus it is the ellipsis (the blanks between the fragments) that gives Exposition its beauty and its truthfulness." —Les Inrockuptibles
>>Read an extract.
A sharp, innovative novella from the author of When I Hit You. Karim and Maya are lovers. They share a home, they worry about money, and then Maya falls pregnant. But Karim is still finishing his film degree, pushing against his tutors' insistence that his art must be Arab like him. And Maya, working a zero-hours job and fretting about her family, can't find the time to quit smoking, let alone have a child. Framed with fragments and peppered with footnotes Exquisite Cadavers is at once a bricolage of influence, and a love story that knows no borders.
"Fascinating." —Guardian
An idiosyncratic exploration of mass consumption, both physical and digital, through our relationship with food.
"Ed Atkins is the artist of ugly feelings — gruesome and smeared and depleted. But everything he does in his videos or paintings, I’ve always thought, he really does as a writer. He uses language as a system where everything gets reprocessed and misshapen – a unique and constant mislaying of tone that’s as dizzying as it’s exhilarating." —Adam Thirwell
"Violent, emetic, immoderate, improper, impure – that’s to say it’s the real thing. Atkins’s prose, which may not be prose, adheres to Aragon’s maxim 'Don't think – write'." —Jonathan Meades
>>An extract of Old Food.
>>Hear the author reading another extract.
>>Visit the exhibition.
Kings, lords, liars, usherettes, goal-hangers, gun-men and prostitutes, Whether or not these stories bear any relation to life as it is lived in Endland [sic] is not my problem and good riddance to all those what prefer to read about truly good, lucky and nice people — you won't like this crap at all.
A series of 39 cautionary tales for our digital age, Endland is comical and brutal, set in strangely familiar locations that at times seem like Thatcher-era Northern towns under military rule or post-Brexit council estates after a Farage party bender. And things are leaking into Endland from all over the place. Nothing is stable. Now is also then and next year, a landscape that is future and medieval at the same time. What's more, the gods have started drinking at lunchtime, which can only lead to trouble. In narratives working a bit like poetry or cartoons, in empty tower blocks, midnight diners and bomb-site cities, Endland is a dysfunctional mirror of England.
"Scabrous." —Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>Forced Entertainment.
>>Swimming against the tide.
>>Tim Etchells, Collector of language.
What do we know? And how do we know it? These are essential questions to consider when a functioning democracy is reliant on an informed populace. Yet at this moment in the information age something has gone awry with our public knowledge. Are we cultivating an environment for the sharing of ideas? Who has access to the institutions and practices that hold our collective knowledge? Do we know when to act and when to delegate to experts? Is our education, in the broader sense of the term, sufficient for us to meaningfully participate in public life? From archives and mātauranga Māori to formal education models and knowledge types that inspire action, this multi-author book explores the state of our public knowledge, its potential and how it affects our public life and conversations. With the need to find responsive solutions to the challenges facing us, the health of our public knowledge matters to us all. Contributions by Barnaby Bennett (designer), Golriz Ghahraman (Member of Parliament), Gwynn Compton (public relations), Hannah Benbow (cartoon librarian). Jared Davidson (archivist & historian), Joseph Hullen (Ngai Tuahuriri/Ngati Hinematua), Lana Lopesi (editor), Marianne Elliott (researcher & advocate), Michael Macaulay (Victoria University), Morgan Godfery (writer & trade unionist), Nicola Gaston (University of Auckland), Ruth Boyask (Auckland University of Technology), Sacha McMeeking (researcher & commentator), Sally Blundell (journalist).
Is boredom the enemy of humanity? Does boredom mean our time is being wasted? In this thoughtful picture book, a boy finds that this seemingly stagnant state is actually a portal into a dynamic, mind-blowing experience.
>>All of Shinsuke Yoshitake's books are both thoughtful and playful.
Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flows of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out?
>>The ideas behind the book.
In this hypersharp, subtle and humane novel, Ginzburg portrays a family drawn to the brink of an abyss by one of its member's absence. Introduction by Claire-Louise Bennett.
"Ginzburg's beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement." —Tessa Hadley
>>Read an extract.
>>"The novel’s new English title is evocative. That comma is like the pre–big bang universe shrunk to a pinhead."
>>Read other books by Ginzburg.
