| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Rat King Landlord by Murdoch Stephens Ever wanted a crash course in Marxist theory, class structure, exploitation and capitalist advantage through property ownership, but found the reading a little too onerous? Well, then this novel is for you. Rat King Landlord, newly out of the excellent Lawrence & Gibson stable from the pen of Murdoch Stephens, is a satire that places you squarely in the continuing saga of our housing crisis — specifically the rental dilemma. Looked for a flat in Wellington lately; lived in an overpriced damp and mouldy house with strange flatmates and yet stranger landlord? — you need to look no further than here for a slice of almost-truth. Meet our flatmate, getting up early to make coffee in his haze of infatuation for Freddie, before she needs for work at the hip Broviet Brunion cafe located at the edgy end of the city, while flattie number three, Caleb, sleeps on or whatever else he does, behind his closed door. While this is set squarely in the now, it could be scenario many of us have encountered in our flatting lives (apart from the shocking rent cost if you are post-40). Yet things getting strange. Everyone wants to get on the property ladder, including the rats. Maligned and misunderstood, the rats are taking back the yard and the house, they are not content to live off your scraps and have to avoid your traps any longer. Rats have rights too! At the same time, strange posters are popping up over the city advertising an event unlike any other — The Night of the Smooth Stones. Unauthorised and taking the billboard space owned by a corporate or a council, the posters resist being painted over or torn down. The message is oblique and the word on the street — well, on social media and in the huddled conversations of the politically leveraged hipsters — is that a revolution is about to hit the streets. Targets: property agents (loud hiss), landlords (hiss) and house owners (half-hearted small hiss). While the street is heating up, at home the temperature is rising too. The human landlord has died falling off a shonky ladder and his odd will results in the ownership of the house ending up in the hands paws of the Rat — the last being to witness him. Don’t even think about being animalist. As the Rat adjusts to his newfound status, learning English through texting (specifically with Caleb — the reclusive — who has an odd fascination with his Rat associate and an employer/employee relationship in due course — one that favours him over his flatmates), upgrading his shed, and making a slippery agreement to get himself into the house as a flatmate/landlord (alarm bells!), our protagonist becomes more agitated by the situation. Fire in the backyard, vigilantes on the street, pseudo-rebellion in the streets — who’s a landlord and who’s a renter? Have you got proof of your status or lack of? And the nights of rebellion just keep getting stranger. Who's behind the call to arms, and why is Freddie's boss acting weird? Rat King Landlord is a hilarious trip with a serious underbelly. Shitty houses, rip-off rents, exploitative agencies and landlords funded by the structure of the capitalist system fuel the beast we call the housing market. Satisfying satire — mad, fast-paced and audacious. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | I am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy {Reviewed by THOMAS} “It is not clear just when we stopped being ourselves and became something else.” These stories do not take long to read but the images in them will be embedded in your mind for a long time, so precisely sharp are Jaeggy’s tiny burrs of observed detail. The stories typically begin in the fantastic but resolve in what may be the actual, the actual as experienced on many levels at once, the small made large and the large made small, perhaps as Jaeggy experiences the actual. Perhaps these stories are not fiction but memoir, perhaps Jaeggy’s brother committed suicide, perhaps her family’s veins ran with schmertz, certainly she knew Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, Italo Calvino, was married to Roberto Calasso, met Oliver Sacks (her account of this, after noting that Sacks needed a very cold room, resolves into the narrator’s affinity with a fish in the restaurant tank, Sacks forgotten), perhaps she realised only by looking at a photograph long after her mother’s death that her mother had been depressed (“Like a flash of lightning, there is an instant that descends, wounds, and it gone.”), but this is of no consequence to us to whom it makes no difference whose experience this is save that it is an experience seemingly shared by reader and author (and what is real about reality other than the experience of it?). Jaeggy’s characters are isolated in the extreme, hypochondriac, melancholy to the point of elegant insanity. They find company in objects rather than in persons. Often, objects take on motive force at the rate at which is is surrendered by these characters, relieving them of will, leaving the stories suspended at that moment of relinquishment that comes immediately before actual dissipation. The characters’ surrender to what thenceforth can be considered, for all practical purposes, to be fate opens their eyes to a grand equivalence of detail, to a topography of experience in which the resonance between things is more powerful, or at least memorable, than the things themselves, in which nuance overwhelms the facts. Memory conflates time, the past flows into, and is confused with, or dissolved into, the present. The intensity of experience, or of nuance, continues to increase until, at the moment of greatest intensity, the character’s fated self-destruction comes as an epiphany of detachment. Relief comes as the first reaction to disaster. All passion removes its bearer from the possible. |
NEW RELEASES
Hotere invited O'Sullivan to write his life in 2005, and this nuanced and insightful portrait of one of Aotearoa's most important and interesting artists is the long-awaited and supremely fulfilling result.
Decades of violence and chaos have generated a political and intellectual hysteria ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about invading or hectically breeding Muslim hordes that has affected even the most intelligent in Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines this hysteria and its fantasists, taking on its arguments and the atmosphere in which it has festered and become influential. In essays that grapple with colonialism, human rights, and the doubling down of liberalism against a background of faltering economies and weakening Anglo-American hegemony, Mishra confronts writers from Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson to Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
The remarkable new novel from the author of Convenience Store Woman. Natsuki isn't like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what. Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki's family are increasing, her friends wonder why she's still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki's childhood are pursuing her.
An exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a Britain still reeling from the Brexit vote, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their relationship, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling flat share in east London. Full of resonances with Roland Barthes's book by the same name and with Xiaolu Guo's own novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
Framed by a charming narrative about a father and son, this is a book about categories. On a journey into town, a boy called Arvo explores the many ways in which we classify the world around us, to fascinating. A stunningly beautiful large-format picture book.
mountweazel n. a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement.
It is the final year of the nineteenth century and Peter Winceworth has reached the letter 'S', toiling away for the much-anticipated and multi-volume Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. He is overwhelmed at his desk and increasingly uneasy that his colleagues are attempting to corral language and regiment facts. Compelled to assert some sense of individual purpose and exercise artistic freedom, Winceworth begins inserting unauthorised, fictitious entries into the dictionary. In the present day, young intern Mallory is tasked with uncovering these mountweazels as the text of the dictionary is digitised for modern readers. Through the words and their definitions she finds she has access to their creator's motivations, hopes and desires. More pressingly, she must also field daily threatening anonymous phone calls. Is a suggested change to the dictionary's definition of marriage (n.) really that controversial? What power does Mallory have when it comes to words and knowing how to tell the truth? And does the caller really intend for the Swansby's staff to 'burn in hell'? As their two narratives combine, Winceworth and Mallory must discover how to negotiate the complexities of an often nonsensical, untrustworthy, hoax-strewn and undefinable life. From the author of Attrib. (winner of the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize).
