>> Read all Thomas's reviews. 



































































 
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilled upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948-49 Naqba/War of Independence. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for each of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerry cans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas




 


























 

Dance Prone by David Coventry     {Reviewed by STELLA}
Remember those gigs when your body was a sledgehammer slamming itself any which way and your aural senses were overwhelmed in the best hedonistic way, where the dance floor was small and cramped, where sometimes you ducked a fist and danced on. The opening lines of David Coventry’s new novel, Dance Prone, gives us the viewpoint of Con, the lead singer of a post-punk band in mid-80s America, watching the chaos unfold. Con is up for it, pushing to the edge of control, looking for perfection in chaos with his band, Neues Bauen. Yet like Coventry's first novel, The Invisible Mile, the setting isn’t exactly the theme. His brilliant debut took out the best first book at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2016, picked up for international publication and translated into numerous languages. Dance Prone looks set for a similar trajectory if the writing is anything to go by. This is the best New Zealand book I have read in a long time, and one of the most affecting novels about trauma, memory and its fallout, where language, pace and tension are expertly pitched and the chaotic music scene notches the decibels up to a level to absorb you in this world. Though it’s not all high intensity. The reflective passages, descriptions of people and place keep us anchored, and the dark humour keeps us amused, even when the psychological aspects of Con’s story threaten to flood our senses. We meet Con over several distinct periods in his life (between the 80s when he is a young man and 2020 when he is in his early 50s) as he intersects with his past band-mates and re-engages, or attempts to re-engage, with pivotal incidents. Not far in, we are beset by a shocking incident. It is wholly unexpected to the reader as it is to Con. Suddenly violence is very near and very real. This incident sets off a trigger of actions and inactions from Con and a crazy reaction from Tone, his kiwi bandmate. As Tone recovers in the hospital and the band tours the dives and front lounges of fans, Con finds himself split in two — before and after — and bereft of explanation and knowledge. Here we start to dig into the themes of denial and memory, or the erasure of fact. In the desert, appropriately, at an indie music gig complete with existential philosophy, this all comes to a head. As the story moves back and forth in time, the action and telling unfold alongside Con’s awareness. As he hides from the truth, the truth is hidden from the reader. What happens in Phoenix is only revealed by a scratchy video of the band’s last gig seen by Con in Marrakech in 2019, where he is searching for Tone, now living in the remote mountains with a group of artist-activists. Add to this a sweet romance, some great riffs on bands, the indie scene and philosophical rants, seemingly senseless behaviour and cravings for artistic perfection, and you have a deft and nuanced novel. And Coventry can write. Each sentence places you where you want to be, each conversation adds another dimension and the plot unfolds with a tension that keeps the bowstring taut and rewards with the aim of the arrow. Intelligent, intimate and raw, Dance Prone is stunning.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
This week's Book of the Week is the highly anticipated and entirely wonderful new novel from David Coventry, Dance Prone, which traces the effects of personal trauma from the context of the 1980s post-punk scene through its characters' lives and relationships and into the deserts of Morocco. It is a deeply thoughtful and achingly well-written exploration of memory, wild possibility, emotional harm and frustrated idealism. 
>>"

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
NEW RELEASES
Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam         $35
It is Saturday afternoon and two boys’ schools are locked in battle for college rugby supremacy. Priya — a fifteen year old who barely belongs — watches from the sidelines. Then it is Saturday night and the team is partying, Priya's friends have evaporated and she isn't sure what to do. Gnanalingam's new novel addresses New Zealand's culture of masculinity, racism and sexual predation, and the ways in which institutions seem often to have priorities than acknowledging victims' needs. 
>>"There are ways of being male without it coming at the expense of other people." 
>>"How do brown bodies move in white spaces in New Zealand?"
>>Sodden Downstream was short-listed for the 2018 Acorn Price for Fiction. 
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne         $37
Some stories are universal. Some are unique. They play out across human history. This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons. One with his father's violence in his blood. One with his mother's artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life among the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. Can this pattern be escaped? An astounding new novel from the author of The Heart's Invisible Furies, A History of Loneliness and A Ladder to the Sky. 
"John Boyne brings a completely fresh eye to the most important stories. He is one of the greatest craftsmen in contemporary literature." —Colum McCann
Rat King Landlord by Murdoch Stephens           $25
Colossal rats invade from the Wellington town belt. Your rent is going up but everyone is calling it a summer of love. Cryptic posters appear around town inciting people to join an evening of mayhem. Until now the rats have contented themselves with scraps. But as summer heats up and the cost of living skyrockets, we can no longer ignore that our friends are seeking their own rung on the property ladder.
>>"The real challenge for a community is how to self-rule beyond the easy villains." 
A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux          $37
Annie Ernaux revisits the night fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another's will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man's, and then he moves on, leaving her bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, is the vital origin of her writing life, her writer's identity.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Years. 
Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton        $65
A beautifully presented and illustrated record of the work and life of one of New Zealand's most recognisable sculptors, a man of warmth and  vitality, whose works are daring, sensual and provocative.
Theft by Luke Brown         $40
What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This was London, 2016. Paul has awoken to the fact that he will always be better known for reviewing haircuts than for his literary journalism. He is about to be kicked out of his cheap flat in east London and his sister has gone missing after an argument about what to do with the house where they grew up, after their mother's death. When Paul is granted a rare interview with Emily Nardini, a cult author, and is then received into her surprisingly grand home, everything begins to skid. A satire of the intersection of personal and political crises under the cloud of Brexit. 
"A wry and stylish look at male privilege." —Financial Times
"Is this the most loathsome hipster in modern fiction?" —Telegraph
Fracture by Andrés Neuman          $33
In 2011, Mr Watanabe, a Japanese electronics executive, is in Tokyo when the earthquake that precedes the Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes. In the aftermath, he fins himself on a journey to Fukushima, a tourist of the current day tragedy that mimics his own experiences of World War II. For Mr Watanabe is one of the few double hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The earthquake shifts his and others memories of those events. Meanwhile, four women based in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid tell their own stories of knowing and loving Mr Watanabe, a victim of one of the largest collective traumas of the last century. Fracture encompasses some of the most urgent political, social and environmental questions of contemporary life, about collective trauma, memory and love.
Pencils You Should Know: A history of the ultimate writing utensil in 75 anecdotes by Caroline Weaver        $35
Interesting, quirky and well-illustrated. Recommended for anyone who gets excited about the new Palomino Blackwing or a perfectly sharpened No. 2 Ticonderoga.
>>Also recommended: The Secret Life of the Pencil. 
Olia Hercules owes some of her earliest and fondest memories to the 'summer kitchens' of her parents, grandparents, neighbours and friends in Ukraine. These small buildings are separate from the main house, and always positioned near a fruit plot or veg patch so families can enjoy the home-grown produce as it ripens, and preserve the surplus in preparation for winter. The number of summer kitchens is dwindling these days, but there is still so much we can learn about making the most of the vibrant summer produce throughout the rest of the year. 
"A complete revelation." —Nigella Lawson
Bulletproof Vest by Kenneth Rosen           $22
The New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment. He was travelling into Mosul, Iraq, when he realized that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself. From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, or Kevlar, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and mundane applications are often lost, as it is now synonymous with body armor, war zones, and domestic terrorism. What Rosen learned through intimate use of his vest was that it acts as a metaphor for all the precautions we take toward digital, physical, and social security. Bulletproof Vest is at once an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of a bulletproof vest on a molecular level and on the world stage. It's also an ode to living precariously, an open letter that defends the notion that life is worth the risk.
Stranger than Kindness by Nick Cave          $70
A journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller and cultural icon Nick Cave. This highly collectible book contains images selected by Cave from 'Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition', presented by the Royal Danish Library in partnership with Arts Centre Melbourne. Featuring full-colour reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs and collected personal artefacts, it presents Cave's life, work and inspiration and explores his many real and imagined universes, with texts from Cave and Darcey Steinke on themes that are central to Cave's work.
>>A trailer for the exhibition. 
>>The song, live, 1987. 
Te Papa to Berlin: The making of two museums by Ken Gorbey         $40
After working on the development and realisation of Te Papa, Gorbey was recruited to salvage the Jewish Museum Berlin. 


Island Dreams: Mapping an obsession by Gavin Francis       $45
Blending stories of his own travels with psychology, philosophy and great voyages from literature, Francis sheds new light on the importance of islands and isolation in our collective consciousness.
Environment by Rolf Halden         $22
What do we mean by environment? It affects everything we do and the way we think; we are part of it and yet we are uncertain how to think of it. 
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville         $48
What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? Grenville's first novel in a decade. 
The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power           $37
A relentless advocate for promoting human rights, Power has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America's "foremost thinkers on foreign policy." The Education of an Idealist traces Power's extraordinary journey, from Irish immigrant to human rights activist to war-zone correspondent to United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
>>Samantha Power talks with Paula Morris. 
Advice to Young Musicians by Robert Schuman and Steven Isserlis        $25
Steven Isserlis revisits Schuman's perennial text and adds commentary of his own. 
>>Isserlis plays the Schuman 'Cello Concerto Op.129. 
Abigail and the Restless Raindrop by Matthew Cunningham and Sarah Wilkins         $20
Abigail is a little girl with big questions. Find out about the water cycle with her in this beautifully illustrated New Zealand book. 
What is goodness? Is goodness achievable, and if so, how? If being a good person is a matter of doing the right thing, then what is the right thing to do? Is it acting rationally, promoting happiness, exercising moderation in all things or respecting the freedom of others, or is it somehow a concoction of all these abilities, wisely adjusted to suit circumstances?
A previously untold history of New Zealand homosexual soldiers in World War II, drawing on the experiences of ordinary men who lived through extraordinary times. At the centre of the story are New Zealand soldiers Harold Robinson, Ralph Dyer and Douglas Morison, who shared a queer identity and love of performance. Through their roles as female impersonators in Kiwi concert parties in the Pacific and Egypt they found a place to live as gay men within the military forces.
Pluses and Minuses: How maths solves our problems by Stefan Buijsman           $37
Thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia became the first humans to make complex calculations numbers. Since then, mathematics has become an unstoppable force. It's behind almost everything, from search engines to cruise control, from coffee-makers to timetables. But now that we hardly ever need to do arithmetic, how relevant is mathematics to everyday life?
[Can the case that could be made for 'plusses' over 'pluses' be so easily made for 'busses' over 'buses'?]
Rootbound: Rewilding a life by Alice Vincent         $33
"A book about heartbreak, salvation, nature and balcony gardens. Alice Vincent mixes memoir with botanical history to explore how plants can heal us." —Huffington Post 
"Rootbound is a poignant testimony to the joy that greenery will bring to your life, and it is a magical reminder that humans, like plants, can mend and grow in their own good time." —Independent 








VOLUME BooksNew releases

>> Read all Stella's reviews.























Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell    {Reviewed by STELLA}
This evocative, heart-breaking and revealing story of grief lays bare the genesis of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet. Yet in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, Shakespeare as we know him hardly has a role. Set almost exclusively in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon and centred around the domestic life of his wife and family, Will is referred to as the Latin tutor, the glover’s son, the father, the husband. and is often working away — letters arriving at intervals. Who do we meet on the first pages, but the son — desperately searching for an adult to help him. His sister is unwell and the plague is present. From here, as time and the shadow of death make their presence known, we circle back increment by increment into the world of this child and his sister, of the mother, of the extended family and the village. We circle further back to the young Latin tutor gazing out the window, bored by the tedium of his job with boys who will never become any great things, and spying a youth (at first he mistakes his future wife for a lad) with a bird (later we meet this kestrel) upon her arm; and circle back again to the reasons why he is entrenched in this wearisome role — his violent and domineering father. Agnes is central and crucial in this novel. O’Farrell takes what little knowledge of Shakespeare's wife and brings her to the reader as a full and fascinating woman in her own right. She reels from the pages with her supposed eccentricities — she is a gifted healer, a lover of plants and the wilderness (seen by some in the community as a wild thing — a woman shunned by some but needed by others) — and her independent life. Emotional and emotive, sly and quiet, when death visits at her door, her grief is unbounded. Life has been snatched from her in a startling and, to her, an uncomprehending way. Agnes and Hamnet hold you in the grooves of this novel, make you want more, and they will stay with you long after the covers are closed. You reside within Hamnet’s mind as he navigates his twin sister’s illness, as he tries to find sense in the madness of the fever and the adult world that stands just outside his grip. You walk alongside Agnes as she loses herself in nature’s wildness to emerge into a world that can only tear at her, yet is necessary for survival and the memories that bind her child to her. Each character offers up a story —  a way of seeing this world and telling its tale — a tragedy wrapped in intrigue on a small stage with rippling emotions. Hamnet is historical fiction at its best — in the vain of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series — it sets you fair and square in this time with all its life, death and drama. Immersive, compelling and rich in language and tale.  
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 

















































Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser     {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“What is the use of thoughts and ideas if one feels, as I do, that one doesn’t know what to do with them?” says Jakob. He abandons his family, we learn nothing of his family, and enrols himself in the Benjamenta Institute, ostensibly a school for servants, seemingly a school, in the loftier sense of the word, for the nullification of one’s individuality, all the better to conform, all the better to meet the demands of the world upon a person. “As an old man I shall have to serve young and confident and badly educated ruffians, or I shall be a beggar, or I shall perish,” says Jakob, realistically. There are no other options. The relinquishment of the self, so to call it, learned at the Benjamenta Institute is not a path to enlightenment but to its opposite, a path to unknowing, an abnegation, a resignation, an obliteration, a relief from the burden of internal life. Not so different from enlightenment, so to call it, perhaps. To obey, to conform, to suppress thought, to extinguish that part of yourself that resists boredom, the part that smarts from the indignity of existence, from mundanity, how better to fit in, to blend in, just as is expected of us? “What we pupils do, we do because we have to, but why we have to, nobody quite knows. We obey without considering what one day will come of all of this thoughtless obedience, and we work without thinking if it is right and good to do our work,” says Jakob, ominously. “We don’t rebel. It would never cross our minds. We have, collectively, so few thoughts. I have perhaps the most thoughts, that’s quite possible, but at root I despise my capacity for thinking.” What cannot be opposed must be allowed to extinguish us if it is not to cause us anguish. “One must learn to love and cherish necessity,” says Jakob. “Here at the Benjamenta Institute one learns to suffer and endure losses, and that is in my view a craft. We pupils have no hopes, it is even forbidden to us to nourish hopes for life in our hearts, and yet we are completely calm and happy.” This achievement is a non-achievement, an unenlightening. “I have become a quite different person, I have become an ordinary person,” says Jakob, “and I have the Benjamentas to thank for my becoming ordinary.” By conforming to expectations without the slightest resistance, Jakob displaces exactly his own volume in these expectations. His obedience is the ultimate disobedience, his submission is the ultimate escape. To oppose the forces of conformity would be to acknowledge those forces more generously than to submit to them, for one can sarcastically conform where one cannot sarcastically oppose. “It suits me to disappear, as inconspicuously as possible,” said Walser, somewhere else. Not only to disappear but to do so inconspicuously. (>>You can read something I wrote on Walser here.) “We are small, small all the way down the scale to utter worthlessness,” says Jakob. All actions in Walser’s books are without consequence, all details are immediately forgotten, time moves on with the sole result that the moments are left behind, relinquished, obliterated. If existence is anguish, this is the best possible result, this snagless moving-forward of time is almost cheerful. Walser seems capable of expressing anguish only in a cheerful way. He has no other vocabulary. He has inexhaustible anguish. He writes to suppress his anguish. Cheerfully. Walser’s characters are all surplus to the requirements of meaningful occurrence, so to call it, if there could even be such a thing as meaningful occurrence, and they are relieved of the conundrum of whether there could be such a thing as meaningful occurrence by being excluded in any case from meaningful occurrence if there was such a thing. Politeness relieves them of their lack of purpose. Politeness is a way of not existing, or, perhaps, a way of existing in your own absence. Jakob is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. He has no effect on the world and he is not affected by it. He is without reciprocation. His nullity is a blank mirror upon which Fraulein Benjamenta destroys herself by looking to him for love, a blank mirror for which Herr Benjamenta ultimately closes his school, declares his love for Jakob the perfectly unreachable pupil, attempts to strangle him, engages him to accompany him. “The individual in me is only a zero,” says Jakob. “But now I’ll throw away my pen! Away with the life of thought! I’m going with Herr Benjamenta into the desert.”
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
NEW RELEASES
Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit          $40
How does a young writer find her voice in a society that would prefer women to be silent? Solnit's memoir is an electric account of the pauses and gains of feminism in the past forty years.
"There's a new feminist revolution — open to people of all genders — and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful voices." —Barbara Ehrenreich
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin            $33
If an individual could be virtually inserted into the life of a random stranger, anywhere in the world, what effects would that have on them both? The characters in Schweblin's nove reveal the beauty of technological connection between far-flung persons — but they also expose the ugly truth of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to love, playful encounters and adventures, but what if it can also pave the way for unimaginable terror?
"Schweblin unveils the hidden horror of our own imaginations and our private spaces deftly and chillingly. Little Eyes is a brilliant, anxiety-provoking novel in a time where our anxiety, personally and societally, is at an all-time high. It is perhaps the novel we both need and deserve, and though it may take courage to pick it up, it is important we do so." —Tor
“Her most unsettling work yet — and her most realistic.” —New York Times
>>Read Thomas's review of Fever Dream. 
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay         $37
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Jean is not good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in a wildlife park. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu — its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too.
Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani          $30
Slimani gives voice to young Moroccan women who are grappling with a conservative culture that at once condemns and commodifies sex. In a country where the law punishes and outlaws all forms of sex outside marriage, as well as homosexuality and prostitution, women have only two approved options for their sexual identities: virgin or wife. 
Aegean: Recipes from the mountains to the sea by Marianna Leivaditaki         $50
Growing up in a taverna in Chania, the relaxed, delicious and achievable food of Crete  and the wider Mediterranean is second nature to Leivaditaki. Very well presented. 
>>The journal of a fisherman's daughter. 
Mazel Tov by J.S. Margot            $30
Unemployed 20-year-old Margot takes up a tutoring job with the Schneiders, an Orthodox Jewish family. Indignant about the insularity and conservatism of their religious life, she dismisses her employers as socially backward, out of step with the modern world. With the Gulf War and the Intifada looming in the background, Margot finds herself caught between clashing cultures: her relationship with her Iranian boyfriend Nima is met with prejudice, while the Schneiders' devotion to Israel provokes similar discontent in him. Through impassioned debates over religion, belonging and cultural heritage, Margot and the Schneider family begin to move past conflict and towards mutual understanding and appreciation.
Designing Disorder: Experiments and disruptions in the city by Richard Sennett and Pablo Sendera         $35
 In 1970 Richard Sennett published the ground-breaking The Uses of Disorder, that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed, likely to produce a fragile, restrictive urban environment. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and alongside campaigner and architect, Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City. The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ordered. What is to be done? Can disorder be designed? Is it possible to maintain the public realm as a flexible space that adapts over time? In this provocative essay Sendra and Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the social life of our cities. What the authors call 'Infrastructures of disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide up, remain open to change rather than closed off. The book proves that ideas of disorder are still some of the most radical and transformative in debates on 21st century cities.
Orwell: A man of our time by Richard Bradford          $43
Despite the commonplace view that Animal Farm was aimed exclusively at Stalinist Russia, it was far more broadly focused and the similarities between aspects of the novel and Trump's America are obvious. Not only the parallels with the current President, but also by those who feel that his cult of personality is a mandate for collective nastiness. "Doublethink" features in Nineteen Eighty Four and it is the forerunner to "Fake News."
Thinking Again by Jan Morris        $37
In this second volume of her diaries, following In My Mind's Eye, Morris casts her eye over modern life in all its stupidity and glory. From her daily thousand paces to the ongoing troubles of Brexit, from her enduring love for America to the wonders of the natural world, and from the vagaries and ailments of old age to the beauty of youth, she displays her determined belief in embracing life and creativity.
Instructions for a Funeral by David Means          $23
Means writes with compassionate precision about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial killer nurse. He transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey; a man's funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia. 
"One of the most talented writers of short fiction in America." —James Wood, New Yorker
The Eighth: Mahler and the world in 1910 by Stephen Johnson       $40
The world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910 was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his adult life, filling Munich's huge Neue Musik-Festhalle on two successive evenings, to tumultuous applause. Stephen Johnson recounts its far-reaching effect on composers, conductors and writers of the time — Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Walter and Klemperer, and the writers Zweig and Mann
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun          $33
Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui. She accepts the offer and travels the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who've paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.
Home Stories: 100 years, 20 visionary interiors by Jasper Morrison, Mateo Kries and Jochen Eisenbrand       $155
Our homes are an expression of how we want to live; they shape our everyday routines and fundamentally affect our well-being. Interior design for the home sustains a giant global industry and feeds an entire branch of the media. However, the question of dwelling, or how to live, is found increasingly to be lacking in serious discourse. This book sets out to review the interior design of our homes. It discusses 20 iconic residential interiors from the present back to the 1920s, by architects, artists and designers such as Assemble, Cecil Beaton, Lina Bo Bardi, Arno Brandlhuber, Elsie de Wolfe, Elii, Josef Frank, Andrew Geller, IKEA, Finn Juhl, Michael Graves, Kisho Kurokawa, Adolf Loos, Claude Parent, Bernard Rudofsky, Margarete Sch tte-Lihotzky, Alison and Peter Smithson, Jacques Tati, Mies van der Rohe and Andy Warhol. Including historic and recent photographs, drawings and plans, the book explores these case studies as key moments in the history of the modern interior. 
Coffee by Danny Lenney        $22
Coffee—it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing—the beverage, the break, the ritual—we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility—where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us?




