We've been asked to name our FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2020.
Click through to read our reviews. STELLA:
1. Dance Prone by David Coventry
2. The Harpy by Megan Hunter
3. Summer by Ali Smith
THOMAS:
1. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
2. The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer
3. Grove by Esther Kinsky
1. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
2. The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer
3. Grove by Esther Kinsky
NEW RELEASES
The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats—the animal that has most captured our imagination—than from the great thinkers of the world.
>>Is philosophy a result of anxiety?
Unquiet by Linn Ullmann $37
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky $45
Divorcing by Susan Taubes $37
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Now that she's grown up—a writer, with children of her own—and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. But it's winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words—both remembered and recorded—remain. Drawing on her own relationship with her father, Ingmar Bergman, this is a remarkably insightful piece of autofiction.
"Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters." —Rachel Cusk
"Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters." —Rachel Cusk
Ever aware of the uneasy relationship between history and memory, Schalansky writes subtly of things, places, people and ideas that have a historical presence that no longer exists beyond memory. How should we think of extinction and loss?
"The most wondrous book of the year: by taking what has vanished and turning it into a great piece of literature, the author has performed a magical act." —Die Zeit
"Schalansky treats each of the 12 objects cataloged in her new book with an almost religious awe, like a believer giving herself up to be inhabited by spirits." —LARB
Dream and reality overlap in a book in which divorce is not just a question of a broken marriage but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie's childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions in her present life. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life.
Swept off her feet by Howard, everything Judith does is now about him: He calls her at work, instructs her on what to wear to dinner, and takes control of her body and sexuality with complete ownership. Judith becomes dependent on the push-pull of their sexual entanglement and on Howard's attention and approval, convinced she's found the man of her dreams. Until, that is, she understands he's the man of her nightmares: hostile, reckless, and manipulative, he seems intent on obliterating any sense of self and autonomy that Judith possesses. Escaping Howard's grasp—and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control—becomes her mission. Merkin's new novel is deeply and often painfully insightful.
>>See also the excellent Enchantment.
>>See also the excellent Enchantment.
A ground-breaking bilingual poetry collection, which features a poem each by seven Māori women writers, originally written in English, and a translation in Māori. The two version of the poems are presented on facing pages. Featuring Anahera Gildea, Michelle Ngamoki, Tru Paraha, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Maraea Rakuraku, Dayle Takitimu and Alice Te Punga Somerville. The poems have been translated by Hēmi Kelly, Te Ataahia Hurihanganui, Herewini Easton, Jamie Cowell, Vaughan Rapatahana and Dayle Takitimu.
In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained enslaved. And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful 'West India Interest'. Supported by nearly every leading figure of the British establishment—including Canning, Peel and Gladstone, The Times and Spectator—the Interest ensured that slavery survived until 1833 and that when abolition came at last, compensation was given not to the enslaved but to the slaveholders, entrenching the power of their families to shape modern Britain to this day. An important revision.
Addresses core philosophical issues including Maori notions of the self, the world, epistemology, the form in which Maori philosophy is conveyed, and whether or not Maori philosophy has a teleological agenda.
Judith Butler's new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable, and tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects.
With his many decades of intimacy both with the city and its place in history, art, literature and thought, Nooteboom manages to evoke new dimensions of understanding of this unique city.
"Nooteboom has achieved the impossible: to say something new about the ageless city about which everything has been said." —Alberto Manguel
Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, the semicolon is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?
American Utopia by David Byrne and Maira Kalman $53
William Softkey and the Purple Spider by C.F. (Christopher Fourges) $40
A joyful collaboration between old friends David Byrne and Maira Kalman, American Utopia offers readers an antidote to cynicism, bursting with pathos, humanism, and hope, featuring Byrne's words and lyrics brought to life with more than 150 of Kalman's colorful paintings. David Byrne's American Utopia was a hit Broadway show before becoming a documentary from Spike Lee. The four-color artwork, by Maira Kalman, which she created for the Broadway show's curtain, is composed of small moments, expressions, gestures, and interactions that together offer a portrait of daily life and coexistence.
Buried deep under sand sits a library the size of a small city, owned by the eerily powerful Mr. Wish and protected by roving bands of toughs and lethal sentient vehicles. When a small but heavy interdimensional spider demands access to the vault, poor William Softkey, with assistance from the gravity-experimenter Gigglewindow sisters, is hired to deal with the problem. Rendered in the artist's trademark stark linework—against a backdrop of paranoid techno-fantasy, strange emblematic beings, and woozy halftone patterns—William Softkey and the Purple Spider is a dreamy comic narrative with strange appeal.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa {Reviewed by STELLA} “Perhaps the past is always trembling inside the present, whether or not we sense it.” Irish poet’s Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s debut novel is a triumph of obsession, self-reflection and love. Obsessed with the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a young mother negotiates her desire to unpick the mystery of this woman as she navigates the daily tasks of her life. “I try to distract myself in my routine of sweeping, wiping, dusting, and scrubbing. I cling to all my little rituals. I hoard crusts.” Out of small spare moments, car trips to historic sites (houses, cemeteries and libraries) with her youngest child and late-night searches on her phone the shape of Eibhlín Dubh’s life is constructed or more accurately imagined. Who was she? What happened to her? Why can this woman’s life not be tracked while her father's, husband's and sons’ lives can? At the heart of the story is a poem—a lament—written by Eibhlín Dubh for her husband Art O’Leary slain by the orders of the English magistrate. “Trouncings and desolations on you, ghastly Morris of the treachery”. The poem becomes a touchstone for the narrator, a place where she can rest, where she can dream—imagine the world of this other woman who is dealing with loss, a woman who is resolute and tough, who will not lie down nor succumb to expectation from either her family nor the authorities. A Ghost in the Throat questions the telling of history—the invisibility of female voices. Scattered throughout the novel is the phrase “This is a female text”, making us aware that stories are told and histories revealed in other ways, through the body and its scars, through cloth and object, through the tasks that make us human, through the words that are sometimes unsaid and in the margins where many do not look. As the narrator discovers the poet, she frees herself along with this woman trapped in time and neglect. Ní Ghríofa writes with bewitching clarity as she describes the daily grind, with dreamlike essence in the moments of childhood memory—the longing and discovery—with realist angst about entering adulthood and motherhood, and with compelling atmosphere as the narrator unpicks the past. Rich in content and language, A Ghost in the Throat is both a scholarly endeavour and an autofiction—endlessly curious and achingly beautiful. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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>>We appreciated Sarah Laing's Covid-19 Diaries during lockdown.
>>Toby Morris worked with Souxsie Wiles to bring us clear information and advice.
>>Sharon Murdoch set the tone at the beginning of the lockdown.
>>The book contains work by Mat Tait.
>>Rufus Marigold found that social distancing and face-masks relieved his social anxiety.
>>Ruby Jones has also produced the Thanks from Iso project to express gratitude from returning New Zealanders in MIQ.
>>Your copy of this book.
NEW RELEASES
A unique novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.
Endless Sea: Stories told through the taonga of the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui te Ananui a Tangaroa by Frances Walsh and Jane Ussher $70
Manchester Happened by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi $23
Winner of the 2020 US National Book Award for Fiction.
"One of the funniest books of the year has arrived, a delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire." —The Washington Post
"Fresh and beautiful. Interior Chinatown represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition." —Jeff VanderMeer, The New York Times Book Review
On Photographs by David Campany $75
Lockdown: Tales from Aotearoa $35
Tasty Treats: Easy cooking for children by Adina Chitu and Elenia Beretta $40
Is it possible to describe a photograph without interpreting it? Can a viewer ever be as dispassionate as the mechanism of a camera? And how far can a photographer's intentions determine responses to their image, decades after it was made? These are just a few questions that David Campany addresses in On Photographs. Campany explores the tensions inherent to the photographic medium — between art and document, chance and intention, permanence and malleability of meaning — as well as the significance of authorship, performance, time and reproduction. Rejecting the conventions of chronology and the heightened status afforded to 'classics' in traditional accounts of the history of the medium, Campany's selection of photographs is a personal one — mixing fine art prints, film stills, documentary photographs, fashion editorials and advertisements. 
Livewired: The inside story of the ever-changing brain by David Eagleman $37
How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? What does a baby born without a nose tell us about our sensory machinery? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts? And what does any of this have to do with why we dream? The answers to these questions are not right in front of our eyes; they're right behind our eyes. This book is not simply about what the brain is, but what it does. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new findings from Eagleman's own research, including new discoveries in synaesthesia, dreaming and wearable neurotech devices that revolutionise how we think about the senses.
19 outstanding graphic novelists and comic artists provide their takes on the New Zealand lockdown and the ways our lives have been changed by the unforeseen events of 2020. Alex Cara, Hana Chatani, Li Chen, Miriama Grace-Smith, Sloane Hong, Ruby Jones, Sarah Laing, Sarah Lund, Toby Morris, Sharon Murdoch, Ross Murray, Ant Sang, Coco Solid, Anthony Stocking (Deadface Comics), Mat Tait, Jessica Thompson Carr (Māori Mermaid), Zak Waipara, Tokerau Wilson, and Jem Yoshioka!