An exploration of mathematical style through 99 different proofs of the same theorem. This book offers a multifaceted perspective on mathematics by demonstrating 99 different proofs of the same theorem. Each chapter solves an otherwise unremarkable equation in distinct historical, formal, and imaginative styles that range from Medieval, Topological, and Doggerel to Chromatic, Electrostatic, and Psychedelic. With a rare blend of humor and scholarly aplomb, Philip Ording weaves these variations into an accessible and wide-ranging narrative on the nature and practice of mathematics. A wonderful book, the mathematical equivalent of Raymond Queneau's Elements of Style.
Shaun Tan writes of this book: "A story in verse and paintings, Dog imagines the bond between humans and dogs as an ongoing cycle of death and rebirth through different places and times, from prehistory to the present and future. The relationship between dogs and humans is unlike that of any other. There are perhaps few inter-species friendships so epic and transforming, spanning some 15,000 years, enduring the vagaries of history, the rise and fall of countless societies, shaping each in turn. Every time I see people walking their dogs at my local park, I never cease to be heartened by the endurance and affection of this bond, its strangeness, its apparent naturalness. But fates are never quite aligned and our hearts so frequently broken. For many years I’ve had a news clipping on the pin-up board that overlooks my desk, a picture of a dog whose owner died in a tragic house-fire. There is something about the dog’s hard-to-read gaze that I’ve always found compelling. It reminds me of many stories such as that of the famous Hachiko, the Japanese dog that waited patiently at Shibuya train station every evening, up to nine years after his owner, a university professor, had died suddenly at work. The sheer loyalty and urgent optimism of dogs has always been a great inspiration for their human companions, who so often wander from such virtuous paths and anxiously question their place in the world. No matter what future meets our planet, no matter how transformed or tragic, even apocalyptic, it’s hard to imagine that a dog will not be there by our side, always urging us forward."
"No te huringa o te kopaki, i tana ringa e wiri ana, ka kite iho a Hare i tetahi hiri-wakihi waiporoporo e whakaatu ana i tetahi tohu kawai; he raiona, he ikara, he patiha me tetahi nakahi e karapoti ana i tetahi pu 'H' e rahi ana. Kaore ano a Hare Pota i paku rongo korero e pa ana ki Howata i te taenga haeretanga o nga reta ki a Mita H. Pota, i Te Kapata i raro i nga Arapiki, i te 4 o te Ara o Piriweti. He mea tuhi ki te wai kanapanapa i runga i te kirihipi ahua kowhai nei, i tere ra te kohakina e nga matua keke wetiweti o Hare, e nga Tuhiri. Heoi, i te huringa tau tekau ma tahi o Hare, ka papa mai tetahi tangata hitawe ake nei, a Rupehu Hakiri, me etahi korero whakamiharo: he kirimatarau a Hare Pota, a, kua whai turanga ia ki Te Kura Matarau o Howata. I te pukapuka tuatahi o nga tino korero ma nga tamariki a mohoa nei, ka whakamohio a Rana ratou ko Heremaiani, ko Tamaratoa, ko Ahorangi Makonara i a Hare me te kaipanui ki te Kuitiki me Tera-e-Mohiotia-ra, ki te whainga o te matarau me te oha mai i mua. I te whakaawenga o te whakawhitia ki te reo Maori e Leon Blake, ka timata te korero i konei." Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in te reo Māori!
Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to unsettle conventional wisdom about culture, society and politics. Exploring unexamined episodes in the school's history and reading its work in unexpected ways, these essays provide ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times.
Throughout his long career, New Zealand painter Dick Frizzell has often goneway out on a limb to see where it would take him. From his early Pop Art influenced approach to his experiments with landscape and the contested area ofappropriation, he's always been provocative. Now, he takes on the history of art, starting with cave art to discover the key threads of Western art that sit in his DNA as a painter in the 21st century. Despite the humour, it sits on a bedrock of serious scholarship and reverence for the painters of the past. And there’s one thing that makes this book different from any other: all the reproductions of significant paintings, from Rubens and Tintoretto to Cezanne and Lichtenstein, are by Frizzell himself, painted over a twelve-month period.
>>10 questions.
Arranged in three parts, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens with Messud's most personal essays — reflections on a childhood divided between cultures, and between dueling models of womanhood. It is here, in these early years, that we see the seeds of Messud's inquiry into the precarious nature of girlhood, the role narrative plays in giving shape to a life and the power of language. As the book progresses, we then see how these questions translate into her criticism. In sections on literature and visual arts, Messud opens up the 'radical strangeness' of childhood in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; the search for the self in Saul Friedlander; the fragility and danger of girlhood captured by Sally Mann; and the search for justice in Valeria Luiselli's The Lost Children Archive.
Following Youth, this volume of Feaver's outstanding biography covers the years 1968—2011.
What will time take from me? Has it taken anything from me already? How will I know? In this novel, a heady mix of autobiography and fiction, Amis explores his formative relationships with his father Kingsley, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Hitchens, and others.
The Alchemist in te reo Māori!
Oh, the places you'll go with a bit of te reo Māori!
25 years after their collaboration on A Timeless Land, three friends return with another evocation of Central Otago in words and paint.
"Step through the gateway now to stories that are as relevant today as they ever were."
Black, anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist thought is often sidelined in mainstream discourse. This unique book sets the record straight. Through interviews with thinkers, including Angela Davis and Silvia Federici, Bhandar and Ziadah present a serious and thorough discussion of race, class, gender, and sexuality not merely as intersections to be noted or additives to be mixed in, but as co-constitutive factors that must be reckoned with if we are to build effective coalitions. Collectively, these interviews trace the ways in which Black feminists, Third World and post-colonial feminists, and indigenous women have created new ways of seeing, and new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems.
A Glorious Freedom: Older women leading extraordinary lives by Lisa Congdon $46
A beautifully hand-drawn and hand-lettered book celebrating women, both famous and not famous, who have found that, in the second half of their lives, they worry less about what other people think, become more themselves, pursue new endeavours.
100 entertaining sentences are waiting for you, the copyeditor, to correct—or, alternatively, to STET. The first person to spot the error, or else call out "STET!" (a copyeditor's term that means "let it stand") if there is no error, gets the card. There are two ways to play — compete for points in a straightforward grammar game, or play with style and syntax and whip the author's sentences into splendid shape. The person with the most cards at the end of the game wins!
BOOKS @ VOLUME #202 (30.10.20)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we are reading and recommending.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Stella will also be reviewing the book on Radio NZ Monday after 10:30 AM.
>>"Harpies symbolise the side of femininity that is often rejected or marginalised."
>>Meet the Harpies.
>>Megan Hunter talks with Evie Wyld.
>>Read Stella's review of The End We Start From.
>>"I've imagined disasters and catastrophes from an early age."
>>"I discovered my own rhythms and particular desires as I wrote."
>>Your copy of The Harpy.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Harpy by Megan Hunter {Reviewed by STELLA} A marriage, a betrayal and a punishment. Meet Lucy, wife and mother, mid-30s. She’s put her career on hold for the children — never finished her PhD — and works part-time editing on contract. It fits in with the children. Jake is her charming husband and life is good, even if they can’t afford their own home in the increasingly expensive suburbs. A message from David Holmes breaks the fairytale. Jake’s been having an affair with a work colleague (David’s wife Vanessa). Lucy is understandably shocked and an inner rage starts to build. To save the marriage Lucy and Jake make a deal. She can hurt him three times unexpectedly and without any discussion. Life carries on and the hurts are dealt out. Yet Lucy, despite her best intentions to play her roles, particularly for the boys, becomes incensed by the reactions of her husband, the other parties involved, and the neighbours. As she hosts the neighbourhood pre-Christmas party she becomes increasingly aware of the double standards of her community. Jake is as popular as ever, while she is either maligned or pitied by his actions. This would be another relationship drama about motherhood, wifedom and sacrifice if it wasn’t for Hunter’s superb writing style, which invites you into Lucy’s world in episodic fragments — rich and nuanced — and the mythical fascination that Lucy has with the harpy — that monstrous, powerful bird-woman, a creature she has been curious about since childhood. And her childhood, the impact of parental behaviour, is a pivotal aspect of this novel. Under Lucy’s skin claws a beast, a rage, adamant to be heard and seen. When the punishment crosses the line, her revenge tips out of control. Will she be consumed by her rage or will her rage avenge the wrongs perpetrated upon her? This is brilliant and, like her first book, The End We Start From, the language is pointed, sparse and beautiful — taut and finely tuned. The Harpy is an exploration of love, revenge and female rage, drawing on mythology and the dark recesses of the psyche with precision and spine-chilling unease, set in the normality of the suburban middle-class home. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey {Reviewed by THOMAS} What are you looking at? Nothing. I’m not looking at anything. Up there in the corner? No, I’m concentrating. Trying to. What on? I’m writing a review of this book by Catherine Chidgey book. You’re writing a review on a Wednesday? But your deadline's Friday. You've never written a review before Friday before. I like the cover. It’s by Fiona Pardington. The photograph. What is it? A moth’s wing, or a butterfly’s. It’s probably some reference to Nabokov. He was a lepidopterist. I don’t know what reference, though. Nabokov not being a writer I particularly appreciate. Why is it called The Beat of the Pendulum? That’s a reference to Proust. Something he wrote about writing novels. It’s in the epigraph. The writer as the manipulator of the reader’s experience of time. The writer as able to make the reader experience time as such, by speeding it up. Or by slowing it down, I suppose. Proust might be mistaken on this, though. What? I am more interested in the differential of the reader’s and the characters’ experience of time. The writer’s inclusion or exclusion of detail controls the reader’s awareness and makes the book move at a varying pace, that’s what detail is for, really that is all it's for, slowing down, speeding up, leaping over swathes of time that would have been experienced by the characters, if they weren’t fictional, a kind of hypothetical time, so to call it, but inaccessible to the reader because those moments are one step deeper into fiction than the text reaches. Sounds more like a concertina than a pendulum. Yes. The book should be called The Squeeze of the Concertina. I’m not sure readers are necessarily aware, consciously, of the difference between text time and narrative time, notwithstanding Proust, though they might well be. What has this got to do with the book? It’s just a transcript of all the conversations the author overheard or that she was involved in. Is it even a novel? Just? Have you read this book? No. But [N.] read it. Or read some of it. Or a review. Or talked to someone who had read it. Or some of it. Or a review. Yes. And said? That it was self-indulgent. I don’t agree with that. At least, it is less self-indulgent than most novels. I mean, what kind of person, other than a novelist, would be so presumptuous as to expect others to spend hours of their time witnessing their make-believe? But people like doing that. That’s beside the point. And the point is? The point is that this book turns the tables on the author, subjects her to the very kinds of scrutiny that most novels are constructed to deflect, if I can damn all writers with one blow, or at least the kinds of writers that write the kind of make-believe that the ‘people’ you referred to earlier like to indulge in. There are other kinds? So in a way this novel is a kind of literary gutting inflicted upon the author by the rigours of the constraint she has chosen, Knausgaard without the interiority. It’s like Knausgaard? No. It’s more a kind of extension of the Nouveau roman project outlined by Robbe-Grillet: a turning-away from the tired novelistic props of plot, character, meaning, a verbal ‘inner life’, inside-out, and all that. Robbe-Grillet wanted a novel made only of objects, surfaces, objective description. This book doesn’t have any of those. Hmm. Yes. This book has cast off all those. Perhaps it’s even more rigorous. There are only words, spoken by people about whom we know nothing but what the words tell us, or imply. We are immersed in language, it is our medium, or the medium of one strand of our awareness. Our sensory awareness and our verbal awareness are very different things. Are you giving a lecture here? I suppose this book, by removing both the referents for language and the matrix of interpretation, or context, the conceptual plinths that weigh down novels, is testing to what extent speech is any good at conveying anything by itself. Conceptual plinths? There aren’t any. The book reminds me, a little, of Nathalie Sarraute, The Planetarium perhaps, where the novel is comprised only of voices. In this book the reader does the same sort of work to ‘build’ the novel around the words. Is that fun? Fun? Well, actually, yes, this book is enjoyable to read. I thought I would read a bit, get the idea, and then take some pretty large running stitches through it, so to speak, but, even though nothing much happens in the way of plot, it is just an ordinary life, after all, the book is hugely enjoyable, and frequently very funny, you want to read every bit, because it so perfectly captures the way people say things, the way thought and language stutter