VOLUME BooksNew releases
Book of the Week. Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel, The Glass Hotel. Set in a hotel on Vancouver Island and in New York, the book explores the fragility of both capital and esteem when crises both financial and personal are triggered by the collapse of a ponzi scheme. A devastating look at emotional turbulence in the age of late capitalism.
>>Read an extract. 
>>Auckland, 2015. 
>>Fact, fiction and the familiar. 
>>EStJM in conversation. 
>>Unbridled.  
>>Read the book!
>>Her previous novel, Station Eleven, sets Shakespeare after an apocalypse. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week
This week's Book of the Week is The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund (published by Gecko Press)   
When her father leaves to save people from a giant who turns them to stone with his gaze, a child in a red dress is left alone. Many days and many nights go by. Every evening the girl says good night to herself in her mirror. When the last light burns down, the girl takes her mirror and a knife and sets out to find her father. "I will save my father from the giant," she says. A beautifully illustrated version of a Swedish fairy tale. 
>>Buy The Stone Giant — we can send it anywhere. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

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The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund   {Reviewed by STELLA}
Another new favourite from the Gecko Press stables, The Stone Giant is both beautiful and taut. It is fairy-tale telling reminiscent of Grimms', but not too scary for little ones. Anna Höglund, inspired by the Swedish author Elsa Beskow’s Tripp, Trapp, Trull, brings us a tale of bravery, audacity and cleverness. A child lives with her father on an island. When her father, who just happens to be a knight, has to leave her to fight a giant who is turning everyone to stone, she waits for his return. After everything is mended and tidied, she watches out the window for his return by day and lights a candle at the window by night to guide him home over the dark seas. She says goodnight to herself as she gazes into her hand mirror. As the days and nights go by, she starts to think about the stone giant, how the gaze of a giant might turn you to stone and wonders whether her father will ever return. She realises that she must venture out to find him. The sea is dark and cold, but luckily this girl can swim — she can swim a long way. When she reaches land again, the sun shines down and dries her, and ahead of her is a shining path. A path that leads her into the forest. She walks and walks. The sun sets and through the trees, she spies a cottage. An old woman invites her in, feeds her, gives her a bed for the night and sends her on her way with a useful item — an umbrella. She continues her quest until she reaches a barren and dismal land and here she meets the monster. Quickly the umbrella opens and covers the girl.  The monster is curious — who is hiding under the umbrella? What will the girl do? Clever and quick thinking makes the child the hero of this story. And yes, there is a happy ending! Anna Höglund’s text is sparse and direct, creating a harmonic synergy with the illustrations which are delicate and subtle in their detail. The quiet and contemplation in the first part of the book moves towards anticipation and endeavour as we venture with the girl in search of her father and the giant (who just happens to be a giant stone woman). Höglund’s illustrations are made by copper plate etchings and watercolour. They are expressive and have layers of depth, with her use of black and small petals of colour, not often seen in children’s books. Add to this the charm of the book’s design with its swirly green and red endpapers and a shiny hand mirror on the back cover and you will be charmed too with the brave young girl stepping out into the world to rescue her father in her red dress complete with pocket (useful for those everyday items that may defeat a giant). 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