"Hanne Ørstavik crafts an atmosphere of unease out of the ordinary. An old man giving a young boy a pair of skates, a man inviting a woman over for coffee, in Orstavik’s hands these seemingly harmless moments become filled with an underlying sense of dread. Longing and loneliness fill these pages, while always there is a sense of the impossibility of real understanding and connection between people. Ørstavik is a true observer of human nature and Love is her masterpiece." —Emily Ballaine
"In Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, the equilibrium between a tense, disquieting plot and a gently experimental binary structure sustain the reader’s attention and awe from beginning to end. The aerial beauty of Martin Aitken’s translation contributes to make the novel a successful rarity: a book that is at the same time a thriller and a dense literary object. 'Perfect' may be the proper adjective to describe it." —National Book Awards citation
"Love is Hanne Ørstavik’s strongest book." —Karl Øve Knausgaard
One of the most important designers and architects of the 20th century, Eileen Gray (1878-1976) wielded enormous influence — though often unacknowledged, especially in her lifetime — in a field largely dominated by men. Today, her iconic designs, including the luxurious Bibendum chair and the refined yet functional E.1027 table, are renowned throughout the world. Resolutely independent and frequently underappreciated, Gray evolved from a creator of opulent lacquer furniture into a pioneer of the modernist principle of form following function. Definitive.
>>See also the graphic novel A House Under the Sun.
As humans evolved, we developed technologies to modify our environment, yet these innovations are increasingly affecting our behavior, biology, and society, as well as having dangerous cumulative consequences for our habitat. Now we must figure out how to function in the world we've created. New Zealand author.
In the late nineteenth century, Tomo, the faithful wife of a government official, is sent to Tokyo, where a heartbreaking task is awaiting her. From among hundreds of geishas and daughters offered up for sale by their families she must select a respectable young girl to become her husband’s new lover. Externally calm, but torn apart inside, Tomo dutifully begins the search for an official mistress.
The characters in the stories in Hall's third collection walk, drive, dream, and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journeys through life, death, and love. Science fiction meets folktale and philosophy meets mortality. A woman with a new generation of pacemaker chooses to shut it down in the Lakeland, the site of her strongest memories. A man repatriated in the near east hears the name of an old love called and must unpack history's dark suitcase. From the new world-waves of female anger and resistance, a mythical creature evolves. And in the woods on the border between warring countries, an old well facilitates a dictator's downfall, before he gains power.
"Sarah Hall is one of those rare writers whose short fiction has the same luminosity as her novels. But the short form allows her more room to probe and roam, to experiment with form, to sink her fingers into the earth." —The Observer
Discover a realm of travel writing little-known in the West - a literary tradition extending over a thousand years: here are asobi, the wandering performers who prefigured geisha; travelling monks who sleep on pillows of grass and listen to the autumnal insects; and a young girl who passionately longs to travel to the capital and read more stories. Interesting.
An interesting history and study of what used to be considered a natural state but which is becoming an increasingly elusive accomplishment.
A guide to 100 Bauhaus structures throughout Germany, often in unexpected places.
The world is not always what we think it is. This book presents unusual borders, enclaves and exclaves, divided or non-existent cities and islands. Numerous conflicts have left countries divided and often shattered. Remnants of countries can by design or accident be left behind as a legal anomaly in this complex world.
Beautifully presented.
A writer tires of trying to improve the literary aspects of his writing and concentrates instead on improving his handwriting as an access route to success. The novelist begins to keep a notebook of handwriting exercises, hoping that if he is able to improve his penmanship, his personal character will also improve.
Stunning photographs of Soviet Metro Stations from across the former states of the USSR and Russia itself. Astounding.
The second of Markovits's projected three novels following the Essinger family is as sharp — and funny — as the first, A Weekend in New York.
A clear analysis of the ways in which fear, and especially induced fear, disempowers society, undermines democracy, and plays into the hands of unscrupulous leaders.