on through time. The book is takes place entirely in the present moment, a present moment regulated by language. By the beat of the sentence. What is said is unimportant. Relatively unimportant. It doesn’t matter what happens? Why should anyone care about that? Apart from the characters, so to call them. She spent a year spying on people and writing down whatever they said, whether she was in the conversation, probably quite private conversations, or things she overheard people saying? How could she do that? How could she not do that? A novelist is always spying on other people, not to overhear what people say but how they say it, not to find out information but to find out how people approach or are affected by or transfer information. You don’t think a novelist is predatory of plot, then? Or scavenging for plot? You can’t hear or see plot. There’s no such thing, objectively. So I suppose you can’t steal one, only impose one. The realist novel, or the so-called realist novel, as a form, makes the most outrageous of its fantasies, its fallacies, in the area of plot. I think that’s unjustified. But people like plot. Yes. Yes, I suppose plot has little to do with objective reality. So to call it. Yes. In fact, coming back to what you said before about objectivity. Dialogue is the only objective form of writing. Description is prone to error, to the interposition of the viewer to the viewed, and no-one would pretend that interiority was anything but an unreliable guide to the actual… No-one as in not even you? …which is its richness, I suppose. But no-one would dispute the saying of what is said. No-one as in not even you? Verbatim is actuality, or, I mean, resembles actuality, at least structurally. Verbatim creates an indubitable immediacy for the reader, which is very seductive, and clocks time against speech. Why write conversation? Conversation is propulsion. It is rocket fuel for a stuck writer, for any writer. It gets the writer out of the way of the text and lets the characters take responsibility for its progression. Conversation gives at least the illusion of objectivity. Conversation draws the reader into the illusion of ‘real time’. Even if it’s not. No. Irrelevant, though. But this novel, The Beat of the Pendulum, purports to be a record of things actually said, in the real world. Yes, I believe it. How is that a novel? All novels are a kind of edited actuality, some more swingeingly edited than others. Otherwise they wouldn’t be believable. She’s edited this? Well, obviously there’s been some sort of selecting process going on, some choosing. A year’s worth of “I’m putting on some washing. Is there anything you want to add to the load”/”There are some socks on the floor in the bedroom, if you wouldn’t mind.” might get a bit tedious. But is not out of keeping with the project. Well, no. I suppose not. But then it wouldn’t be a novel. Literature is potentised by exclusion rather than by inclusion. What makes this book a novel is the rigour of its form. It is an experiment in form. A laboratory experiment, if you like. You said this book is funny. I don’t remember The Wish Child being funny, and her new book, Remote Sympathy, doesn't seem remotely funny. Where does the humour come from? Scientific rigour is indistinguishable from humour. The world is a relentless funfair? If you look at it dispassionately. And a relentless tragedy. There are some rather memorable and enjoyable passages, revelatory, even, you could say. Such as? There is a long passage, maybe a dozen pages, which just records the sales pitch of a sales assistant showing Catherine and her husband a carpet shampooing machine. The use, or misuse, of language is just so well observed, it’s hilarious and tragic. Likewise the patter used by Fiona Pardington when taking Chidgey’s portrait, or there’s the compound pretension and insecurity of the conversations in the creative writing classes Chidgey tutors, or the attempt to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to an inattentive child. Humour often comes from the simultaneous impact of multiple contexts upon language. I thought humour comes from noticing the world as it actually is. That’s why humour is often cruel. Or all the medical appointments, or the woman overheard in a waiting room talking about her jewellery. “I’m a silver person but my three daughters are gold people,” or something like that. Chidgey reveals the distortions, the structural flaws and inconsistent texture of the verbal topographies we wander through. Hark at him. And the way words act as hooks or burrs that accrete details to entities in ways sufficiently idiosyncratic to make them specific. So you get to know the characters in this book? Even though nobody’s named. No, not really. At least, not closely. Surprisingly, perhaps. But then an overdefined personality, or ‘character’ is a definite flaw that fiction, even—sometimes—good fiction, but certainly—always—bad fiction, is prone to fall into. What we call identity is really just a grab-bag or accretion of impressions and tendencies, and multiple voices, including incompatible impressions and contradictory tendencies and conflicting voices. We are much less ourselves than we pretend we are. Speak for yourself. Attachment to what we, for convenience, call persons, is something imposed upon actuality and is not something inherent in it. Chidgey’s book is not involving in the way we sometimes expect novels to be involving, there’s no story, or any of those other appurtenances, but there is both a fascination and a shared poignancy that comes with this cumulative evidence of the feeling that actual life is slipping away, with each beat of the pendulum, its loss measured out in words. Each squeeze of the concertina. The moments whose residue is on these pages will never return. The words both immortalise them and mark their evanescence. It’s both an anxiety and a release from anxiety. So our anxiety about our vulnerability magnifies our vulnerability? That’s a fairly accurate observation. That’s what we use words for. Ha. The book is arranged on a day-by-day basis through the year. Yes. You’re supposed to read only what’s on today’s date, then, for a year. Haha. That would be a bit religious. Yes, you could. That would be an experiment in reading. It’s been done. But not in a novel. I don’t know. What are you doing? I’m putting my computer away. You’re not going to write the review? All this talking has used up the time I was going to write it in. You can always write it on Friday. Deadline day. I suppose. I was hoping to at least make a start. Sorry. Don’t say that. Sorry. It’s ironic, isn’t it, our situation, two fictional characters engaged in a fictional conversation about an objective novel comprising only actual, ‘real-life’, material. What are you saying? We’re both fictional, authorial conceits if you like. Mind you, you are rather more fictional than I am. Someone might mistake me for an actual person. But you’re not? Not on the evidence of our conversation. |
NEW RELEASES
Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird — the huia —and journeys on into troubling futures. These poems reach for the possibilities of lyric, even as their worlds are being threatened in a range of agitating ways. In the title poem we hear a baby say Wow to life and to the astonishing prospect of language; but almost immediately we hear the world reply: Also. Along the way there are several desperate jokes.
>>4 poems.
A man calls one afternoon with a shattering message for Lucy: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, he wants her to know. The revelation marks a turning point. Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage: she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.
"The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read." —Daisy Johnson
Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, Verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'.
Those who cannot sleep are the only ones who do not take sleep for granted. For the insomniac, every detail of their lives is seen in relation to their insomnia. Harvey's insomnia came upon her without warning. This is the poetic and insightful account of how she spent a year under its dominance.
Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism by Julia Watson $110
In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo-TEK, a design movement rebuilding indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture to generate sustainable, resilient infrastructure and design solutions that are eco-positive.
"Can ancient fixes save our crisis-torn world? This book is the result of a decade of travelling to some of the most remote regions on the planet, interviewing anthropologists, scientists and tribe members. Watson carefully documented their indigenous innovations using the landscape architect's language of plans, cross-sections and exploded isometric diagrams to explain clearly how they work." —The Guardian
An anthology of writing and art to celebrate the diversity of New Zealand's cultures, produced in response to the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks.
Completely fascinating and occasionally useful.
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in 1804 in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a life much like her mother's. But after three divorces — and with a temperament much too strong-willed for her family's approval — she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo (present-day Tokyo). This book intimates life in Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet, which would open Japan up to trade and diplomacy with the West for the first time. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai and eventually ends up in the service of a famous city magistrate.
When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man's death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things. That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front — at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war.
"A remarkable and audacious novel that is harrowingly real and, at the same time, asks the most searching questions about men at war." —William Boyd
Can trauma be inherited? Halberstadt's travels into his own heritage to answer this question. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather — apparently the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin — to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story — that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.
In January 2002, a group of suspected terrorists were transferred to a Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They were the first of hundreds of men who would be held there—and 40 still remain. These prisoners were characterized as the "worst of the worst" but many of them have never been properly charged or tried in a proper court, and have been denied due process. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a place that most Americans would rather not think about. But the stories of the people whose lives have been shaped by Guantanamo deserve to have their stories heard. In the graphic novel Guantanamo Voices, journalist Sarah Mirk and her team of diverse artists tell the stories of ten people who spent time at the prison, including service members, prisoners, lawyers, and journalists.
Why does archaeology matter? How does studying prehistory help us understand climate change? How can archaeological discoveries challenge contemporary assumptions about gender? How has archaeology been used and misused to support political and nationalist agendas — and how can it help build a more diverse and inclusive picture of our world by examining the people left out of written history?
The Pōrangi Boy by Shilo Kino $25
Awful, but fascinating. The book is filled with photographs (and maps!) giving insight into period crime and detection, from phrenology to fingerprints, 1811—1911.
Twelve-year-old Niko lives in Pohe Bay, a small, rural town with a sacred hot spring and a taniwha named Taukere. The government wants to build a prison over the home of the taniwha, and Niko's grandfather is busy protesting. People call him pōrangi, crazy, but when he dies, it's up to Niko to convince his community that the taniwha is real and stop the prison from being built. With help from his friend Wai, Niko must unite his whanau, honour his grandfather and stand up to his childhood bully.
Fancy Dancing: New and selected poems, 2007—2020 by Bernadette Hall $30
Her eleventh collection. "As close as I’ll ever get to writing an autobiography."
Community-positive large-flavoured vegetarian recipes drawing from McKinnon's Chinese-Australian heritage.
>>Other cookbooks by Hetty McKinnon.
Graham Bennett: Around Every Circle by Graham Bennett, Felicity Milburn, Rosa Shiels, John Freeman-Moir, Barbara Speedy $85
This exquisite book from award-winning art publisher Ron Sang records the career to date of this important New Zealand sculptor and intimates his approaches, environmental concerns and working practices.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #201 (23.10.20)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we are reading and recommending.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi {Reviewed by STELLA} With the quotation, “Does the wound of daughter turn into something else if left unattended?” from Linda Yuknavitch opening this novel, you are, from the start of this Booker finalist, set on a course. Burnt Sugar is a sharp-edged portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship that has love, revenge and confusion at its core. Antara, the daughter, is in the throes of her mother’s madness. A madness that has invaded her life from the outset, in one sense or the other. A madness of selfishness and obsession leads Tara, as a young mother, to gather her baby, leave her husband, and follow the guru at the local ashram. Her sexual relationship with the guru leaves her young child to the whims of communal life and, fortunately, the hands of an older woman, Kali Mata. Antara’s memories of this time are fragmented and, at times, frightening, and these early years of abandonment mark her interactions with both her parents as well as making her wary of close relationships with others. When Tara does leave the ashram, her relationship with the guru in tatters, it does nothing to heal the wound for Antara — the daughter is never good enough — a burden who is endured rather than loved, and later a competitor for attention as Tara ages. While Doshi does not overstate the interactions of Antara with her husband, friends and, later, her own baby, it is clear by her behaviour that she has difficulty finding emotional security in her everyday life. Antara is an artist and her artworks focus on memory and obsession. She has a daily project — drawing and redrawing the same face each day — the small changes recorded over time reflect the way in which actions are rewritten incrementally. This project in itself reveals the complex relationship between mother and daughter — one of misguided love and obsession. While it is easy to see this novel as a story of a poisonous mother, this would do Avni Doshi’s novel an injustice. Yes, Antara at times sees her mother’s dementia as a penance for her bad behaviour and for her failure as a parent, and Tara does still inflict destruction in her present incarnation — habitually as much as anything, but there is also an empathy here for her mother’s state, if not forgiveness, especially as she deals with her own sense of entrapment by marriage and motherhood. Doshi explores these themes, along with the expectations of women’s roles in contemporary India, with a honed eye and acid wit. Revenge comes in spoon-fed sugar mouthfuls, and love is elusive, yet hovering at the edges, for Antara. She is not your average heroine nor villain — a victim but also a perpetrator of deceit: Doshi’s portrayal of a young woman at odds with the world she lives in — middle-class India — and at odds with her mother — “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure” — is searingly honest. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Lost Writings by Franz Kafka {Reviewed by THOMAS} “People are individuals and fully entitled to their individuality, though they first must be brought into an acceptance of it.” If I write more of this it will mean nothing, but this does not stop me sitting at my little desk, here in the hall of our apartment, writing away each night after the others have gone to sleep. The clock in the sitting room slices away the seconds with each swing of its pendulum; the seconds, the minutes, the hours, each moment a decapitation of all that I have written, these sentences just as deserving of being considered shavings from my pencil as the shavings that accumulate at my page-side. Which is the better monument to my labour? It is hard to begin to write, but I am one who believes that beginning to write is possible, perhaps with superhuman effort, or with effort that is human if superhuman effort is not attainable by humans, but I do not believe that it is possible to bring writing to completion, and so I complete nothing. Not that it is not easy to stop; nothing could be easier. Anyone who writes has an equal ability to stop writing; though the ability to write may be very unequally distributed, to stop writing is within the reach of all. Why then, if stopping is so easy, do so many writers not improve the quality of their work by availing themselves more often of this common ability? If a good writer is one who manages not to write bad books, a reasonable definition, then, and I state this without conceit, though I complete nothing I am a better writer than many writers more famous than me. If it is possible to begin and possible to stop but impossible to complete, at least for me who does not believe in the possibility of completion and who does not believe that the world contains completion, only beginnings and stoppings, what is produced by all this writing? I produce nothing but fragments. I believe in nothing but fragments. Even the great sheaf of pages that I call The Proceedings is a fragment, an interminable fragment, uncompletable, and I would rather this is burned after my death than turned into a work by an editor or executor, no matter how well-intentioned. Will there come a day, perhaps a hundred years from now, when the fragment is recognised as a literary form in itself, perhaps the only literary form, the only form that can approach the truth, no matter that it limps in its approach. The smaller the fragment, then, the more perfectly it expresses its inability to be anything other than a fragment, but how shall these fragments be assembled and arranged? Fragments are best arranged in a fragmentary way. Just as dust accumulates throughout an unswept house, but more in some places than in others, such as in the space between an unclosed door and the wall against which it rests, so fragments naturally become lost within the drifts of which they are part. How shall they be found among all the other fragments in which in plain sight they are as good as lost? There is nothing lost about these lost writings. The writer and the reader are more lost than what is written, but only when they write and read. I write to be rid of myself. I write to be rid of thought. I write to be rid of what I have written but every fragment adds to this burden I write to put down. I sharpen my pencil again as the pendulum swings and add to the pile of shavings that is my more fitting legacy, the one that my executor will not hesitate to burn, should they happen to survive that long. I write as the birds begin to sing in the trees in the street below. I will not complete what I write. It is not possible to complete what I write. Whether I wish to complete what I write or not affects nothing, I will produce a fragment, but the question of whether I should strive for completion remains. I will be found where I am lost. Every opportunity is a trap, but I leap in regardless [...] |
>>How the Polynesian Panthers gave rise to Pasifika activism.
>>A history of the Polynesian Panthers.
>>Shoulder to shoulder.
>>A personal discovery of the Panthers.
>>The Dawn Raids and its resistance.
>>Sofia's story.
>>"David Lange saved my life."
>>45 years later.
>>In solidarity with the Black Panthers.
>>The Black Panthers World Tour.
>>Get The Platform.
NEW RELEASES
Fosse continues his remarkable 'slow prose' project with an exploration of the two artists, Asle and Alse, doppelgängers or alternate versions of the same person, whose parallel lives intersect (at least in one direction!), leading the reader into philosophical and ethical considerations of great subtlety.
"Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous." —Catherine Taylor, Guardian
"The reader of I is Another is both on the riverbank and in the water being carried forward, and around, by the great, shaping, and completely engrossing, flow of Fosse’s words. It’s a doubleness of view that is reflected in the characters, named Asle, who are both one and other, and through which we can see and feel the world, and ourselves, more clearly." —David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On
The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. A garden can provide a family's food, a child's playground, an adult's peaceful retreat. But around the world and throughout history, gardens have often meant something more profound. For Sue Stuart-Smith's grandfather, returning from the First World War weighing six stone, a year-long horticulture course became a life raft for recovering from the trauma. For prisoners in today's justice system, gardening can be a mental escape from captivity which offers, in a context when opportunity is scarce, the chance to take ownership of a project and build something positive up from seed. In The Well Gardened Mind, Stuart-Smith investigates the huge power of the garden and its little-acknowledged effects on health and wellbeing.
A thirty-two-year old man can’t get out of bed or leave his apartment. All he can do is recall his life so far, dissect it, write it, gathering all the memories around what would mark his existence forever: his mother’s departure in the summer of 1994, when he was only ten, so that she could join the Zapatista uprising that was shaking up the whole country. Her mysterious escape from one day to the next only worsens with his clumsy father’s secrecy, silence and awkwardness, a man unable to carry the responsibilities for his son and teenage daughter. This worsens with the boy’s erratic investigations to uncover the reasons for his mother’s decision to leave. All he can do is create an anguish-filled parallel world: he will unsuccessfully seek refuge in his origami obsession, or in his sensory deprivation tank in which he locks himself up to see if he can erase his existence. Finally, with the help of Rata, a young delinquent dating his sister, he will undertake a voyage of discovery to the darkest corners of his Mexico City, where he will meet the face of gratuitous cruelty, as well as the selfless kindness of strangers. 
We Will Work With You: Wellington Media Collective, 1978—1998 edited by Mark Derby, Jenny Rouse and Ian Wedde $60
The Platform: The radical legacy of the Polynesian Panthers by Melani Anae $15
Two Cities by Cynthia Zarin $22
Timeline: Science and technology by Peter Goes $40
The House of the Happy Spirits: A children's book inspired by Hundertwasser by Géraldine Elschner and Lucie Vandevelde $32
Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek myths by Nathalie Haynes $40
Good Night Stories fro Rebel Girls #3: 100 immigrant women who changed the world by Elena Favilli et al $60
A Wild Winter Swan by Gregory Maguire $33
Stuck Together: Recipes to share with the people you love by Sarah Tuck $65
A fascinating and full illustrated record of the work of the group of designers and political activists committed to left-wing principles and politics.
>>WMC [no relation].
Auckland's Polynesian Panther movement were modelled on the US Black Panther Party — but without guns. The Polynesian Panthers was founded in response to the racist treatment of Pacific Islanders in the era of the Dawn Raids. Central to the group was a three-point 'platform' of peaceful resistance against racism, Pacific empowerment and a liberating education aimed at changing the landscape of race relations. The Polynesian Panthers defined an emerging group of Pacific people whose legacy still resonates.
Zarin's deeply personal response to the contrasting cities of Venice and Rome intimate something of the relationship between person and the cumulative culture of places with long histories embedded in art.
In his signature playful style, Peter Goes illustrates the most fascinating technologies, from the first tools to the most specialized IT, from medical breakthroughs to the creation of YouTube. He includes remarkable scientists and innovators and highlights lesser-known stories. A compelling history of technology from the Stone Age to the present day, from America to the Southern hemisphere and beyond. A companion volume to Timeline: A visual history.
Children can rethink cities and discover ways of living with nature with this imaginative story of the creation of the Hundertwasser House in Vienna.
Taking Pandora and her jar (the box came later) as the starting point, Haynes puts the women of the Greek myths on equal footing with the men. After millennia of stories telling of gods and men, be they Zeus or Agamemnon, Paris or Odysseus, Oedipus or Jason, the voices that sing from these pages are those of Hera, Athena and Artemis, and of Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Eurydice and Penelope.
The Dragon Ark by Curatoria Draconis $48
With dragon numbers in rapid decline, time is running out to ensure the survival of the species. Curatoria Draconis, also known as the Dragon Protector, is on a mission to find the rarest dragon on Earth: the Chinese Celestial Dragon. Aboard the Dragon Ark, you'll travel all over the globe and see some of the most incredible dragons—care for Deep-Sea Dragons off the coast of New Zealand, journey into the Amazon Rainforest to spot plant-loving Parvula Dragons, and travel alongside the Ice Dragons in Antarctica.
Brief and inspiring biographies paired with stunning full-page illustrations.
A reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Wild Swans' as the story of an Italian immigrant's coming-of-age in 1960s New York. From the author of Wicked and Mirror, Mirror.
Positively delicious food from the sensation behind fromthekitchen.co.nz. 
Plantopedia: The definitive guide to house plants by Lauren Camilleri and Sophia Kaplan $65
Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi $20
A Journey through Greek Myths by Marchella Ward and Sander Berg $45
COMING SOON: ORDER NOW!
Definitive. 150 plant profiles and practical advice.
In this sequel to the wildly popular Before the Coffee Gets Cold, four more customers avail themselves of the time-travelling offered by the Cafe Funiculi Funicula.
Books written in blood and books that kill, books of the insane and books that hoaxed the globe, books invisible to the naked eye and books so long they could destroy the Universe, books worn into battle, books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered...
Travel around the Mediterranean is this beautifully illustrated book and learn about the myths associated with each place you visit.
Scandinavian Green: Simple ways to eat vegetarian, every day by Trine Hahnemann $55
Classic Paperbacks Memory Game by Richard Baker $45
Scandinavian and Scandinavian-inflected recipes for each season, including mains, breads, sweets, pantry staples and some special dishes for cooking outside.
Match the jackets. Fun!
The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan $45
Hotere invited O'Sullivan to write his life in 2005, and this nuanced and insightful portrait of one of Aotearoa's most important and interesting artists is the long-awaited and supremely fulfilling result.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon {Reviewed by THOMAS} Could he even write a review of a book he had read about someone writing about sentences that he in turn had read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, he himself had read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which he has also read? The question mark, when it finally arrived, seemed somehow out of place, so far did it trail the part of the sentence he had just written in which the matter of the question appeared early, all those clauses shoving the question mark to an awkward distance, already the thought that the sentence described was changing direction, as thoughts do, but the sentence was still obliged to display the mark that would make the first part of the sentence, and indeed the whole sentence thereby into a question, there was a debt to be paid after all, he was lucky to get off without interest. The separation of the question mark from the quested matter was not the only reservation he had about the sentence he had just written, he had other reservations, both about its structure and its content, in other words both about its grammar and its import, if that is the right word. One reservation was that he had chosen to write the sentence in the third person, a habit he had acquired, or an affectation that he had adopted, that depersonalised his reviews and made them easier to write and, he hoped, more enjoyable to read, certainly, he thought, less embarrassing for himself to read, or should that be re-read, not that he was particularly inclined to do such a thing. These reviews were also written in the past tense, for goodness sake. Could he write in the first person and in the present tense, he wondered, or was that a mode he contrarily reserved for fiction? Can I even write a review of a book I have read, he wrote as an experiment, about someone writing about sentences that he has read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, I have read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which I have also read?, he wrote, though I must say, he thought, that question mark is more problematic than ever. Also, would it not be ludicrous, he thought, to even attempt to write a review about a book about fine sentences, or exceptional sentences, or exemplary sentences or whatever, from William Shakespeare to Anne Boyer, including sentences from several of my favourite writers, though not perhaps the sentences of theirs that I would choose if I had been choosing, he thought, when my own sentences churn on, when in my own repertoire I have only commas and full stops, a continuation mark and a stopping mark, when those two marks for him are already too much for him to handle, accustomed as he had once made himself to the austerity of the full stop alone, you could write a whole book using only full stops, he thought, or he had once thought. He had wandered, and tried to return to the task in hand, or the book in hand, or to the thought in head, so to speak. Because the book was about sentences he found himself unable to write any sentences about it. If he wrote a review, he thought, he had no doubt that at least some of the readers of that review, if not all of the readers of that review, if there were any such readers, which seemed unlikely, would find his sentences fell short of their subject, or if they did not fall short they would quaver under their scrutiny, weaken and collapse, which is another sort of falling. His sentences would rather point than be pointed at. Thinking of writing would have to suffice. I would like to write, he thought of writing, that this book, Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon, is the sort of book that anyone interested in reading better, or, indeed, in writing better, which goes without saying, as writing is a subset of reading, if that goes without saying, though not everyone’s subset, he thought, and would have said had he been saying instead of thinking and writing, or, rather thinking and thinking of writing, Brian Dillon is good company in working out how text works when it works well, but, although he thought of writing this, as he had said, see, he does say though he said he was not saying, he did not write this as, by this time, his comma-infested sentences were almost unable to move in any direction even if not in a straight line, bring on the full stops, he thought. "Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping.” —Jean-François Lyotard |
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Inkberg Enigma by Jonathan King {Reviewed by STELLA} Miro lives with his Dad in Aurora — a small fishing town — and it’s the school holidays. He loves adventures — the ones in books — and spends his days happily lying on the sofa hidden in fantastic and amazing worlds. But he's a bookworm and needs to feed his book stack. Luckily, the house they have recently moved to has an attic of treasures — and some of these treasures are sought after. Miro is a regular at the antique shop and is a dab hand at bartering. His trade done, it’s off to get a stack of books at the second-hand bookshop. While in the village, he’s keeping an eye out for Dad — he doesn’t want to run into him (Miro’s book collection is growing — some may think too large) — and for the town bullies. Yet buried in anticipation of reading his new stash, he doesn’t notice the bullies, but someone else does: Zia, equipped with her camera and an eye for trouble, easily frightens them off. Miro and Zia make the perfect duo — one smart and thoughtful, the other curious and fearless, and they both love adventures — Miro’s in books and Zia’s in real life. And something fishy is happening in their small town. Jonathan King has created a brilliant world. It’s Aotearoa, but could be a fishing town along the American coast or Canadian isles, loosely based on Lyttelton and Diamond Harbour, complete with the ferry and the fish works. There are recognisable buildings — the mysterious mansion is Larnach Castle and the ship stuck in the ice is a classic Antarctic explorer territory, and the sea, as in many New Zealand stories is never far from the action. When Zia pulls Miro into a real-life adventure, the weird underbelly of the town comes to the surface in more ways than expected. Yes, as you would expect, there is a creature from the depths, but how and why it is surfacing in little Aurora is a mystery from the past, with strange rituals, shady characters, and an unusual book. Why is the mayor so keen on keeping a secret? What’s really happening at the fish works? And why are Miro and Zia being warned to keep their noses out of it? With the help of the museum’s archives, a marine biologist (Miro’s Dad’s girlfriend), and Zia’s insatiable curiosity, the duo will find the key to the mysterious happenings in the harbour and unlock the secrets of the Inkberg — while just keeping their heads above water! A brilliant graphic novel illustrated in the style of 'Tintin 'for 7 to 12-year-olds, Jonathan King’s The Inkberg Enigma is a wonderful adventure with plenty of twists and just enough scares to please. Here’s hoping for more adventures with this excellent duo from the pen of this comic artist. |
NEW RELEASES
Egg and Spoon is a beautiful illustrated cookbook for children—and adults—that celebrates imagination, confidence and the fun of cooking. A scrumptious collection for anyone who loves good healthy food— and an occasional indulgence. Here are after-school snacks, breakfast on a stick, cakes, slices and dinners. Egg and Spoon is for children learning to cook independently and families to enjoy cooking together. Much of the food is naturally gluten-free or vegan.
In this brutal, gripping novel, Selva Almada narrates the case of three small-town teenage girls murdered in the 1980's in the interior of Argentina. Three deaths without culprits: 19-year old Andrea Danne, stabbed in her own bed; 15-year old María Luisa Quevedo, raped, strangled, and dumped in wasteland; and 20-year old Sarita Mundín, whose disfigured body was found on a river bank. Almada takes these and other tales of abused women to weave together a dry, straightforward portrait of gender violence that surpasses national borders and speaks to readers' consciousness all over the world. From the author of The Wind That Lays Waste.
Formed in 1974, Red Mole performed Dadaesque cabaret, agit-prop, costume drama, street theatre, circus and puppetry, live music, and became a national sensation. They toured the country with Split Enz and travelled internationally. One of Red Mole's five founding principles was 'to escape programmed behaviour by remaining erratic'. Edmond's insightful and well-written memoir of his time with the troupe captures both the times and the urgency for change that ran through them like an electric current.
There is something about the way Colin McCahon’s life and work intertwine that resists interpretation. He always insisted it was the work that was important, not the life; while at the same time maintaining that the work was autobiographical. He also said that all art is about death: biography, too, seeks to describe the shape of a life which is over. Edmond sets out the primary facts of McCahon's life in chronological order, relates those facts to the work he did, and suggests what his influences, his preoccupations and his ambitions at any given time might have been.
"Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment. In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings." —Reiner Stach
This volume contains overlooked stories unearthed by Stach in his preparation of the monumental 3-volume biography of Kafka.
Thirty years of incisive essays from the London Review of Books, including 'Royal Bodies', 'In Bed with Madonna', and ruminations on Jane Boleyn, Robespierre, the murder of James Bulger, Britain's last witch, the Hair Shirt Sisterhood, and numerous other historical, political and social matters. Compelling.
The word 'coffee' is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 400-year transformation from an obscure Ottoman custom into an everyday necessity.
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier $32
Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl, our dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father, avoiding her loving boyfriend, and ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighbourhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickle-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.
"Great inventiveness, unfailing intelligence and empathy, and best of all a rare and shimmering wit." —Richard Ford
The Kiosk by Anete Melece $30
Dangerous Men by Michal Dukatis $27
For years, the kiosk has been Olga's life, but she dreams of distant places. One day a chance occurrence sets her on an unexpected journey. Absurd and heart-lifting, this is a picture book about being stuck and finding a way to get free.
An old cowboy stares into the eyes of his dead wife and remembers a time before he knew her; a photojournalist and his terminally ill wife enjoy one last night together under the hunter's moon; a family wait for their son to return home from the civil war in Bosnia; and a dying man takes violent revenge against the people who ruined his life.
Into the Tangled Bank: How we are in nature by Lev Parikian $35
Lev Parikian embarks on a journey to explore the many ways that he, and we, experience the natural world. Starting in his own garden plot, he gradually moves outwards to local patch, wildlife reserve, craggy coastline and as far afield as the dark hills of Skye.
Comida Mexicana: Snacks, tacos, tortas, tamales and desserts by Rosa Cienfuegos $55
An exciting tour of the street food of Mexico.
The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well by Robert Dessaix $35
Down South by Bruce Ansley $50
Beautifully designed and produced, this book captures all the wonder of the collections in book form.
Reflecting on time, religion, painting, dancing and even grandchildren, Dessaix takes us on an enlivening journey across the landscape of growing older. Riffing on writers and thinkers from Plato to Eva Hoffman, he emphasises the importance of a rich inner life.
What We'll Build: Plans to build our together future by Oliver Jeffers $30
Between 2010 and 2020, human figures and native New Zealand flora and fauna have been among Dibble's oft-revisited subjects, his work refining these figures to their simplest forms.
A father and daughter set about laying the foundations for their life together. Using their own special tools, they get to work; building memories to cherish, a home to keep them safe and love to keep them warm. We all need to build a together future.
A companion volume of sorts to Here We Are.
Crosby has reworked his book The Musket Wars into a popular format, and emphasised how the period of territorial fluidity and imbalance that followed the introduction of firearms (2806—1845) has its legacy in many issues today.
From Curio Bay to Golden Bay, who could be a better companion on a road trip of the South Island than Bruce Ansley?
Yes, they really do pop up.