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Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Fact is to me a hindrance to memory,” writes the narrator in this remarkable collage of passages evoking the ways in which past experiences have impressed themselves indelibly upon her. The sleepless nights of the title are not so much those of the narrator’s youth, though these are either well documented or implied and so the title is not not about them, but those of her present life, supposedly as “a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home”, waking in the night “to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through the night.” As if the narrator is a projection of the author herself, cast forward upon some distorting screen, the ten parts of the book make no distinction between verifiable biographical facts and the efflorescence of stories that arise in the author’s mind as supplementary to those facts, or in substitution for them. Elizabeth the narrator seems almost aware of the precarity of her role, and of her identity as distinct from but overlapping that of the author: “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” Hardwick writes mind-woundingly beautiful sentences, many-commaed, building ecstatically, at once patient and careering, towards a point at which pain and beauty, memory and invention, self and other are indistinguishable. Spanning over fifty years, the book, the exquisite narrowness of focus of which is kept immediate by the exclusion of summary, frame or context, records the marks remaining upon the narrator of those persons, events or situations from her past that have not yet been replaced, or not yet been able to be replaced, by the ersatz experiences of stories about those persons, events and situations. “My father…is out, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded.” Hardwick and her narrator are aware that one of the functions of stories is to replace and vitiate experience (“It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction”), and she/she writes effectively in opposition to this function. Observation brings the narrator too close to what she observes, she becomes those things, is marked by them, passes these marks on to us in sentences full of surprising particularity, resisting the pull towards generalisation, the gravitational pull of cliches, the lazy engines of bad fiction. Many of Hardwick’s passages are unforgettable for an uncomfortable vividness of description—in other words, of awareness—accompanied by a slight consequent irritation, for how else can she—or we—react to such uninvited intensity of experience? Is she, by writing it, defending herself from, for example, her overwhelming awareness of the awful men who share her carriage in the Canadian train journey related in the first part, is she mercilessly inflicting this experience upon us, knowing it will mark us just as surely as if we had had the experience ourselves, or is there a way in which razor-sharp, well-wielded words enable both writer and reader to at once both recognise and somehow overcome the awfulness of others (Rachel Cusk here springs to mind in comparison)? In relating the lives of people encountered in the course of her life, the narrator often withdraws to a position of uncertain agency within the narration, an observatory distance, but surprises us by popping up from time to time when forgotten, sometimes as part of a we of uncertain composition, uncertain, that is, as to whether it includes a historic you that has been addressed by the whole composition without our realising, or whether the other part of we is a he or she, indicating, perhaps, that the narrator has been addressing us all along, after all. All this is secondary, however, to the sentences that enter us like needles: “The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick calm.”
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
NEW RELEASES
Dance Prone by David Coventry              $35
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of The Invisible Mile. During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band's four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, and violence. With decades passed and compelled by his wife's failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.
"A gorgeous panegyric to the purity, poison and impossibly high stakes of punk. Funny, filthy, erudite and rude." —Carl Shuker
>>Read a sample. 
>>The Invisible Mile.
>>Transit at Marrakech. 
Lost Property by Laura Beatty           $23
In middle age, a writer finds herself despairing and uncomprehending at how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her species, she and her lover rent a van and journey across France to the Mediterranean, across Italy to the Balkans and Greece and on to the islands. To travel through space is also to travel through time: along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the wars with the Huguenots, the fragility of the Italian Renaissance, the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current refugee crisis, meeting figures from Europe's political and artistic past — a Norman knight, Joan of Arc, Ariosto, d'Annunzio and Alan Moore's nihilistic Rorschach, each lending their own view of humanity at its best and at its very worst. 
"The closer they get to their destination, the further they are from finding any definitive answers, and even the questions have become elusive. But this shifting, unsure quality, made luminous with an extraordinary descriptive brilliance, emerges as the book’s strength." —Guardian
The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund        $27
When her father leaves to save people from a giant who turns them to stone with his gaze, a child in a red dress is left alone. Many days and many nights go by. Every evening the girl says good night to herself in her mirror. When the last light burns down, the girl takes her mirror and a knife and sets out to find her father. "I will save my father from the giant," she says. A beautifully illustrated version of a Swedish fairy tale. 
>>Artwork by Anna Hoglund. 
Machines in the Head: Collected stories by Anna Kavan          $36
This new selection of Kavan's stories gathers work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940),  evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). 
>>The awful force of inanimate things. 
How Do You Make a Baby? by Anna Fiske        $33
A very effective and informative blend of good information and hilarious illustrations. 
>>See also Tell Me.
The U.S. Antifascism Reader edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials         $43
Antifascism: as American as apple pie. Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of "white nationalism," the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before Antifa became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organisers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.
Ocean by Steve Mentz        $22
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Unlike familiar stories of agricultural settlements and conquering empires, an oceanic context immerses human bodies in alien waters. Our engagement with the world ocean can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic waste and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasises the frailty of human experience.
>>Some other books on the 'Object Lessons' series. 
Merchant, Miner, Mandarin: The life and times of the remarkable Chole Sew Hoy by Jenny Sew Hoy Agnew and Trevor Gordon Agnew        $50
A history and legacy of a businessman from China's Guangdong Province who arrived in Port Chalmers in 1869. Good insight into New Zealand race relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 
The Big Book of Blooms by Yuval Zommer         $30
Beautifully illustrated and highly informative. 
>>Other books by Yuval Zommer. 
Obsessive About Octopuses by Owen Davey         $33
...and silly about squid. Did you know that an octopus has three hearts and a doughnut-shaped brain? You'll discover that these incredible creatures are super-smart and have great survival skills.From the truly terrifying giant Pacific octopus to the inventive common octopus, find out where members of this eight-armed family live, what they eat and how we can protect them.
Madness in Civilisation: A cultural history of insanity by Andrew Scull        $35
From the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Scull questions what we mean by madness and what place this construct plays in the functioning of society through time. 
Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon          $35
A novel of stories exploring the impact of American interference in Southeast Asia on three teenagers living in Laos.
"The chapters exercise hypnotic intensity, but the overall effect is even more profound. With his panoramic vision of the displacements of war, Yoon reminds us of the people never considered or accounted for in the halls of power." —The Washington Post
Turned On: Science, sex and robots by Kate Devlin           $25
An exploration of sexuality, technology, and humanity through the promises of artificial intelligence.


The Quick and the Dead: True stories of life and death from a New Zealand pathologist by Cynric Temple-Camp         $40
More from the author of the very popular The Cause of Death. 
Basquiat: Boom for Real by Eleanor Nairne, Dieter Buchhart and Lotte Johnson          $90
Basquiat first came to prominence when he collaborated with Al Diaz to spray-paint enigmatic statements under the pseudonym SAMO(c). From there he went on to work with others on collages, Xerox art, postcards, performances, and music before establishing his reputation as one of the most important painters of his generation. This book places his collaborations in a wider art historical context and looks at his career through the lens of performance.
Architek by Dominique Ehrhard         $55
An introduction to architectural creation, the 95 precut cardboard elements in this book can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to build all sorts of fantastical structures. Follow the full-color idea diagrams to create more than 20 unique projects, then disassemble them and try something different. Developing direction-following skills and 3-D creativity, this kit allows young architects to both learn traditional design rules and break them.


VOLUME BooksNew releases

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The Glass Hotel by Emily St, John Mandel    {Reviewed by STELLA}
Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel. Her previous novel, Station Eleven, was centred in the aftermath of worldly collapse, complete with a pandemic. The Glass Hotel takes us back to the early 2000s, with its escalating wealth capital and house-of-cards financial boom and bust. Vincent is an attractive young woman loitering in her hometown, working as a bartender at an upmarket exclusive hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island: The Glass Hotel, owned by financier Jonathan Alkaitis. The night Vincent and Alkaitis meet, an unnerving action has occurred: someone had written graffiti on the glass window of the entry lounge. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” A message for Alkaitis we presume — one he never sees — but which shakes Vincent and a guest, shipping executive Leon Prevant, to the core. What does it mean? And why has someone bothered to display this message so viciously (when its target could have easily been accessed in New York), in one of the remotest places Vincent knows, a place she describes as two roads to nowhere. The novel opens and closes with a first-person narrative of falling through the ocean — it is lyrical and strangely eerie. A ghostly theme that recurs in several places in The Glass Hotel — either with hallucinatory drugs or stress-induced experiences, or within the counterlife narratives of Alkaitis. Between these ocean fallings, we follow Vincent, her half-brother Paul, and Alkaitis as their lives unfold and intertwine. Here is the complacency of being a ‘trophy wife’, the denial of a crime (Alkaitis’s financial activities parallel Bernie Madoff’s schemes and his eventual downfall) and the stories one tells to justify rotten behaviour and errors of judgement. Paul is shallow, but wanting to be wonderful — a recovering drug addict who will stoop to any depths to pull himself up. Alkaitis is successful, blooming with the confidence of money. Vincent is ready and able to reinvent herself with merely a blink of an eye. In The Glass Hotel, we move in the dance-drug scene, we traipse through the mundanity of dead-end jobs and the precariat class, we luxuriate in the world of the moneyed, and edge into the knife-sharpened pretence of the art scene. But mostly what we are called out for, as are all the players in this game, is our complacency in being part of this structure. As Alkaitis sits in jail, he questions who is the biggest crook: his criminal activity — a Ponzi scheme — or the investors who want more and better returns on their precious dollars? When Vincent starts life again after her days with Jonathan, can she escape her belief that she knew nothing? When Paul becomes a well-known avant-garde composer can he let loose his demons? Hauntings pervade The Glass Hotel.  Emily St.John Mandel’s excellent writing, from the main threads to the bit players, familiar settings as well as oblique passages, makes The Glass Hotel a fascinating, compelling novel. The more you walk away from The Glass Hotel, the more it will come back to you with its questioning voice and its insistence that responsibility is necessary and long overdue  a  haunting that refuses to be quiet.  
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