Appealing dishes nicely illustrated and very achievable.
Karl Maughan edited by Hannah Valentine and Gabriella Stead $80
Jacob's Ladder by Ludmilla Ulitskaya $38
The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy by Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson $25
The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan $33
For more than three decades, Karl Maughan has painted intricately painted gardenscapes, presenting idyllic yet unsettling enclosed spaces characterised by their claustrophobic and visually heightened atmosphere.
A twentieth-century family epic tracing the fates of an assimilating Jewish couple and their descendants through the maelstrom of Russian history.
"Jacob’s Ladder dramatizes this Russian concept of sudba, the understanding of fate as a kind of prison we can never escape." —New York Times
Penguins and Polar Bears: Getting to know the Arctic and Antarctic by Alicia Klepeis and Grace Helmer $48
Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander $38
"A brilliant achievement by one of Russia’s greatest writers." —World Literature Today
Dark Matter; A guide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt by Richard Langston $43
Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory precisely because their respective disciplines operate so differently. Dark Matter argues that what makes their contributions to the Frankfurt School so remarkable is how they think together in spite of these differences. At the core of all their adventures in gravitational thinking is a profound sense that the catastrophic conditions of modern life are not humankind's unalterable fate. In opposition to modernity's disastrous state of affairs, Kluge and Negt regard the huge mass of dark matter throughout the universe as the lodestar for thinking together with others, for dark matter is that absolute guarantee that happier alternatives to our calamitous world are possible.
Lark by Anthony McGowan $17
Things are tense at home for Nicky and Kenny. Their mum's coming to visit and it will be the first time they've seen her in years. A lot has changed since they were little and Nicky's not so sure he's ready to see her again. When they head for a trek across the moors to take their minds off everything, a series of unforeseen circumstances leaves the brothers in a vulnerable and very dangerous position. There might even be a chance that this time not everyone will make it home alive. Exciting and well written.
Winner of the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal.
"The clear, poetic prose in this affecting story about two brothers creates a perfectly pitched, moving tale which captures the humour and strength of their love for one another. The characters are skilfully drawn making them realistic and believable. There is an incredible sense of place when the boys are out on the moors, effectively conveying their fear and the dangers of their situation. The growing sense of jeopardy and building tension is perfectly balanced with instances of humour and palpable brotherly love, making this a breath-taking read. The epilogue brings the story to a moving and powerful conclusion." —Judges' citation
>>McGowan talks about the book.
The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer $35
Who's Your Real Mum? by Bernadette Green and Anna Zobel $30
An introverted young environmental activist forms a relationship with the ghost of a martyred fourth-century saint whose bones he steals from a church.
"Meijer examines the ethics of environmental activism through the prism of teenage angst and idealism. At the heart of the book lie questions about what it means to live an ethical life under late-stage capitalism, including how best to love others. Meijer spins a contemporary fable of lust, devotion, and transgression that will challenge readers to examine all the ways they move through the world. A sensitive, nuanced meditation on radical politics, queerness, and the responsibility of care." —Kirkus
>>Rag.
>>Interview.
When Nicholas wants to know which of Elvi's two mums is her real mum, she gives him lots of clues. Her real mum is a circus performer, and a pirate, and she even teaches spiders the art of web. But Nicholas still can't work it out! Luckily, Elvi knows just how to explain it to her friend.
We all know that ice bears and penguins never meet (except in zoos), but what else do you know about the Arctic and the Antarctic (or polar) regions? Did you know that Antarctica is not just the coldest, but also the driest continent on Earth? Have you ever wondered how a polar bear stays warm in the Arctic? Sitting on the most extreme North and South Poles are two of our planet's most mysterious regions, but what similarities and differences do they share?
Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me." This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions. Of practical concern, she's six-foot-two and weighs over 30 stone - even divided up between Seventh and his 11 brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, a far from reliable guide. Beyond the practical, Seventh struggles with the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels—to his mother, to his people and to his unique cultural heritage. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, stretching back centuries. But he's getting tired of chains.
2000 years of humanist wisdom, quotes and stories exploring what it means to lead an ethical and fulfilling life. "At the heart of humanism is the idea that humans can be deeply moral beings without having some external source of goodness to either impel or encourage them to behave well. Living a good life comes from you, from employing your own human faculties of reason and empathy and love.” —Alice Roberts
Fleeing the city, Duncan Peck seeks refuge in a village where the people can write accusations on a great wall and the accused are punished without the need for proof.
"A troubling, uncanny and believable nightmare world. The Last Good Man is an original exploration of mob mentality and the increasingly blurred line between fact and opinion that dominates so much political and cultural discourse across the world today." —Irish Times
This beautiful book, photographed by Jane Ussher, surveys the New Zealand Maritime Museum’s collection and explores New Zealand maritime history through 100 fascinating and wide-ranging objects. From ship-building tools and yachting trophies, to menu cards from the glory days of ocean liners and exquisite model ships, it is a for all who love the sea, boats and ships, and all else that sails on the water.
The bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere. Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: a reflection on our age of disquiet and dread. The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, it's in our minds.
Te Kai a te Rangatira: Leadership from the Māori world edited by Rawiri J. Tapiata, Renee Smith and Marcus Akuhata-Brown $80
The Rise and Fall of James Busby, His Majesty's British Resident in New Zealand by Paul Moon $40
An exploration of Māori leadership – its origins and values, and the life experiences that nurture rangatiratanga, based on interviews with 100 elders and with striking portraits.
>>Watch the trailer.
>>Watch the trailer.
James Busby is known was the author of New Zealand's Declaration of Independence and a central figure in the early history of independent New Zealand as its British Resident from 1833 to 1840. Officially the representative of the British government in the volatile society of New Zealand in the 1830s, Busby endeavoured to create his own parliament and act independently of his superiors in London. This put him on a collision course with the British Government, and ultimately destroyed his career and left him caricatured as an inept, conceited and increasingly embittered person. This book draws on an extensive range of previously unused archival records to reconstruct Busby's life in much more intimate form, and exposes the back-room plotting that ultimately destroyed his plans for New Zealand. Moon aims to alter the way that Britain's colonisation of New Zealand is understood, and leave readers with an appreciation of how individuals, more than policies, shaped the Empire and its rule.
"Makumbi’s collection of short stories reveals a thoughtful writer who quietly, engagingly, pierces the reality of relocating to Britain. Makumbi made the same journey from Uganda to Manchester that so many of her characters struggle with in this collection, which spans work from 2012 to the present day. Yet it never feels repetitive. Rather, Manchester Happened explores the emotional nuance of the immigrant experience." —Guardian
Winner of the Windham Campbell Prize
While a lot of gardening books focus on the grand plantings of wealthy citizens, Morris explores the historical processes behind humble gardens—those created and maintained by ordinary people. From the arrival of the earliest Polynesian settlers carrying precious seeds and cuttings, through early settler gardens to 'Dig for Victory' efforts, he traces the collapse and renewal of home gardening culture, through the emergence of community initiatives to the recent concept of food sovereignty. Considering compost, Maori gardens, the suburban vege patch, the rise of soil toxin levels, the role of native plants and City Beautiful movements, Morris looks at the ways in which cultural meanings have been inscribed in the land through our gardening practices over time. 
14 Blown Kisses by Wayne Youle $20
When we’re apart from the ones we love, how do we get our kisses to them? We blow them! The blown kisses in this charming book travel far—tied to a rocket, attached to a pigeon, kicked like a rugby ball, and many other imaginative ways. Wayne Youle (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whakaeke, Ngāti Pākehā) lived in isolation for 14 days during the COVID-19 lockdown. He created 14 ways to share blown kisses with his sons.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich {Reviewed by STELLA} A body lying askew in a hotel room greets the reader on entering Virtuoso. The author Yelena Moskovich describes the deceased woman with filmic quality as the observer runs their eyes over their lover, noting in documentary style the position of the body, the hand, fingers splayed on the carpet, rose-coloured, the ‘knee a gasp’. In the very next paragraph, the eyes turn on the wife as she throws the bag of lemons to the floor and makes a desperate lunge towards the body. In this moment, much is revealed. We are introduced to Aimee and later in the novel her life with Dominique plays out. This is just one of the female relationships explored in Moskovich’s second novel—stories of love, betrayal, desire and identity. In this heady, accomplished tale we meet Jana and Zorka, two teens growing up in 80s Czech republic; Aimee, a Parisian medical secretary; and Dominique, an ageing actress—Dominxxika_N39 and o_hotgirl Amy_o having an on-line romance through a lesbian chatline. The former, an Eastern European wife kept under lock and key—sometimes literary—and the latter, a Mid-west American teenager. These lives become connected by a myriad of consequences and coincidences either in actuality or through shared experiences or themes. Moskovich stitches with sharp needles, cuts with a rusty knife, yet brings life and love into these women’s lives in spite of the violence and the dislocation which attacks and surrounds them. The friendship and teen romance (lust) between Jana and Zorka is reminiscent of the girls in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, each dealing with parents who are angry, disappointed, or mad—and in Zorka’s case, a violently insane mother. Their childhood is rich and elaborate in imagination, and poor in resources and care. Both teens leave the East on different trajectories. Zorka disappears (to America), while Jana remains determinedly studying languages and escaping to Paris to become a translator. These passages of the novel are endlessly fascinating and the interplay between the two young women is wild in a youthful and reckless manner. Aimee’s life, by comparison, is easy (on the surface)—a father who adores her and all money can buy in cultural experiences—yet it is not until she meets Dominique that she is truly happy, for a while. The chatroom romance slices into these two stories when you least expect, bringing some humour but also an edge of dangerous disillusionment to the text. Bringing all these strands together in a novel that cuts between the present and the past is quite remarkable. Moskovich's turn of phrase, language and pace is all her own—surprising, strange and encompassing. While there are echoes of Ferrante in the development of close female friendships, there is also the weirdness, the dream-like smokescreens and uneasy violence of filmmaker David Lynch, making the novel a spliced undertaking of trippy dark hauntings and realist actions. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan {Reviewed by THOMAS} At what point does literature begin, he wondered, if there is such a thing as literature and if it does at some point begin. Is it not after all the case, he wondered, that we are assailed at all times and in all circumstances by an unbearable infinitude of details that we must somehow resist or ignore or numb ourselves to almost entirely if we are to bear them, we can only be aware of anything the smallest proportion of things and stay alive or stay sane or stay functioning, he thought, we must tell ourselves a very simple story indeed if we are to have any chance of functioning, we must shut out everything else, we must only notice what we look for, what our story lets us look for, he thought, the froth now frothing in his brain, or rather in his mind, our stories blot stuff out so that we can live, at least a little longer. We are so easily overwhelmed and in the end we are all overwhelmed, the details get us in the end, but until then we cling to our limitations, to the limitations that make the unbearable very slightly bearable, if we are lucky. All thought is deletion. The stories that we think with, he thought, are not possible without an ongoing act of swingeing exclusion, thought is an act of exclusion. What would we put in a diary? What would we put in an essay? What would we put in a novel? If we boil it all down how far can we boil it all down? We find ourselves alive, the details of our life assail us, eventually overwhelm us and destroy us. That’s our story. We die of one detail too many, but if it wasn’t that detail that finished us off it would be another, they are lining up, pressing in, abrading us. Can we resist what we understand, he wondered, to the extent that we even understand it? Is art just this form of resistance? At what point does literature begin, if there is such a thing as literature and if it does at some point begin? Is there something in our life that resists exclusion, something that when the boiling down is done is not boiled completely down? Can we move beyond simplification to a countersimplification, he wondered, and what could this even mean? If Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger’s diary at an auction and she read this diary so often that she felt she almost was its eighty-six-year-old author, if a diary’s keeper is an author, she too became the dairy’s keeper, certainly, at least in some sense, and then if she further edited this dead woman’s year, this dead woman’s words, though the woman was not yet dead, obviously, in the year that she kept the diary, when she was the diary’s keeper, not quite yet dead, whose work do we have in Aug 9—Fog, the boiled down boiled down again, this rendering, this literature, we could call it, rendered from life, here in a two-step rendering process? That is no place for a question mark, he thought. The story of the year is a story of death plucking at an old woman’s life, she loses her husband, her health, her spirits, so to call them, a strange term. The details of her life are the ways in which what she loves is torn away but also these details, often even the same details, are the ways in which this tearing away is resisted, he thought, these details are the ways in which what is loved may be clutched, in which what is loved is saved even while it is borne away. “Turning cooler in eve. We had smoked sausages, fried potatoes & onions. Dr. says it’s a general breaking up of his body. I am bringing in some flowers.” Every very ordinary life, and this is nothing but a very ordinary life, he thought, no life, after all, is anything but a very ordinary life, every very ordinary life is caught in the blast of details that will destroy it but or and these are the very details that enable a resistance to this blast, through literature perhaps, so to call it, resistance is poetry, he thought, an offence against time, a plot against unavoidable loss. We resist time and succeed only when we fail. “Every where glare of ice. We didn’t sleep too good. My pep has left me.” |
NEW RELEASES
Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another. The poems dwell within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-heritage girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words.
"This is a book of the body and the senses, whether the million tiny nerve endings of young love; the hunger that turns ‘your bones soft in the heat’; the painterly, edible, physical colour of flowers and the fabric lantern in the pattern of Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam; or ‘the soft scratchings of dusk’. These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams'." —Alison Wong
A young Russian woman is torn between her care for her father, a musician seemingly without a future, and her father's larger-than-life friend. When fortune suddenly smiles upon them in the form of a transformed failure, Aneliya and her father move from Russia to St Andrews in Scotland. Xstabeth tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of classic Russian novels, and the power of art and music to re-wire reality.
"Reading Xstabeth feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music." —Edna O'Brien
"More of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance." —Wendy Erskine
>>"I was never that guy."
>>"I was never that guy."
S has disappeared from Ruth and Leonard's home in Brighton. Suicide is suspected. The couple, who had been spying on their young lodger since before the trouble, begin to pour over her diary, her audio recordings and her movies - only to discover that she had been spying on them with even greater intensity. As this disturbing, highly charged act of reciprocal voyeurism comes to light, and as the couple's fascination with S comes to dominate their already flawed marriage, what emerges is an unnerving and absorbing portrait of the taboos, emotional and sexual, that broke behind the closed doors of 1950s British life. Quin's Three, first published in 1966, established her at the forefront of the British avant garde, her text, like life itself, seemingly suspended between disintegration and recoagulation.
>>The brilliance of Ann Quin.
>>"Every cripple has his own way of walking."
>>Deborah Levy on Ann Quin.
The Grief Almanac by Vana Manasiadis $30
>>The brilliance of Ann Quin.
>>"Every cripple has his own way of walking."
>>Deborah Levy on Ann Quin.
This bold hybrid of poetry, memoir, letter, essay and ekphrasis shows what alchemy can happen when pushing at the boundaries of what poetry is. Using strikingly unique forms and melding Greek with English, prose with poetry, and the past and present with fantasy and myth, The Grief Almanac defies conventions as it steers us over multiple terrains. The grief of the title is the grief of memory, inevitability, and in particular the grief of, and for, a lost mother, but the result goes beyond eulogy. Wry revisions, elegy, and a kind of poetic archiving, point to co-existence and interconnectedness and culminate instead in a guidebook, a legend and expansive lament.
"The Grief Almanac is rich, brilliant, with a kind of texturing that feels to me like complex symphonic music. This is not a collection of poems in any conventional sense. It is a sustained work of immense, far reaching intellect. With the two languages at her disposal and the full force of a great mind and heart, Manasiadis lifts her mother up into the light. We see the mother and we see the daughter and the primal truth that lies at the heart of those tragedies and myths that have endured for centuries because they are profoundly true." — Fiona Farrell
>>Sample pages.
>>Sample pages.
Neither documentary nor fiction, the film essay London by architect-turned-filmmaker Patrick Keiller is a unique kind of travelogue. The film chronicles a year in the life of England's capital through the eyes of the enigmatic Robinson, whose literary reflections and historical speculations are voiced by an unnamed, unseen narrator. This book includes over two hundred images accompanied by the film's complete narration, and an afterword by Keiller offering insights into his creative process, his films, and approaches to psychogeography.
There are strange relics hidden across Scotland's landscape: forgotten places that are touchstones to incredible stories and past lives which still resonate today. Yet why are so many of these 'wild histories' unnoticed and overlooked? And what can they tell us about our own modern identity? From the high mountain passes of an ancient droving route to a desolate moorland graveyard, from uninhabited postindustrial islands and Clearance villages to caves explored by early climbers and the mysterious strongholds of Christian missionaries, Patrick Baker makes a series of journeys on foot and by paddle. Along the way, he encounters Neolithic settlements, bizarre World War Two structures, evidence of illicit whisky production, sacred wells and Viking burial grounds.
In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community for "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family's import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. Yet the radicalism of Spinoza's views has long obscured that his primary reason for turning to philosophy was to answer one of humanity's most urgent questions: How can we lead a good life and enjoy happiness in a world without a providential God?
A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard $38
An addictively free-ranging survey of the massive impact that the domesticated ungulates of the genus Ovis have had on human history. From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the rolling hills of medieval England to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Starting with our Neolithic ancestors' first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 10,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and languages, helped us to win wars, decorated our homes, and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth. Enormous fortunes and new, society-changing industries have been made from the fleeces of sheep, and cities shaped by shepherds' markets and meat trading.
"This book deserves a place in your bookcase next to Harari's Sapiens. It's every bit as fascinating and is surely destined to be just as successful." —Julian Norton
Jack by Marilynne Robinson $38
Luster by Raven Leilani $38
The Lamplighter by Jackie Kay $25
Cold Warriors: Writers who waged the literary cold war by Duncan White $30
The Iconic Interior: 1900 to the present by Dominic Bradbury and Richard Powers $55
Queen of the Sea by Dylan Meconis $29
An addictively free-ranging survey of the massive impact that the domesticated ungulates of the genus Ovis have had on human history. From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the rolling hills of medieval England to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Starting with our Neolithic ancestors' first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 10,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and languages, helped us to win wars, decorated our homes, and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth. Enormous fortunes and new, society-changing industries have been made from the fleeces of sheep, and cities shaped by shepherds' markets and meat trading.
"This book deserves a place in your bookcase next to Harari's Sapiens. It's every bit as fascinating and is surely destined to be just as successful." —Julian Norton
In the final novel of her outstanding Gilead quartet, Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the beloved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne'er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher's child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit, and an independent will.
"Luster smashes together capitalism, sex, loss, and trauma and constructs something new with the pieces, using pitch-black humor as glue. Edie is a unique character, a young Black woman full of dissatisfaction who constantly engages in self-destructive behavior. She is flawed and bright, funny and broken, depressed and horny. Edie is unforgettable, and so is Luster, a novel that shines with a distinctive darkness. Yes, the world is burning and maybe you feel like a depressing novel is the last thing you need, but there is pleasure at the core of every cringe Leilani will force on you." —NPR
"A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal—and brilliant." —Zadie Smith
Presented originally both as a radio play and a stage play, Jackie Kay's multi-layered poetic drama tells the stories of its five characters' journey through slavery, from the the fort, to the slave ship, through the middle passage, following life on the plantations, charting the growth of the British city and the industrial revolution. Kay, Scotland's Makar, intimates the devastating impact of slavery on the lives of individuals and illuminates and rehumanises dark corners of history.
>>Missing faces.
Eric Hobsbawn: A life in history by Richard J. Evans $30
>>Missing faces.
At the time of his death at the age of 95, Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was the most famous historian in the world. His books were translated into more than fifty languages and he was as well known in Brazil and Italy as he was in Britain and the United States. His writings have had a lasting effect on the practice of history. Hobsbawm's interests covered many countries and many cultures, ranging from poetry to jazz, literature to politics. He experienced life not only as a university teacher but also as a young Communist in the Weimar Republic, a radical student at Cambridge, a political activist, an army conscript, a Soho 'man about town', a Hampstead intellectual, a Cambridge don, an influential journalist, a world traveller, and finally a Grand Old Man of Letters.
During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookshop for the battlefield. White chronicles how this intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carr , Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Vaclav Havel.
A varied and stimulating selection of one hundred exemplary interiors, showing the changing nature of the relationship between humans and their built spaces through the twentieth century.
In Defence of Open Society by George Soros $28
In recent years, philanthropist George Soros has become the focus of sustained right-wing attacks in the United States and around the world based on his commitment to open society, progressive politics and his Jewish background. In this book Soros offers a compendium of his philosophy, and a call-to-arms for the ideals of an open society: freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea.
When her sister seizes the throne, Queen Eleanor of Albion is banished to a tiny island off the coast of her kingdom, where the nuns of the convent spend their days peacefully praying, sewing, and gardening. But the island is also home to Margaret, a mysterious young orphan girl whose life is upturned when the cold, regal stranger arrives. As Margaret grows closer to Eleanor, she grapples with the revelation of the island's sinister true purpose as well as the truth of her own past. An exquisite graphic novel.
>>Have a look through the book.
>>Visit Martin Toft's website.
>>Images from the book.
>>Rebuilding the old marae.
>>How the book came about.
>>Launching the book in New Zealand.
>>In PhotoBook Journal.
>>The book is designed by Ania Nałęcka-Milach.
>>Your copy.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit {Reviewed by STELLA} Rebecca Solnit’s memoir will not open the doors to her personal life. The title, Recollections of My Non-Existence, gives you a hint of what to expect. This is a series of recollections, mostly from the 1980s, of the young woman she was and how she became the writer we know in her excellent essays and observant analysis of place in her ‘travel’ writing. I say travel, but Solnit is not easily subsumed by genre and here again in her memoir, it is never pedestrian. The chapter headings are intriguing to begin with. 'Looking Glass House' — how we look back into the past like looking into a mirror watching for some sense of the person we once were. “I looked at myself as I faced a full-length mirror and saw my image darken and soften and then seem to retreat, as though I was vanishing from the world rather than that my mind was shutting it out.” Later she goes on to describe the sea as mirror-like and like her sense of self she draws comparison with the subtlety of nature and human depths. “Sometimes the whole sea looks like a mirror of beaten silver, though it’s too turbulent to hold many reflections; it’s the bay that carries a reflected sky on its surface.” “Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no colour we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green ...the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count ….If you look away for a moment you miss a shade for which there will never be a term..” With much of this writing, quiet observation and the importance of place is crucial to the way in which Solnit remembers and reflects on herself. Or, as she states in 'Disappearing Acts', her non-existence as a young woman, attempting to find a place and a sense of herself. Centred around the flat she lived in for twenty-six years, moving (escaping) from suburbia to a then ungentrified area of San Francisco, she pinpoints the influence the neighbourhood on her development as a writer as she carves out a way forward as a student, a young journalist and then as an art writer and later a feminist political thinker and essayist. And it is words, always words and the way in which we and others use language, that underpin her thinking, either by descriptions of her apartment, her writing desk, her neighbourhood or by actions which are enacted upon others, specifically violence on women and the wider use of authority structures which fires up so much of Solnit’s work. The only image, aside from the cover, included in this memoir is at the beginning of the book — it is her writing desk. Gifted to her by a friend, who survived a vicious assault, it is Solnit’s place from which she travels with words. It is lovingly described and a central object in her life. Reading these passages remind me of the desk in Nicole Krauss’ Great House and the pivotal role that an object can have. Solnit’s memoir has some parallels to the autofictions of Sheila Heti and Siri Hustvedt but remains at a space removed. The writing is subtle, beautiful in parts, but don’t expect to find any gritty revelations. What we do sense is the honesty to reveal the girl she was — thin, unconfident, living with family violence — and the steps it takes to seek out one’s self in the world where Solnit as a young woman describes herself as having made herself invisible. Read this for the thoughtful approach to becoming a person; what it means to be alive in your own skin; for, as always, the sharp insistent voice she employs against injustice and violence; for an insight into the development of a writer; and for the luxury of the language. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride {Reviewed by THOMAS} To ‘stay’ in a hotel (as opposed to ‘staying’ home) does not mean to remain but merely to await departure. A hotel is not a home away from home but is the opposite of a home, a place where, as McBride puts it, “nothing is at stake,” a place where action and inaction begin to resemble each other, a place where the absence of context allows or invites unresolved pasts or futures to press themselves upon the present without consequence. There is no plot in a hotel; everything is in abeyance. The protagonist in Strange Hotel is present (or presented) in a series of hotels — in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, and Austin (all hotels are, after all, one hotel) — over a number of years in what we could term her early middle age. She spends the narrated passages of time mainly not doing something, choosing not to sleep with the man in the room next door, not to throw herself from the window as she waits for a man to leave her room, not to stay in the room of the man with whom she has slept until he wakes up, not to meet a man at the hotel bar, not to let in the man with whom she has slept and who she almost fails to keep at the distance required by her rigour of hotel behaviour. Her ritual self-removal from the stabilising patterns of her ordinary existence — about which we learn little — in the hotels seems designed to reconfigure herself following the death of her partner without either wearing out the memory she has of him or being worn out by it. Slowly, through the series of hotels, she becomes capable of reclaiming herself from her loss, moving from instances where even slight resemblances to experiences associated with her dead partner close down thought (as with the speaker in Samuel Beckett’s Not I) to a point where memory begins to not overwhelm the rememberer, when the hold on the present of the past begins to loosen, when the path to grief loses its intransigence and coherence and no longer precludes the possibility that things could have been and could be different. McBride’s linguistic skill and introspective rigour in tracking the ways in which her protagonist negotiates with her memories through language is especially effective and memorable. Language is a way of avoiding thought as much as it is a way of achieving it: “Even now, she can hear herself doing it. Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the original unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train.” Her self-interrogation and her “interrogating her own interrogation” “serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence,” but as her ‘hotel-praxis’ (so to call it) starts to erode the structures of her ‘grief-taxis’ (so to call it), language is no longer capable of — or, rather, no longer necessary for and therefore no longer capable of — buffering her from loss: “I do like all these lines of words but they don’t seem to be helping much with keeping the distance anymore.” At the start of the the book she feels as if she has “outlived her use for feeling” and clinically observes that, in another, “sentiment must be at work somewhere, unfortunately”; in Prague she observes of the man whose departure from her room she awaits on the balcony: “She hadn’t intended to hurt his feelings. To be honest, she’s not even sure she has. His feelings are his business alone. She just wishes he hadn’t presumed she possessed quite so many of her own. She has some, naturally, but spread thinly around—with few kept available for these kinds of encounters.” By the end of the process, though — “to go on is to keep going on” — the possibility of feeling begins to emerge from beneath her grief, the present is no longer overwhelmed by actual or even possible alternative pasts, and she begins to sense that she can “turn too and return again from this most fitly resolved past that was never really an option — to the life which, in fact, exists.” |
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
Mihi by Gavin Bishop $18
This beautiful te Reo board book introduces ideas of me and my place in the world in the shape of a simple mihi: introducing yourself and making connections to other people and places. Essential.
Isabel spent her life following Jane's lead. Of the conjoined twins, Jane was always the stronger one, both physically and emotionally. But when Jane dies on the operating table during a risky attempt to separate the twins, Isabel is left alone. Or is she? Soon, Jane returns, attached to Isabel from shoulder to hip just like she used to be. Except Isabel is the only person who can see Jane — a ghost, a phantom limb, a phantom twin.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Read Stella's review.
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.
>>Read Stella's review.
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.
Miro and Zia live in Aurora, a fishing town nestled in the shadow of an ancient castle. Miro lives in his books; Zia is never without her camera. The day they meet, they uncover a secret. The fishing works, the castle, and the town council are all linked to an ill-fated 1930s Antarctic expedition. But the diary of that journey has been hidden, and the sea is stirring up unusual creatures. Something has a powerful hold over the town. With Zia determined to find out more, Miro finds himself putting aside his books for a real adventure. A superb graphic novel for 8—12-year-olds.
>>Watch the trailer!
>>Read Stella;s review.
On a winter's day, twelve-year old Alex receives a package in the mail—an old tin robot from his grandfather. 'This one is special,' says the enclosed note, and when strange events start occurring around him, Alex suspects this small toy is more than special; it might be deadly. Alex's grandfather arrives, saving him from an attack and plunging him into the macabre magic of an ancient family feud. Together, the duo flees across snowy Europe, unravelling the riddle of the little robot while trying to outwit relentless assassins of the human and mechanical kind. Exciting.
Things are tense at home for Nicky and Kenny. Their mum's coming to visit and it will be the first time they've seen her in years. A lot has changed since they were little and Nicky's not so sure he's ready to see her again. When they head for a trek across the moors to take their minds off everything, a series of unforeseen circumstances leaves the brothers in a vulnerable and very dangerous position. There might even be a chance that this time not everyone will make it home alive. Exciting and well written.
Winner of the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal.
"The clear, poetic prose in this affecting story about two brothers creates a perfectly pitched, moving tale which captures the humour and strength of their love for one another. The characters are skilfully drawn making them realistic and believable. There is an incredible sense of place when the boys are out on the moors, effectively conveying their fear and the dangers of their situation. The growing sense of jeopardy and building tension is perfectly balanced with instances of humour and palpable brotherly love, making this a breath-taking read. The epilogue brings the story to a moving and powerful conclusion." —Judges' citation
In this sequel to the wonderful Mophead, Selina is crowned Commonwealth Poet and invited to perform for the Queen in Westminster Abbey. But when someone at work calls her a 'sellout', Selina starts doubting herself. Can she stand with her people who struggled against the Queen . . . and serve the Queen? From the sinking islands in the south seas to the smoggy streets of London, Mophead Tu: The Queen's Poem is a hilariously thought-provoking take on colonial histories and one poet's journey to bridge the divide. Selina has to work out where she stands and how to be true to herself.
The Kiosk by Anete Melece $30
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.
>>How to travel.
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.
Burn by Patrick Ness $28
“On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron Gas Station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm.” This dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye. Sarah can't help but be curious about him, an animal who supposedly doesn't have a soul but is seemingly intent on keeping her safe from the brutal attentions of Deputy Sheriff Emmett Kelby. Kazimir knows something she doesn't. He has arrived at the farm because of a prophecy. A prophecy that involves a deadly assassin, a cult of dragon worshippers, two FBI agents – and somehow, Sarah Dewhurst herself.
>>Read Stella's review.
Nona and her uncle travel everywhere together, replacing stained-glass windows in war-torn buildings throughout England. One day a mysterious commission takes them to the lonely moors of Dartmoor, where a powerful magic threatens everything that Nona holds dear. She is determined to do whatever it takes to protect those she loves – even if it means fighting darkness itself.
A Bear Named Bjorn by Delphine Perret $25
Bjorn lives in the forest with his animal friends. When a sofa is delivered to his cave, he is not impressed — what will he do with it? When his friend Ramona, who is a human and lives in the city, sends him the present of a fork, he knows what it is for — to scratch his back — but what would be a good present to send in return? Bjorn is happy just being himself — he doesn’t want to wear his new spectacles, because he likes the world blurry. A charming book about being happy who you are.
"Everyone talks about falling in love like it's the most miraculous, life-changing thing in the world. Something happens, they say, and you know That's what happened when I met Kit Godden. I looked into his eyes and I knew. Only everyone else knew too. Everyone else felt exactly the same way." An excellent YA novel about a family and a summer — the summer when everything changes.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Read Stella's review.
"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!
When a group of young Australian and Kiwi sailing friends are allowed to camp in New Zealand's Bay of Islands, they discover something very unexpected on a tiny nearby rocky islet. Fresh cultural and environmental insights are introduced with the arrival of a pair of children from the local iwi who bring humour and resilience while facing problems that threaten to turn their lives upside-down.
Lisette's Green Sock by Catharina Valckx $30
One day Lisette finds a pretty green sock. She's delighted, until some bullies begin to tease her: socks should come in pairs; what use is one sock? Lisette searches and searches, but she cannot find the sock's missing mate. Fortunately, her friend Bert helps her see the situation in a new way.
The migrants must leave the forest. Borders are crossed, sacrifices made, loved ones are lost. It takes such courage to reach the end. At last the journey is over and the migrants arrive. This is the new place. A beautiful picture book with an important message.
Aspiring by Damien Wilkins $22
Fifteen-year-old Ricky lives in Aspiring, a town that's growing at an alarming rate. Ricky's growing, too - 6'7", and taller every day. But he's stuck in a loop: student, uncommitted basketballer, and puzzled son, burdened by his family's sadness. And who's the weird guy in town with a chauffeur and half a Cadillac? What about the bits of story that invade his head? Uncertain what's real — and who he is Ricky can't stop sifting for clues. He has no idea how things will end up.
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves
Nothing to See by Pip Adam $30
The new novel from the winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize for Fiction unsettles as it compels, undermining the reader's conceptions of the workings of reality in the age of surveillance capitalism. Adam both attracts and deflects attention to her characters, effective or abandoned doubles, shrinking from the twin monstrosities of alcohol and boredom in a novel both mathematical and disconcerting.
"Adam has advanced even further as a writer. There is an evenness to her writing that is hypnotic rather than monotonous, steady rather than flat, and the sustained melancholy recalls the sadder end of science-fiction — films like Her and Never Let Me Go. At its heart, this is a novel about shame, loneliness, about wanting to do good and hoping for second chances — or third or fourth chances. It’s about finding new ways of being. That it can cover all this, and be deeply affecting as it does so, while also pushing at the traditional limits of fiction, is a real achievement." —Philip Mathews (ANZL)
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
A scalpel-sharp short story collection: A science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger's party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.
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
>>Read Stella's review.
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara $38
A remarkable reimagining of Argentina's macho national origin myth from a female perspective; a joyful, hallucinatory journey across the pampas of 19th century.
"The Adventures of China Iron sets British industry and Argentine expansion against the sisterhood of the wagon and an indigenous society of fluid genders and magic mushrooms. Sentences bound on from one page to another, seeming almost as long as the vignette-like chapters, in a thrilling and mystical miniature epic. This story, drunk on words and visions, is an elegy to the land and its lost cultures." —Guardian
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey $35
The compelling new novel from the author of The Wish Child. The eyes of the wife of the new Buchenwald concentration camp administrator are opened to the actualities of her situation when she forms an alliance with one of the inmates, the inventor of a machine he claimed would cure cancer. Whether the machine works or not, it may yet save a life...
"Chidgey's compellingly gentle and empathetic treament of the consequences of very disturbing patterns of human behaviour serves to maintain her position as one of our 'must read' novelists." —Otago Daily Times
Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti $36
Amid a political climate of right-wing, nationalist leadership, three very different women in the city of Calcutta find themselves gifted with magical powers that match their wildest dreams. There is one catch — the gifts come with a Faustian price.
"Chakraborti has embarked on one of the most interesting career trajectories seen in recent times." —The Sunday Guardian
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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke $30
An astounding new novel, reaching right to the shared core of fantasy and loneliness, from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
"A remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention." —Guardian
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
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A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. The long-awaited new novel from the author of the wonderful Sweetland.
The Silence by Don DeLillo $30
Five people are meeting for dinner in a Manhattan apartment, but when all the screens go dark they are forced to face what is left of themselves without the internet.
"DeLillo is a master stylist, and not a word goes to waste. DeLillo looks for the future as it manifests in the present moment." —Anne Enright, Guardian
"Mysterious and unexpectedly touching. DeLillo offers consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world." —Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review
"DeLillo has almost Dayglo powers as a writer." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Brilliant and astonishing...a masterpiece...manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions...The effect is transcendent." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
"Taut, unsettling, ferocious." —Fatima Bhutto
"Crystalline, surgical, compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us." —Sharlene Teo
"Raw, wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty, marriage and motherhood, art and illness, and one woman's fight for her sense of self." —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Read Stella's review.
Actress by Anne Enright $35
Looking back on her mother's life and career as an actor, both in Ireland and in Hollywood, a woman finds herself reassessing her own life and her relationship with her parents.
"This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could. Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. This is a study of possession that includes the subtly implied pain of having to share your mother with a crowd." —Guardian
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante $37
Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself? She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape. An astounding new novel from the author of the quartet that began with My Brilliant Friend.
"An astonishing, deeply moving tale of the sorts of wisdom, beauty and knowledge that remain as unruly as the determinedly inharmonious faces of these women." —Guardian
Dorothea 'Tea' Gray joins the Land Service and is sent to work on a remote farm in North Otago, one of many young women who filled the empty shoes left by fathers and brothers serving in the Second World War. But Tea finds more than hard work and hot sun in the dusty North Otago nowhere—she finds a magic inside herself she never could have imagined, a way to save her brother in a distant land she never thought she could reach, and a love she never knew existed. Inspired by feminist and LGBTQ+ history and family wartime memories, A.J. Fitzwater has turned a piece of forgotten women's history into a tapestry of furious pride and love that crosses cultures, countries and decades.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan $37
In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider...
"This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical. This book is vintage Flanagan. It is urgent and angry and fierce. But it is also a kind book, a sorrowful book. It is a book that offers notes of grace and gratitude in the face of beauty, asking its readers to be vigilant in how we take care of our world, of each other, of ourselves. Nothing disappears, it suggests, if we’re brave enough to pay it the attention and regard it deserves. What an astonishing book this is." —Sydney Morning Herald
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa $38
A blend of essay and autofiction exploring the inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. By reaching into the past and finding another woman's voice, a woman frees her own.
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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.
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.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison $38
"That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, he writes fantasy and sf, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction." —China Mieville
"That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, he writes fantasy and sf, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction." —China Mieville
Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age fourteen. It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical. Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies? As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.
Winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.
Winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.
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
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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.
Take a story and shrink it. Make it tiny, so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. Carry the story with you everywhere, let it sit with you while you eat, let it watch you while you sleep. Keep it safe, you never know when you might need it. In Kawakami's super short 'palm of the hand' stories the world is never quite as it should be: a small child lives under a sheet near his neighbour's house for thirty years; an apartment block leaves its visitors with strange afflictions, from fast-growing beards to an ability to channel the voices of the dead; an old man has two shadows, one docile, the other rebellious; two girls named Yoko are locked in a bitter rivalry to the death. Short stories from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami $38
A novel exploring the inner conflicts of an adolescent girl who refuses to communicate with her mother except through writing. Through the story of these women, Kawakami paints a portrait of womanhood in contemporary Japan, probing questions of gender and beauty norms and how time works on the female body.
>>Read Stella's review.
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann $38
Kehlmann's resetting of the adventures of the folkloric prankster Tyll Ulenspiegel during the Thirty Years' War delivers a book that is funny, frightening, dirty, informative, both alien and familiar, and completely engrossing.
"This energetic historical fiction, featuring a folkloric jester in a violent, superstitious Europe, is the work of an immense talent. It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past, but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times." —Guardian
Casting its net widely, this anthology of Aotearoa-New Zealand science fiction and fantasy ranges from the satirical novels of the 19th-century utopians one of which includes the first description of atmospheric aerobreaking in world literature to the bleeding edge of now. Includes Godfrey Sweven, Janet Frame, Margaret Mahy, Maurice Gee, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall, Phillip Mann, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Juliet Marillier, Elizabeth Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Bernard Beckett, Anon, Craig Gamble, Danyl Mclauchlan, Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall, Tina Makereti, Lawrence Patchett, Octavia Cade, Rachael Craw, Karen Healey, Jack Barrowman, Emma Martin, Samantha Lane Murphy, Jack Larsen, Tamsyn Muir, and some worried sheep.
A writer on a residency in Berlin falls into a web of frightening associations through the internet. Red Pill is a novel about the alt-right, online culture, creativity, sanity and history. It tells the story of the 21st century through the prism of the centuries that preceded it, showing how the darkest chapters of our past haunt our present. More than anything, though, this is a novel about love and how it can endure in a world where everything else seems to have lost all meaning.
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The Swimmers by Chloe Lane $30
Erin's mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter.
"The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love — not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us at once to forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out." —Pip Adam
Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride $33
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. A hotel room is a no-place that could be any place. When there, the occupant has only the forces of their past to provide momentum. Destabilised by loss, the protagonist becomes increasingly uncertain of her identity.
"Strange Hotel evokes a precariousness that flits between the physical, the mental and the linguistic — specifically, the narrator’s identity as a woman. Reading Strange Hotel is indeed a matter of strange immersion, and one that will often puzzle and sometimes frustrate the reader, but its portrait of sadness and alienation is, in the end, also strangely revivifying." —The Guardian
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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.
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Winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Judges' commendation: "Auē, by first-time novelist Becky Manawatu, introduces readers to the orphaned Arama, who is deposited in rural Kaikōura with relatives, and his brother Taukiri, a young man fending for himself in the big smoke. There is violence and sadness and rawness in this book, but buoyant humour, too, remarkable insights into the minds of children and young men, incredible forgiveness and a massive suffusion of love. With its uniquely New Zealand voice, its sparing and often beautiful language, the novel patiently weaves the strands of its tale into an emotionally enveloping korowai, or cloak. In the words of Tara June Winch, 'There is something so assured and flawless in the delivery of the writing voice that is almost like acid on the skin.'”
The Mirror and the Light ('Wolf Hall' #3) by Hilary Mantel $50
"If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?"*
The intensely and long-anticipated and superlatively wonderful conclusion of Mantel's trilogy based on the life of Thomas Cromwell (1485—1540).
*Apologies for the spoiler!
"A novel of epic proportions, every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors. This is a masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future." —Guardian
2000ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra $30
"Eamonn Marra writes about trying to grow into a complete human being in a world that wants only selected parts of you. He does it better than anyone I can think of. His stories are thoughtful and introspective, but each contains a wallop of insight that comes from forgetting that anyone but you exists, and looking up to suddenly see someone close to you in a flash of complex vulnerability." —Annaleese Jochems
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor $37
The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice.
"Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal, Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village and reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. This is an inquiry into the sexual terrorism and terror of broken men. This is a work of both mystery and critique. Most recent fiction seems anaemic by comparison." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste $33
A compelling novel concerning women soldiers defending Ethiopia during the Italian invasion of 1935.
"Devastating." —Marlon James
"Magnificent." —Aminatta Forna
Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.
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On the longest day of the summer, twelve people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. In twenty-four hours they reveal their capacity not only for kinship but for cruelty.
"Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched. ... A great part of a novelist’s skill lies in the breadth of their sympathies and their ability to enter into the lives of people unlike themselves. Moss does this so naturally and comprehensively that at times her simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech feel almost like documentary or nonfiction – there is an artfulness to her writing so accomplished as to conceal itself." —Guardian
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.
The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting $38
The new novel from the author of The Sixteen Trees of the Somme (and Norwegian Wood), is fitted together live the staves of a Norwegian stave church. As long as people could remember, the stave church's bells had rung over the isolated village of Butangen, Norway. Cast in memory of conjoined twins, the bells are said to ring on their own in times of danger. In 1879, young pastor Kai Schweigaard moves to the village, where young Astrid Hekne yearns for a modern life. She sees a way out on the arm of the new pastor, who needs a tie to the community to cull favor for his plan for the old stave church, with its pagan deity effigies and supernatural bells. When the pastor makes a deal that brings an outsider, a sophisticated German architect, into their world, the village and Astrid are caught between past and future, as dark forces come into play.
Escape Path Lighting by John Newton $25
Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly. When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to hope he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chilly wind is blowing through Paradise. Meanwhile, at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Diaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover. Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day? John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. Every blow rings true.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell $38
Set in a plague-stricken Elizabethan England, O'Farrell's tender and incisive novel looks at the effects on William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes of the death of their son Hamnet.
Winner of the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.
"Dazzling. Devastating." —Kamila Shamsie
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Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan $33
In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news — news that forces the life-long friends to confront their own mortality head-on. What follows is a moving examination of the responsibilities and obligations we have to those we love.
"This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a 'litany of small tragedies', these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either." —Guardian
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Weather by Jenny Offill $33
Very funny on top of an underlying anxiety, Offill's new novel is absolutely on the pulse. The burdens and ironies of contemporary urban life — motherhood, sisterhood, wifehood, workerhood — are exemplified in Lizzie's endless surges of underachievement and misdirection.
"Perhaps the most powerful portrait of Trump’s America yet." —Guardian
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Mordew by Alex Pheby $38
God is dead, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew. In the slums of the sea-battered city a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns. Until one day his desperate mother sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. The Master derives his magical power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength - and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. One of the most fascinating books published this year. A book unlike any other.
"Mordew is a darkly brilliant novel, extraordinary, absorbing and dream-haunting. That it succeeds as well as it does speaks to Pheby’s determination not to passively inhabit his Gormenghastly idiom but instead to lead it to its most extreme iteration, to force inventiveness and grotesqueness into every crevice of his work." —Guardian
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld $33
This memorable novel, short-listed for the 2020 Booker International Prize, tells of the impact of a tragic accident on the the world-view of a ten-year-old growing up in a religious family on a rural dairy farm. The book is shot through with memorable images, unsettling moments, and passages of remarkable linguistic power.
Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize.
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The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel $35
Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel. 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.
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The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan $23
Anonymous people in anonymous towns; mothers screaming inside their houses, unapologetic doctors, mournful dogs, hungry girls, grandmothers on the couch tethered in a blue spell, steaks in soft sacks of blue blood, rare breeds of show cats in big black sedans, baby rabbits beneath heavy boots; and lonesome men crouched among the thorny shrubs and the rough, wild grasses... With the economy of Lydia Davis and Grace Paley, and the unsettling verve of Mary Gaitskill and Claire-Louise Bennett, The Dominant Animal is a powerful short story collection.
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Minor Detail by Adania Shibli $35
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.
"All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice, and as an author Shibli is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good." —Fatima Bhutto, Guardian
"An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion, and formal virtuosity." —Pankaj Mishra
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Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld $37
What if Hilary Rodham had turned down Bill Clinton's proposal of marriage? How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton?
"Brilliantly re-imagined and enjoyable." —Guardian
Summer by Ali Smith $34
Smith's outstanding quartet, written 'in real time' comes to its conclusion with this eagerly anticipated volume.
"These novels, in straddling immediacy and permanence, the personal as well as the scope of a world tilting toward disaster, are the ones we might well be looking back on years from now as the defining literature of an indefinable era. And the shape the telling takes is, if not salvation, brilliance itself." —The New York Times
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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.
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The winner of the 2020 BOOKER PRIZE is informed by the author's own coming-of-age in Glasgow in the 1980s with an alcoholic mother, and was described by the judges as “destined to be a classic: a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values.”
Here We Are by Graham Swift $33
A relationship triangle between a young show magician, his assistant, and their compère threatens not only their show (in Brighton, in 1959), but also those things they hold most dear. Both intimate and coolly observed, Swift's writing retains its economical power.
"The variety of voices and its historical and emotional reach are so finely entwined, it is as perfect and smooth as an egg. Passages leap out all the time, demanding to be reread, or committed to memory. It is perhaps too simple to say that Swift creates a form of fictional magic, but what he can do with a page is out of the ordinary, far beyond most mortals’ ken. —The Herald
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Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms, a slow and painstaking process. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that's a world away from his childhood growing up in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace has not been home, and he hasn't told his friends. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. Over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, a catastrophic mishap and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with intimacy, desire, the trauma of the past and the question of the future.
The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde $35
Drawing from his own family history, and the experiences of others, Wedde's new novel tells of a young woman from northern Germany who straddled two worlds and ended up in New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and asks, how reliable are memories? and what is the nature of stories?
"Epic, engrossing and richly patterned, The Reed Warbler explores complex migrations: the way human lives move inexorably towards their futures while at the same time doubling back on their pasts. In tracing the story of Josephina and her family, Ian Wedde invites us to consider the threads that tether us to our own histories." —Catherine Chidgey
The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams $35
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).
The New York Times, aware that only fiction could help readers grasp reality in strange times, commissioned these stories. Includes Caitlin Roper, Rivka Galchen, Victor LaValle, Mona Awad, Kamila Shamsie, Colm Tóibín, Liz Moore, Tommy Orange, Leila Slimani, Margaret Atwood, Yiyun Li, Etgar Keret, Andrew O'Hagan, Rachel Kushner, Téa Obreht, Alejandro Zambra, Dinaw Mengestum Karen Russell, David Mitchell, Charles Yu, Paolo Giordano, Mia Cuoto, Uzodinma Iweala, Rivers Solomon, Laila Lalami, Julián Fuks, Dina Nayeli, Matthew Baker, Esi Edugyan, John Wray, Edwidge Danticat.
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
From Curio Bay to Golden Bay, who could be a better companion on a road trip of the South Island than Bruce Ansley?
Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish fishing village by Lamorna Ash $35
There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child — the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land's End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn't seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour. Out on the water, miles from the coast, she learns how fishing requires you to confront who you are and what it is that tethers you to the land. But she also realises that this proud and compassionate community, sustained and defined by the sea for centuries, is under threat.
"Marks the birth of a new star of non-fiction." —William Dalrymple
There are no easy answers to the big questions, but at least we have the questions.
Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and me by Deirdre Bair $33
Becket and Beauvoir lived on essentially the same street, and, apparently, despised each other. Bair wrote incisive biographies of each. How did she juggle these personalities, and the different approaches she needed to take with each of them?
In the Time of the Manaroans by Miro Bilbrough $40
In 1978, when Miro Bilbrough was fourteen she was sent to live with her father living by "alternative lifestyle" back-to-the-land principles (and poverty) near Canvastown. Their house is a stopping point for the Manaroans travelling to and from their remote Marlborough commune.
"A lost world of hippies and drifters breaks into gleaming life. Miro Bilbrough trains a poet's tender, unsparing gaze on growing up female in the anything-goes 1970s. In the Time of the Manaroans lucidly portrays the visions and limits of the counter-culture, as well as all the fearful ecstasy of being young." —Michelle de Kretser
Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski $39
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books—selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude—have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces." From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated—and mordantly funny.
"She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be." —New Yorker
Following astonishing, insightful, and pellucidly written novels, including Visitation and Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck turns her pen on herself and reveals aspects of her life, her literary and musical influences and preoccupations, and thoughts on society. Her essays are as astonishing, insightful and pellucidly written as her fiction.
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating. Ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg
"Her restrained, unvarished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss
"Erpenbeck's writing writing is a lure that leads us — off-centre as into a vortex — into the most haunted and haunting territory." —Anne Michaels
Signs of Life: To the ends of the earth with a doctor by Stephen Fabes $45
When Stephen Fabes left his job as a junior doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. Of more pressing concern were the daily challenges of life as an unfit rider on an overloaded bike, helplessly in thrall to pastries. But leaving medicine behind is not as easy as it seems. As he roves continents, he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma or circumstance, and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards.
Hundred: What you learn in a lifetime by Heike Faller and Valerio Vidali $48
How does our perception of the world change in the course of a lifetime? When Heike Faller's niece was born she began to wonder what we learn in life, and how we can talk about what we have learnt with those we love. And so she began to ask everyone she met, what did you learn in life? Out of the answers of children's writers and refugees, teenagers and artists, mothers and friends, came 99 'lessons' — each here delightfully illustrated by Valerio Vidali.
Know Your Place by Golriz Ghahraman $40
When she was nine, Golriz Ghahraman and her parents were forced to flee their home in Iran. After a terrifying and uncertain journey, they landed in Auckland where they were able to seek asylum and create a new life. Ghahraman talks about making a home in Aotearoa New Zealand, her work as a human rights lawyer, her United Nations missions, and how she became the first refugee to be elected to the New Zealand Parliament.
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life by John Gray $45
The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats—the animal that has most captured our imagination—than from the great thinkers of the world.
Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg $48
A beautifully drawn and thoughtful graphic novel about the imaginary world invented by the four Brontë siblings when they were children — and what happened to that world when its creators grew up and abandoned it. From the author of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and The One Hundred Nights of Hero.
Specimen by Madison Hamill $30
Shape-shifting personal essays probing the ways in which a person’s inner and outer worlds intersect and submit to one another. Discomfiting, vivid and funny.
"I never felt that I was looking at fine writing — only at astonishing writing." —Elizabeth Knox
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.
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.
This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones $40
"This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pākehā. Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Māori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā — and other New Zealanders — curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Māori."
19 superb graphic novelists and comic artists provide their takes on the New Zealand lockdown and the ways our lives have been changed by the unforeseen events of 2020. Alex Cara, Hana Chatani, Li Chen, Miriama Grace-Smith, Sloane Hong, Ruby Jones, Sarah Laing, Sarah Lund, Toby Morris, Sharon Murdoch, Ross Murray, Ant Sang, Coco Solid, Anthony Stocking (Deadface Comics), Mat Tait, Jessica Thompson Carr (Māori Mermaid), Zak Waipara, Tokerau Wilson, and Jem Yoshioka!
Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel $45
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.
>>VOLUME feature.
The first volume of Obama's presidential memoirs. Thoughtful and revealing.
Motherwell: A girlhood by Deborah Orr $60
An insightful, devastating and well-written account of growing up in a housing estate on the west coast of Scotland.
"A non-fiction book for the ages. Motherwell is a searching, truthful, shocking (and timely) observance of the blight that monetarist policies can bring about in a community of workers, indeed on a whole culture of fairness and improvement, while also showing — in sentences as clean as bone — the tireless misunderstandings that can starve a family of love." —Andrew O'Hagan, Guardian
Sweet Time by Weng Pixin $48
A charming, intimate graphic rumination on love, empathy, and confidence. Singaporean cartoonist Weng Pixin delicately explores strained relationships with a kind of hopefulness while acknowledging their inevitable collapse.
>>Look inside!
Figuring by Maria Popova $33
“How, in this blink of existence book-ended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” From the creator of the hugely popular Brainpickings blog.
"A highly original survey of life, love and creativity; an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation. It interweaves the 'invisible connections' between pioneering scientists, artists and writers to create a tapestry of ideas and biographies. Her approach subverts the idea that lives 'unfold in sensical narratives'. Popova’s unique act of 'figuring' in this book is to create resonances and synchronicities between the lives of visionary figures." —Guardian
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.
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter $32
In 1934, the Austrian painter Christiane Ritter travelled to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen to spend a year with her husband, an explorer and researcher. They lived in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies, but as time passes, and after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life. A rediscovered classic.
The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager $37
After spending her career peering into the stars in search of Earth-like planets, Seager found her connections with an Earth-like planet much closer to home following the death of her husband and the realisation that her Asperger's affects how she relates to every part of the universe.
A series of perceptive essays on the experiences and lessons of lock-down. "There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are, above all, personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity. Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table - I was in need of practical assistance. I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book, but I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard."
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
>>Read Stella's review.
You Have a Lot to Lose: A memoir, 1956—1986 by C.K. Stead $50
In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study abroad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three. It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s.
>>"I'm an alien, a book man."
>>'Janet Frame and Me" (extracted from the book)
Addresses core philosophical issues including Maori notions of the self, the world, epistemology, the form in which Maori philosophy is conveyed, and whether or not Maori philosophy has a teleological agenda.
The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering nature in the modern world by Sue Stuart-Smith $55
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.
Square Haunting: Five women, freedom, and London between the wars by Francesca Wade $45
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently.
"Outstanding. I'll be recommending this all year." —Sarah Bakewell
"A beautiful and deeply moving book." —Sally Rooney
At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies' Pond by
Ava Wong Davies, Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, Nell Frizzell, Eli Goldstone, Amy Key, Jessica J. Lee, Sophie Mackintosh, So Mayer, Deborah Moggach, Nina Mingya Powles, Leanne Shapton, Lou Stoppard and Sharlene Teo $25
Esther Freud describes the life-affirming sensation of swimming through the seasons; Lou Stoppard pays tribute to the winter swimmers who break the ice; Margaret Drabble reflects on the golden Hampstead days of her youth; Sharlene Teo visits for the first time; and Nell Frizzell shares the view from her yellow lifeguard’s canoe.
In The Salt Path, Raynor and Moth went out to find the sea, the windswept and wild coastline, to find a way through homelessness, to find themselves again. Now, in The Wild Silence, they come back to what should be home, but four walls no longer feel that way. For Raynor, recovering self-esteem and trust in herself, and in others, is harder than she expected. She continues to face Moth's debilitating illness and struggles to find a way to adjust to a life in one place, unmoving. Then an incredible gesture by someone who read their story changes everything.
"In this unflinching sequel to The Salt Path, nature provides solace against forebodings of mortality." —Guardian
"In this unflinching sequel to The Salt Path, nature provides solace against forebodings of mortality." —Guardian
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
"There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviours they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive.
Long before Darwin, our ancestors were obsessed with the visual similarities and differences between the animals. Early scientists could sense there was an order that unified all life and formulated a variety of schemes to help illustrate this. This human quest to classify living beings has left us with a rich artistic legacy, from the folklore and religiosity of the ancient and Medieval world through the naturalistic cataloging of the Enlightenment to the modern, computer-generated classificatory labyrinth.
Based on the findings of the world-leading Dunedin Study, which tracked thousands of people from birth to middle age, this book helps us to thnk about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child's early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.
Wayfinding: The art and science of how we find and lose our way by Michael Bond $38
How do our brains make cognitive maps that keep us orientated, even in places we don't know? How does our understanding of and relationship to place help us to understand our world and our relationship to it? How does physical space affect the way we think?
An addictively free-ranging survey of the massive impact that the domesticated ungulates of the genus Ovis have had on human history. From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the rolling hills of medieval England to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Starting with our Neolithic ancestors' first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 10,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and languages, helped us to win wars, decorated our homes, and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth. Enormous fortunes and new, society-changing industries have been made from the fleeces of sheep, and cities shaped by shepherds' markets and meat trading.
"This book deserves a place in your bookcase next to Harari's Sapiens. It's every bit as fascinating and is surely destined to be just as successful." —Julian Norton
The devastating summer of Australian bush fires underlined the terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic shift. Fears have been raised that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people are hoping for a post-pandemic ‘new normal’: a cleaner, greener, fairer and safer world. This book brings together researchers, commentators, activists and writers to bear witness to the current crisis.
How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? What does a baby born without a nose tell us about our sensory machinery? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts? And what does any of this have to do with why we dream? The answers to these questions are not right in front of our eyes; they're right behind our eyes. This book is not simply about what the brain is, but what it does. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new findings from Eagleman's own research, including new discoveries in synaesthesia, dreaming and wearable neurotech devices that revolutionise how we think about the senses.
From the human being to the octopus, the shark to the humble sea squirt, all animals are physical beings made up entirely of cells. And yet they can think, to varying degrees. How did this come to be? How did a mind first grow from the matter that is the body? And at what stage did that clump of cells become a 'self'? From the author of Other Minds.
Hoffman argues that how we see the world is determined by our species's imperative t survive, and that this means not only that our world view may be very different from beings with different survival imperatives, but also may contain a large number of useful errors, or once-useful errors, that may no longer be so useful at all. What we see is determined more by our minds than by actuality: evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Interesting.
Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty $37
From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, 15-year-old Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries of his intense connection to the natural world, and his perspective as a teenager juggling exams and friendships alongside a life of campaigning. "In writing this book," Dara explains, "I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child's eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere."
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee's flight to the UK, and from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why.
Icelandic author and activist Andri Snaer Magnason's 'Letter to the Future', an extraordinary and moving eulogy for the lost Okjokull glacier, made global news and was shared by millions. Now he attempts to come to terms with the issues we all face in his new book On Time and Water. Magnason writes of the melting glaciers, the rising seas and acidity changes that haven't been seen for 50 million years. These are changes that will affect all life on earth.
"The love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll." —Rebecca Solnit
The Human Cosmos: A secret history of the stars by Jo Marchant $33
"A cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. It is dark, funny and grim." —The New York Times
Music is filled with mathematical elements. The works of Bach are often said to possess a math-like logic, and Arnold Schoenberg, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote music explicitly based on mathematical principles. Yet Eli Maor argues that it is music that has had the greater influence on mathematics, not the other way around.
For most of human history, celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our religious beliefs, power structures, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us—and that disconnection comes at a cost. Marchant guides us through history and around the globe and reveals the richness of humanity's relationship with the heavens.
From the cave walls at Lascaux to the last painting by Van Gogh, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Mark Twain, there is clear evidence that crows and ravens influence human culture. Yet this influence is not unidirectional, say the authors of this fascinating book: people profoundly influence crow culture, ecology, and evolution as well.
When Olsson came across the letters between the mathematician André Weil and his sister, the philosopher Simone Weil, she was struck by the way in which, between them, they grappled with the differences (and similarities) between abstract thought and practical approaches to life. What is the relationship between analytical and creative thought?
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.
Through a set of scientific principles, this book examines life's everyday interactions including: Decisions and the route we take to make them; Conflict and how we can avoid it; Relationships and how we establish them; Etiquette and how we conform to it. Looking at human behaviour from her place on the autism spectrum has enabled Pang to present an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in.
Winner of the 2020 Royal Society Science Book Prize.
"Brave and unflinching in setting out the reality of the hell towards which we're headed, but even more urgent, passionate and compelling about the grounds for hope if we change course fast enough, Hope in Hell is a powerful call to arms from one of Britain's most eloquent and trusted campaigners." —Caroline Lucas
How the Brain Lost its Mind: Sex, hysteria and the riddle of mental illness by Allan Ropper and B.D. Burrell $33
In 1882, Jean-Martin Charcot was the premiere physician in Paris, having just established a neurology clinic at the infamous Salpetriere Hospital, a place that was called a 'grand asylum of human misery'. Assessing the dismal conditions, he quickly set up to upgrade the facilities, and in doing so, revolutionised the treatment of mental illness. Many of Carcot's patients had neurosyphilis (the advanced form of syphilis), a disease of mad poets, novelists, painters, and musicians, and a driving force behind the overflow of patients in Europe's asylums. The trend of neurology at the time, though, led towards hypnosis and the treatment of the mind and away from medicine and the treatment of the brain. Does the relationship between psychology and neurology mirror that between the mind and the body?
When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his life. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist.
Astounding images of the natural history collections at Te Papa, from the award-winning photographer. Lavish and giftable.
The Road to Conscious Machines: The story of A.I. by Michael Woolridge $40
The ultimate dream of artificial intelligence is to build machines that are like us: conscious and self-aware. While this remains a remote possibility, rapid progress on AI in this century is already profoundly changing our world. Yet the public debate and media hype is still largely centred on unlikely prospects from sentient machines to dystopian robot takeovers.These anxieties distract us from the more immediate risks that this transformative technology poses — from algorithmic bias to fake news.
Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Have we invented numbers or do they truly exist? What sort of reality should we attribute to them? Mathematics has always been a way of understanding and ordering the world: from sacred ancient texts and pre-Socratic philosophers to twentieth-century logicians such as Russell and Frege and beyond.