"A brave and beautiful exploration into food, race, memory and the very meaning of life. I read it greedily - and so will you." —Meera Sodha, author of Fresh India
Laurenzo and Jiacomo are identical twins, as alike as two drops of water. No one can tell them apart (which comes in very handy for playing tricks on their teachers). And no one can split them up. But when tragedy strikes their carefree young lives, they must make their own way in the world. As each brother chooses his own path - hardworking Laurenzo to make beautiful objects from gold and silver, and fearless Jiacomo to travel, explore and become an unlikely thief - it is the start of a series of incredible escapades that will test them to their limits. Along the way they will face terrible danger, solve cunning riddles, become prisoners in a castle, sail across the ocean, fall in and out of love, stay at an enchanted inn, help save a priceless pearl, even become kings by mistake. They must use all their talents, wiles and wisdom to survive. From the author of The Letter for the King.
"We've finished the earthly tsars and we're coming for the heavenly ones!" A wonderful assembly of Soviet anti-religious propaganda.
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List #1: FICTION
List #3: SCIENCE & NATURE
List #4: FOOD & DRINK
List #5: BIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR & ESSAYS
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: HISTORY & POLITICS
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
List #10: GRAPHIC NOVELS
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: HISTORY & POLITICS
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
List #10: GRAPHIC NOVELS
 | I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman {Reviewed by STELLA} Forty women are in an underground bunker with no clear understanding of their captivity. Why are they there? What was their life before? And as the years pass, what purpose do the guards, or those who employ the guards, have for them? The narrator of this story is a young woman—captured as a very young child—who knows no past: her life is the bunker. The women she lives with tolerate her but have little to do with her and hardly converse with her. She is not one of them. They have murky memories of being wives, mothers, sisters, workers. They know something catastrophic happened but can not remember what. The Child (nameless) is seen as other, not like them, not from the same place as them. The Child has been passing the days and the years in acceptance, knowing nothing else, but her burgeoning sexuality and her awareness of life beyond the cage (she starts to watch the guards, one young man in particular), limited as it is to this stark underground environment, also triggers an awakeness. She begins to think, to wonder and ask questions. As she counts the time by listening to her heartbeats and wins the trust of a woman in the group, The Child’s observations, not clouded by memories, are pure and exacting. We, as readers, are no closer to understanding the dilemma the women find themselves in, and like them are mystified by the situation. Our view is only that of The Child and what she gleans from the women—their past lives that are words that have little meaning to her, whether that is nature (a flower), culture (music) or social structures (work, relationships)—this world known as Earth is a foreign landscape to her. When the sirens go off one day, the guards abandon their positions and leave. Fortunately for the women, this happens just as they have opened the hatch for food delivery. The young woman climbs through and retrieves a set of keys that have been dropped in the panic. The women are free, but what awaits them is in many ways is another prison. Following the steps to the surface takes them to a barren plain with nothing else in sight. What is this place? Is it Earth? And where are the other people? Will they find their families or partners or other humans? The guards have disappeared within minutes—we never are given any clues to where they have gone—have they vapourised? Have they left in swift and silent aircraft? The women gather supplies, of which there are plenty, and begin to walk. I Who Have Never Known Men is a feminist dystopia in the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale or The Book of the Unnamed Midwife but is more silent, more internal and both frustrating and compelling. I found myself completely captivated by the mystery of this place and the certainty of the young woman. The exploration of humanity and its ability to hope and love within what we would consider a bleak environment, and the magnitude of one woman to gather these women to her and cherish them as they age is exceedingly tender. The introduction by Sophie MacKintosh ( author of The Water Cure), which I recommend reading after rather than before, adds another layer of meaning to the novel. I Who Have Never Known Men is haunting and memorable—a philosophical treatise on what it is to be alone and to be lonely, and what freedom truly is. |
STELLA'S 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR':1. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
2. Spring by Ali Smith
3. The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
4. The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
>> Read all of Stella's reviews.
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Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“‘Today’ is a word that only suicides ought to be allowed to use, it has no meaning for other people.” Even five decades after it was written, this wholly remarkable book continues to reveal new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living.
In the first part of the book, ‘Happy With Ivan’, the unnamed narrator records her obsessive love affair with a man she first sees outside a florist’s shop near her home in Vienna. On account of Ivan, “the rest of the world, where I lived up to now — always in a panic, my mouth full of cotton, the throttle marks on my neck — is reduced to its petty insignificance.” She snatches evenings with Ivan, plays chess with him (resulting in stalemate), writes him letters (which she tears to shreds and throws away, unsent), and talks with him on the telephone, but, mainly, she waits and thinks and smokes. “Ever since I’ve been able to dial this number, my life has finally stopped taking turns for the worse, I’m no longer coming apart at the seams. I hold my breath, stopping time, and call and smoke and wait.” But hers is a desperate happiness, not a convincing happiness, not really happiness at all but a straining towards the impossibility of happiness, agitation trying to pass as happiness. Just as the difference between pleasure and irritation is generally merely a matter of degree, there is, for the narrator, no substantial difference between ostensibly contradictory states and the case for her happiness is made so strenuously that it is clearly made from a position of great unhappiness. Ivan lives along the street, but the narrator shares an apartment with Malina, a civil servant who works at the Austrian Military Museum but who is so compartmentalised in the narrator’s mind that he never makes contact with Ivan, or, rather, never enters the Ivan compartment in the narrator’s mind. Although the narrator interacts with Malina, and we are told of her visiting elsewhere with him, it is very unclear that Malina exists outside the narrator’s mind, or, rather, that he is not an aspect of the narrator. “Ivan hasn’t been warned about me. He doesn’t know with whom he’s running around, that he’s dealing with a phenomenon, an appearance that can also be deceiving, I don’t want to lead Ivan astray but he has never realised that I am double. I am also Malina’s creation.” I increasingly began to suspect that Ivan also exists, at least mostly, in the narrator’s mind, and that, although probably affixed to someone she saw outside the florist’s shop, the Ivan with whom this love affair persists is a never-quite-reachable eidolon of her longing and desperation. “My living body gives Ivan a reference point, maybe it’s the only one, but this same bodily self disturbs me. Extreme self-control lets me accept Ivan’s sitting opposite me.” Is there no exteriority? All these words, these truncated staccato telephone conversations, these endlessly commaed descriptions, these letters and interviews and documents in many versions, these moments and encounters, these details, these memories and revised memories, these stupendous rants, are they all the desperate invention of the narrator (in the same way that the novel is the desperate invention of the author)? “Whatever falls on my ground thrives, I propagate myself with words and also propagate Ivan.”
The second part of the book, ‘The Third Man’, intimates, perhaps, the degree of trauma that underlies the narrator’s agitation and the fracturing of her psyche. Passages, seemingly dreams or memories, describe violence, torment and sexual abuse, largely at the hands of the narrator’s father (and of, by extension, Austria and Nazism), enacted either upon the narrator or upon her naive and complicit alter ego Melanie. “Here there is always violence. Here there is always struggle.” Bachmann’s sentences offer no respite for the reader nor for the narrator. “I don’t want to be any more, because I don’t want war, then put me to sleep, make it end.” The dream sequences are interspersed with conversations, written as script, between the narrator and the rational, interrogating Malina, bringing into her awareness the nature of her trauma, and moving towards the possibility of understanding. “Although it disgusts me to look at him [father], I must, I have to know what danger is still written in his face, I have to know where evil originates.” But, Malina warns, “Once one has survived something the survival itself interferes with understanding.”
The third part, ‘Last Things’, charts the shrinking of the narrator’s world, her gradual inevitable loss of Ivan, either as reality or eidolon, her loss of confidence in herself or hope in her world — and it is much funnier than this list would suggest, though no less tragic. Experience, once replaced with knowledge of — or description of — experience, loses the power of experience. Language at once conjures and replaces — annihilates — what is lived. But, says the narrator, “I must have reached a point where thought is so necessary that it is no longer possible.” Her conversations with Malina drain the reality from Ivan and reveal her isolation and self-suffocation. “I am not one person,” she says, “but two people standing in extreme opposition to one another, which must mean I am always on the verge of being torn in two. If they were separated it would be livable, but scarcely the way it is.” The slow, cumulative, fatal intrusion of rationality is here like a pin being pushed against the surface of a balloon with great, horrible, slow, thrilling patience. “The story of Ivan and me will never be told, since we don’t have any story.” Literature is lack. All that is written is written against the facts. Happiness, or imagined happiness, becomes harder and harder and at last impossible to sustain. The narrator’s ‘I’, her subjective self, “an unknown woman”, catches a last whiff of Ivan in the crack in the wall, enters it and disappears, leaving the rational alter ego, Malina, the cataloguer, the explainer, the understanding mind, to answer the telephone when Ivan rings (their first encounter) and to deny her very existence. The book ends with the bare sentence, “It was murder,” but, if the characters are all fractured parts of a single mind (if there can be such a thing), what is the nature of this ‘murder’? “What is life?” asks Malina. “Whatever can’t be lived.”
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THOMAS'S 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR' (so to call them):1. Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
2. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
3. Lanny by Max Porter
4. Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
>> Read all of Thomas's reviews.
NEW RELEASES
Virginia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virginia's internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virginia's thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice's lifelong quest to discover "the nucleus made of a single instant". Written when Lispector was 23.
"Sphinx, Sorceress. Sacred monster. The Chandelier offers an early glimpse of Clarice Lispector’s power." —The New York Times
How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
The writer of nonsense rhymes was also a serious painter and a gentle, melancholy man for whom the society he so amused with his verses made little room.
"Jenny Uglow has written a great life about an artist with half a life, a biography that might break your heart." —Robert McCrumb, Guardian
Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets. This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets— Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.
>>Redefining the Black Mountain poets.
>>Expressions of something shared.
Each phase of his wandering life is included, from an essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final interviews given shortly before his death in 1977.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, four sisters live in dilapidated houses in Osaka and Ashiya, and each navigate their own complex, personal relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Junichiro Tanizaki evokes in loving detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity.
"An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade. I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century." —David Mitchell
"A near-perfect novel." —Hanya Yanagihara
The 2019 Nobel Laureates in Economics show how traditional western-centric thinking has failed to explain what is happening to people in a newly globalised world. This books shows why migration doesn't follow the law of supply and demand, and why trade liberalisation can drive unemployment up and wages down.
It's New Year's Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Bunny—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow "lunatics" and writing a novel about what brought her there.
"There is a great deal of humor, compassion, and sensitivity for the material. Readers will quickly commit to this extraordinary novel. Laser-sharp prose, compelling observations, and an engaging, sympathetic central figure conspire to make it a page-turner. Rabbits for Food is an impressive achievement. It should be read as soon as possible." —Los Angeles Review of Books
An amnesiac detective on the streets of Paris is unaware that the person he seeks is himself, and that he in somehow implicated in something he cannot remember during the Nazi occupation.
In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the graveyard shift at a factory. Burdened with heavy debts, alienated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives. A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles her philandering, gambling husband. She confesses her crime to her colleagues and unexpectedly, they agree to help.
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.
This history of a widow and her children whose lives were transformed by the conditions of her husband’s will takes readers to the violent frontiers where squatters ran sheep in South Australia and Victoria, to Melbourne, Ireland, England and, occasionally, New Zealand. Caroline’s Dilemma reveals much about women’s property rights, widowhood, sibling relations, migration, settler colonialism, and Catholic-Protestant conflict. It also reminds us why feminists in the 19th century fought so hard first for wives to retain control of their own property, then for limitations on husband’s rights to bequeath family property as they wished, and in the 1970s for fair division of matrimonial property when couples divorced. Both succession law and the question of couples’ claims on relationship property are once again on the legislative agenda in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere.
>>Bettina Bradbury on Radio New Zealand.
Grace Wales Bonner is a 28 year old fashion designer from south-east London. She has been feted by the worlds of both serious culture and high glamour, but here’s the unusual part: her clothes come with reading lists. Interviewed by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri, Grace explains how she sees herself on some level as a researcher. She visits libraries, digests acres of complex ideas about politics and identity, and expresses them, among other things, via the realm of clothes.
The featured book of this issue is Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), supposedly the most decadent novel ever written. Its relentless inventory-keeping thrills and inspires some readers and baffles others, and is highly relevant to this season of non-stop accumulation. Contributors include Jarvis Cocker, Lydia Davis, Rob Doyle and Jeanette Winterson.
We have been asked to name OUR FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR (so far). Click on the titles to read our reviews and to secure your own copies.
THOMAS:
1. Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
2. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
3. Lanny by Max Porter
4. Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
>> Read all of Thomas's reviews.
STELLA:1. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
2. Spring by Ali Smith
3. The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
4. The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
>> Read all of Stella's reviews.
 | 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. |
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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.
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>>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.
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.
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>>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.
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.
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>>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?
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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.
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