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The Other Name by Jon Fosse   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
And I see myself sitting and reading the thick blue book of two parts, not that thick, actually, and I have reached that point in the book, though it is not in fact a point in the book for there is nothing in the book that would mark such a point, but rather a point in my reading of the book, which just happens to be around page seventy-five, that I came to realise that the book is written entirely in one sentence, one slow, patient, uninterrupted flow of words, no, I think, that is not correct, the book is written in two parts, though each begins with the word And, but neither part ends, each rather just leaves off, so it would not be correct that the book is written in one sentence, or in two sentences, one for each part, but rather in no sentences, one, or two, slow, patient, uninterrupted flow, or flows, of words, that much at least I got right, I think, just the kind of thing I like, but done with such virtuosity and with such little display of virtuosity that I had not realised until page seventy-five or thereabouts that there are no full stops to be found in this book, or no full stop, I am uncertain if this absence should be singular or plural, possibly both, this Jon Fosse and his translator Damion Searles having built these words without one misstep, or missomething, the metaphor seems mixed and I has not even realised that it was a metaphor, I must be more careful, capturing the flow of thought, so to call it, and speech, realistically, seemingly of the narrator, a middle-aged painter named Asle, living, I am almost tempted to put, as such people do, in a small town in western Norway, driving in the snow to and from a city on the western coast of Norway, the city of the gallery which shows, which is a euphemism of sorts for sells, his paintings, but also the city in which lives a middle-aged painter named Asle, resembling both in looks and clothing, if clothing is not part of looks, the narrator, the narrator narrating in the first person and this other Asle, the alter-Asle if you like, this alter-Asle to the thoughts and memories of whom the narrator-Asle has extraordinary access, though there is no evidence of any reciprocal mechanism, we are, I am sure, never given an instance of the alter-Asle even being aware of the existence of such a person as the narrator, this aler-Asle, being confined to the third person, and, I wonder, what sort of trauma confines a person to an existence only in the third person? presumably a trauma, I think, this alter-Asle being also an alcoholic and a person who “most of the time, doesn’t want to live any more, he’s always thinking that he should go out into the sea, disappear into the waves,” but not doing so because of his love for his dog, there is, I think as I am reading, some relationship between the two Asles, well, obviously there is, my thought, or the thought I have, being that the alter-Asle is the actual Asle and the narrator-Asle is the Asle that the alter-Asle-who-is-actually-the-actual-Alse would have been if he was not the Asle he became, which, I think, I have made sound a bit confusing, and the opposite of an explanation, not that that matters, on account of whatever trauma, or whatever it is that I speculate is a trauma, that confined him to a third-person existence, the characters being one character, all characters being one character as they are in all books, I speculate, though in this book The Other Name, almost all the characters have, if not the same name, almost the same name, which tightens the knot somewhat, if I can be forgiven another metaphor, though I will not forgive myself for it at least, I will try to avoid, I think, thinking of the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, or, in any rate, describing the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, in any way other than a literary way, whatever that means, nothing, I think, the person that Asle could have been sees the Asle that Asle became, though Alse cannot know him, the person that Asle could have been rescues Asle when he has collapsed in the snow and takes him to the Clinic and to the Hospital, and takes the dog to look after, who knows, though, if the third-person Asle, the one I was calling the alter-Asle until that became too confusing, at least for me, survives, neither we nor the first-person Asle know that, but after the first-person Asle goes to the city and rescues the third-person Asle from the snowdrift, how could he know where to find him, I wonder, he begins, in the second part of the book, to have access to some deeply buried memories of the Asle that perhaps they once both were, memories all in the third person, for safety, I think, memories firstly of Asle’s and his sister’s disobedience of their parents in straying along the shore and to the nearby settlement, a narrative in which threat hums in every detail, a narrative in which colour impresses itself so deeply upon Asle that, I think, he could have become nothing other than a painter, a narrative that seems searching for a trauma, for a misfortune, a narrative assailed by an inexplicable motor noise as they approach the settlement but which resolves with a misfortune that is anticlimactic, at least for Asle, a trauma but not his trauma, what has this narrative avoided, I wonder at this point, what has not been released, or what has not yet been released, I wonder, Fosse is a writer who writes to be rid of his thoughts, I think, just as his narrator says, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me, to get rid of them in a way, to be done with them, I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, I try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away,” and, yes, when the narrator lies in bed at the end of the book and is unable to sleep, he does recover the memory, a third person memory, the memory of the trauma that split the Asles and trapped one thereafter in the third person, the memory that explains the awful motor noise that intruded on the previous narrative of disobedience as the children approached the locus of the trauma, and, I think, all the sadness of the book leads from here and to here
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
NEW RELEASES
Jerningham by Cristina Sanders         $37
Bookkeeper Arthur Lugg is tasked by Colonel William Wakefield with keeping tabs on his charismatic and erratic nephew Edward Jerningham. This is a novel of Wellington's colonial beginnings and of the rise and fall of one of New Zealand history's remarkable characters. 
Dominicana by Angie Cruz          $37
Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she must say yes. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So, in 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by César, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay.
"In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world." —judges' citation for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction 
>>Other books on the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction short list.
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar        $30
Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a 13-year-old girl whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across the country, a madness that affects both living and dead, old and young.
"The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree speaks of the power of imagination when confronted with cruelty, and of our human need to make sense of the world through the ritual of storytelling. Through her unforgettable characters and glittering magical realist style, Azar weaves a timely and timeless story that juxtaposes the beauty of an ancient, vibrant culture with the brutality of an oppressive political regime." —judges' citation, 2020 International Booker Prize
>>Other books on the 2020 International Booker Prize short list.
From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman         $45
New Zealand enfranchised women in 1893, but it took a further forty years before there was a woman MP. Women were not entitled to stand as candidates until 1919. 
Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our civilisation's last chance by Srećko Horvat      $40
Capitalism and historical revisionism have constructed a new world of normalized apocalyptic politics in which our passivity is guaranteed if we believe there is no future. This is a radical manifesto for hope in democracy, union and internationalism. 
>>"The current system is more violent than any revolution."
Fathoms: The world in the whale by Rebecca Giggs       $37
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these fabled animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? And what does it mean to write about nature in the midst of an ecological crisis?
"A work of bright and careful genius. Equal parts Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard, Giggs masterfully combines lush prose with conscientious history and boots-on-the-beach reporting. With Giggs leading us gently by the hand we dive down, and down, and down, into the dark core of the whale, which, she convincingly reveals, is also the guts of the world." —Robert Moor
Losing Eden: Why our minds need the wild by Lucy Jones         $48
What happens as we lose our bond with the natural world — might we also be losing part of ourselves? Travelling from forest schools in East London, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, via Poland's primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. 
Wilberforce by H.E. Cross          $35
A novel following the misadventures of several boys at a British public school in 1926, especially those of a particularly hapless young man and his possible redemption.
The Island by Ana María Matute          $30
Matute's 1959 novel is a stifling story of rebellious adolescence, narrated by Matia, as she struggles against her domineering grandmother, schemes with her mercurial cousin Borja and begins to fall in love with the strange boy Manuel. Steeped in myth, fairy tale and biblical allusion, the novel depicts Mallorca as an enchanted but wicked island, a lost Eden and Never Never Land combined, where the sun burns through stained glass windows and the wind tears itself on the agaves. Ostensibly concerned with Matia's anxieties about entering the adult world, this internal conflict is set against the much wider, deeper, and more frightening conflict of the civil war as it plays out almost secretly on the island, set in turn against the backdrop of the Inquisition's mass burning of Jews in previous centuries. These two conflicts shimmer at the edges of Matia's highly subjective account of her life on the island, where life is drawn along painful and divisive lines.
The Butchers by Ruth Gilligan         $37
A photograph is hung on a gallery wall for the very first time since it was taken two decades before. It shows a slaughter house in rural Ireland, a painting of the Virgin Mary on the wall, a meat hook suspended from the ceiling — and, from its sharp point, the lifeless body of a man hanging by his feet. The story of who he is and how he got there casts back into Irish folklore, of widows cursing the land and of the men who slaughter its cattle by hand. But modern Ireland is distrustful of ancient traditions, and as the BSE crisis in England presents get-rich opportunities in Ireland, few care about The Butchers, the eight men who roam the country, slaughtering the cows of those who still have faith in the old ways.
Riding in the Zone Rouge: The Tour of the Battlefields 1919 — Cycling's toughest ever stage race by Tom Isitt        $28
The Circuit des Champs de Bataille (the Tour of the Battlefields) was held in 1919, less than six months after the end of the First World War. It covered 2,000 kilometres and was raced in appalling conditions across the battlefields of the Western Front, otherwise known as the Zone Rouge. The race was so tough that only 21 riders finished. It was never staged again, and has largely been forgotten. 
>>Ideal to read in conjunction with David Coventry's The Invisible Mile. 


The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, translated by Ciaran Carson       $33
"Quite simply the best version of Dante there is." —Paul Muldoon
Fresh from Poland: New vegetarian cooking from the Old Country by Michael Korkorsz          $38

Authentically Polish. All vegetarian. Rozkoszny!
The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren by Paul Gorman         $38
"The Diaghilev of punk." —Melvin Bragg
>>The Sex Pistols © Malcolm McLaren

Parlour Games for Modern Families by Mfanwy Jones and Spiri Tsintziras        $30
All the games you have forgotten and all the games you never knew. 



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

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella