NEW RELEASES

Colouring My Soul by Kat Maxwell           $25
Maxwell's remarkably raw and direct stories and spare, effective style evoke a childhood in a whānau marked by deprivation, misfortune and strength. 
"I write because my stories bruise my brain until they’re written. They fell out of my fingers one day after I had been nostalgic remembering my childhood and my aunties, my nanny and my koro, and all my cousins."
“Kat Maxwell writes vividly and with raw emotion. She’s inside her world, she knows how it works, her stories are brave and bare.”—Maurice Gee
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The last interview and other conversations           $36
Ginsburg details her rise from a Brooklyn public school to becoming the second woman on the United States Supreme Court, and her non-stop fight for gender equality along the way. Besides telling the story behind many of her famous court battles, she also talks openly about motherhood and her partnership with her beloved husband, her Jewishness, her surprising friendship with her legal polar opposite Justice Antonin Scalia, her passion for opera, and offers advice to high school students wondering about the law. 
Letters of Denis Glover selected and edited by Sarah Shieff           $80

"Oh Christ, a bloody ½ witted student, for purposes of an essay, has just come in to ask me what I and Baxter write verse for, and if we mean what we say, or is there something deeper; could we write better verse in England, or here; or do the critics and professors just read a lot into what’s said that isn’t there? So much. And I have been very rude indeed." – Letter to John Reece Cole, 16 August 1949
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle. 


The Imaginary Museum by Ben Eastham             $23
With the help of a cast of critics, guards, curators, artists, protestors and ghosts, Eastham explores the idea that the value of art is not to be found in what it means, but in what it does to you.
“The Imaginary Museum is the most inventive writing on art I’ve read in a long while. By inviting us into his made-up institution, Ben Eastham opens up a space for reflection on how contemporary art helps us make sense of ourselves and the world around us. This is a brilliant book – a museum in the form of a parable.”  —Lauren Elkin
“Ben Eastham is a critic with intelligence, verve and delirious wit, and in this essay he makes a lovely experiment with art criticism: proposing contemporary art as a charmed space for us all to explore a radical and comical subjectivity – flâneurs freed from the illusion of connoisseurship.” —Adam Thirlwell

The 99% Invisible City: A field guide to the hidden world of everyday design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt           $60
The most effective design is often the design that we don't notice, the design of the objects, spaces and systems we use every day. This fascinating book helps us to appreciate the world around us in new ways. 
Must I Go by Yiyun Li             $48
Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the birth of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press—the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Drawn into an obsession over this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own, rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with her sharply incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her own life. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27. How does the past shape the future? How do we live in the face of the unanswerable? 
"This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book." —Meg Wolitzer
The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris          $40
Kindred in spirit to their previous collaboration The Lost Words but intriguingly new in form, pocket-sized gem The Lost Spells introduces another beautiful set of word-poems and artwork. 
Patti Smith — Camera Solo            $55
For more than four decades, Patti Smith has documented sights and spaces infused with personal significance. Her visual work possesses the same unfiltered, emotional quality prevalent in her poetry and music lyrics: their allure lies in their often dreamlike imagery; their modest scale belies their depth and power. Using either a vintage Land 100 or a Land 250 Polaroid camera, Patti Smith photographs subjects inspired by her connections to poetry and literature as well as pictures that honor the personal effects of those she admires or loves.

PANdemIC! Covid 19 shakes the world by Slavoj Žižek        $30
We live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds. And when, according to Žižek, a new form of communism—the outlines of which can already be seen in the very heartlands of neoliberalism—may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism.
Solitude and Company: The life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez told with help from his friends, family, fans, arguers, fellow pranksters, drunks, and a few respectable souls by Silvana Paternostro               $37
Did Gabriel García Márquez survived his own self-creation?

Victors' Justice, From Nuremberg to Baghdad by Danilo Zolo             $33
An argument against the manipulation of international penal law by the West, combining historical detail, juridical precision and philosophical analysis. Zolo's key thesis is that contemporary international law functions as a two-track system—a made-to-measure law for the hegemons and their allies, on the one hand, and a punitive regime for the losers and the disadvantaged, on the other. Though it constantly advertised its impartiality and universalism, international law served to bolster and legitimize, ever since the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials, a fundamentally unilateral and unequal international order.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, translated by Philip Boehm             $24
From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects. Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party's aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he'll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed. 
This excellent new translation from Koestler's original, long-lost manuscript adds further dimension and nuance to this classic, hitherto known in English only in a rather inept and incomplete translation from 1940. 


Helen Garner's second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the bombshell that followed it, Garner grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both thrilling and uncompromising.
Snake by Erica Wright           $22
Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age cave drawings to Snakes on a Plane, this creature continues to enthrall the public. But what harm has been caused by our mythologising? While considering the dangers of stigma, Erica Wright moves from art and pop culture to religion, fetish, and ecologic disaster. This book considers how the snake has become more symbol than animal, a metaphor for how we treat whatever scares us the most, whether or not our panic is justified.


Girl With a Sniper Rifle: An Eastern Front memoir by Yulia Zhukova         $35
Yulia was a dedicated member of the Komsomol (the Soviet communist youth organisation) and her parents worked for the NKVD. She started at the sniper school in Podolsk and eventually became a valued member of her battalion during operations against Prussia. She persevered through eight months of training before leaving for the Front on 24th November 1944 just days after qualifying. Joining the third Belorussian Front her battalion endured rounds of German mortar as well as loudspeaker announcements beckoning them to come over to the German side and witnessed Nazi atrocities as the war drew towards its end. 
I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett       $22
When the tribute album by various artists I'm Your Fan was released in 1991, Cohen's popularity was at a low. Did this album of covers resuscitate his career?
There is a Britain that exists outside of the official histories and guidebooks—places that lie on the margins. This is the Britain of industrial estates, and tower blocks, of motorway service stations and haunted council houses, of roundabouts and flyovers, places where modern life speeds past but where people and stories nevertheless collect—places where human dramas play out: stories of love, violence, fear, boredom and artistic expression, places of ghost sightings, first kisses, experiments with drugs, refuges for the homeless, hangouts for the outcasts.  Struck by the power of these stories and experiences, Gareth Rees set out to explore these spaces and the essential part they have played in the history and geography of Britain. 

Sealand: The true story of the world's most stubborn micronation by Dylan Taylor-Lehman          $38
In 1967, retired army major and self-made millionaire Paddy Roy Bates inaugurated himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand on a World War II Maunsell Sea Fort near Felixstowe. Having fought off attacks from UK government officials and armed mercenaries for half a century—and thwarted an attempted coup that saw the Prince Regent taken hostage—the self-proclaimed independent nation still stands. It has its own constitution, national flag and anthem, currency, and passports. 
These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong           $25
The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery. A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette's first love—and first betrayal. But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can't stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.
14 ngā Tohu Aroha ka Tukuna 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.
Exit by Laura Waddell            $22
Exits are all around us. They are the difference between travelling and arriving, being on the inside or outside. Whether signposted or subversive, personal or political, choices or holes we've fallen through, exits determine how we move around our lives, cities, and the world. What does it really mean to 'exit'? In these meditations on exits in architecture, transport, ancestry, language, garbage, death, Sesame Street and Brexit, Laura Waddell follows the neon and the pictograms of exit signs to see what's on the other side. 
Best wishes for the new year!





VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

THE 2020 VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR
Use the selector to choose 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.
List #1: FICTION
List #4: FOOD & DRINK
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

 We wish you all a happy and safe festive season, whether you are travelling or staying home, whether you are spending time with family and friends or alone. Whatever your situation, we wish you many excellent books. Thank you for being part of our book community in this unusual year.

IRREGULAR SEASONAL HOURS: 
Saturday 19 December: open 10 AM—1 PM
Sunday 20 December: closed
Monday 21 December—Wednesday 23 December: open 10 AM—4 PM
Thursday 24 December: open 10 AM—3 PM
Friday 25 December—Monday 28 December: closed
Tuesday 29 December—Thursday 31 December: open 10 AM—4PM
Friday 1 January—Monday 4 January: closed
Tuesday 5 January: normal hours resume
VOLUME Books

 NEW RELEASES

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.
>>Is philosophy a result of anxiety? 


Unquiet by Linn Ullmann          $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
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky           $45
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
Divorcing by Susan Taubes          $37
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. 
22 Minutes of Unconditional Love by Daphne Merkin        $45
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. 
Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori momen poets in translation edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis       $20
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. 
Māori Philosophy: Indigenous thinking from Aotearoa by Georgina Tuari Stewart          $30
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 Force of Non-Violence by Judith Butler           $33
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.
Venice: The lion, the city and the water by Cees Nooteboom        $50
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
Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading, and even change your life by Cecelia Watson            $20
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
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.
William Softkey and the Purple Spider by C.F. (Christopher Fourges)         $40
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. 



VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

>> 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.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 



































 
Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In biology, the directional response of a plant’s growth either towards or away from an external stimulus that either benefits or harms it is termed tropism. Nathalie Sarraute, in this subtly astounding book, first published in 1939, applies the term to her brief studies of ways in which humans are affected by other humans beneath the level of cognitive thought. In these twenty-four pieces she is interested in describing “certain inner ‘movements’, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives. These movements, of which we are hardly cognisant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness, in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak. They constitute the secret source of our existence.” We are either attracted or repulsed by the presence of others, though attraction and repulsion are indistinguishable at least in the degree of connection they effect, we are either benefitted or harmed by others, or both at once (which is much more harmful), but we cannot act upon or even acknowledge our impulses without making intolerable the life we have striven so hard to make tolerable in order to survive. Neurosis may be a sub-optimal functional mode, but it is a functional mode all the same. We wish to destroy but we fear, rightly, being also destroyed. We sublimate that which would overwhelm us, preferring inaction to action for fear of the reaction that action would attract, but we cannot be cognisant of the extent to which this process forms the basis of our existence for such awareness would be intolerable. We must deceive ourselves if we are to make the intolerable tolerable, and we must not be aware that we so deceive ourselves. Such devices as character and plot, which we both apply to ‘real life’ and practise in the reading and writing of novels, are “nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life” to make it liveable. Sarraute’s brilliance in this book, which is the key to her other novels, and which constitutes an object lesson for any writer, is to observe and convey the impulses “constantly emerging up to the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.” Subliminal both in its observations and in its effects, the book suggests the urges and responses that form the understructure of relationships, unseen beneath the effectively compulsive conventions, expectations and obligations that comprise our conscious quotidian lives. Many of the pieces suggest how children are subsumed, overwhelmed and harmed by adults: “They had always known how to possess him entirely, without leaving him an inch of breathing space, without a moment’s respite, how to devour him down to the last crumb.” Sarraute is not interested here in character or plot, but in the unacknowledged impulses and responses that underlie our habits, attitudes and actions. Each thing emerges from, or tends towards, its opposite. All that is beautiful moves towards the hideous. Against what is hideous, something inextinguishable moves to rebel, to survive. ‘Tropism’ also suggests the word ‘trop’ in French, in the sense of ‘too much’. The ideas we have of ourselves are flotsam on surging unconscious depths in which there is no individuality, only impulse and response. Sarraute’s tropisms give insight into the patterns, or clustering tendencies, of these impulses and responses, and are written in remarkable, beautiful sentences. “And he sensed, percolating from the kitchen, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn’t stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can’t sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and to make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we’ve taken our breath away.”
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

This week's Book of the Week is the just-published collection of nineteen outstanding New Zealand graphic novelists' and comic artists' responses to the month-long lockdown with which the country eliminated Covid-19 transmission from the community. LOCKDOWN: STORIES FROM AOTEAROA presents a wide range of experiences in a wide range of graphic styles, all of which capture some aspect of our collective effort, trauma and hope, and some way in which we learned to look at our lives differently. The artists included are: 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.
>>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. 


VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu           $38
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. 
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
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.
Lockdown: Tales from Aotearoa          $35
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!
Tasty Treats: Easy cooking for children by  Adina Chitu and Elenia Beretta      $40
Appealing dishes nicely illustrated and very achievable. 


Karl Maughan edited by Hannah Valentine and Gabriella Stead        $80
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. 
Jacob's Ladder by Ludmilla Ulitskaya           $38
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 
"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
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.
Who's Your Real Mum? by Bernadette Green and Anna Zobel           $30
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.
Penguins and Polar Bears: Getting to know the Arctic and Antarctic by Alicia Klepeis and Grace Helmer     $48
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? 
Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander          $38
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.
The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy by Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson        $25
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
The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan           $33
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.



Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett        $48
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
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. 
The Rise and Fall of James Busby, His Majesty's British Resident in New Zealand by Paul Moon         $40
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.
Manchester Happened by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi     $23
"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
Common Ground: Garden hsitories of Aotearoa by Matt Morris         $45
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.




VOLUME BooksNew releases

 


>> 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. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 

 >> 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.”
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles          $30
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
Xstabeth by David Keenan            $38
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."

Three by Ann Quin          $33
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
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. 
London by Patrick Keiller             $55
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. 

The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland's wild places by Patrick Baker         $40
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.
Think Least of Death: Spinoza on how to live and how to die by Stephen Nadler           $35
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
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 by Raven Leilani          $38
"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
The Lamplighter by Jackie Kay            $25
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
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.

Cold Warriors: Writers who waged the literary cold war by Duncan White         $30
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.
The Iconic Interior: 1900 to the present by Dominic Bradbury and Richard Powers     $55
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. 
Queen of the Sea by Dylan Meconis            $29
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. 




VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Our book of the week, Te Ahi Kā: The fires of occupation by Danish photographer Martin Toft, is a remarkable photographic essay on decolonisation on the Whanganui River. In 1996 Toft spent six months living with Māori who had returned to reclaim their tūrangawaewae at Mangapapapa, to rebuild the marae and to live by the values of their ancestors. The experience  had a deep impact on Toft, and he returned twenty years later to work on this book. The book is outstanding for the strength of its photographic images, the quality of its production and reproductions, and its value as a social document. 

>>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. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> 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.   

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> 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.” 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 List #2: FICTION FOR CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULTS

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. 


The Phantom Twin by Lisa Brown          $33
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. 


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. 


What We'll Build: Plans to build our together future by Oliver Jeffers         $30
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. 

The Inkberg Enigma by Jonathan King         $30
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. 
Monstrous Devices by Damien Love          $17
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. 

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
Mophead Tu: The Queen's poem by Selina Tusitala Marsh          $25
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. 



The Pōrangi Boy by Shilo Kino       $25
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. 

Glassheart by Katharine Orton             $22
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. 


The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff           $18
"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. 



Hare Pota me te Whatu Manapou nā J.K. Rowling, nā Leon Heketū Blake i whakamāori         $25
"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!
Those Seal Rock Kids by Jon Tucker          $23
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.


Migrants by Issa Watanabe           $30
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.

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector