NEW RELEASES

Adorable by Ida Marie Hede            $38
Hede's intriguing novel is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B's brain. When B's father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it's finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld. In Hede's porous world, which is our world, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal. 
"Adorable pulls us between wanting to live and having to die, between child found and parent lost, feeling from inside Hede's brain-womb all that hide and seek within the concaves of living rooms, telephone calls, and other skins. An urgent, brutally tactile novel that grows boundless in the mind, Adorable achieves life." —Mara Coson
>>Read an extract. 
Library of Exile by Edmund de Waal        $35
De Waal's powerful installation and accompanying book appreciate the cultural importance of books—both individually and collected into libraries—and remembers books and libraries that have been lost or destroyed—and writers who have suffered or been exiled—by war and authoritarian powers. The library de Waal assembled contains 2,000 books written by authors in exile in numerous languages from antiquity to the present day. The exterior walls, washed with porcelain over sheets of gold are inscribed with the names of lost or destroyed libraries from history — from Nineveh and Alexandria to those lost more recently including Timbuktu, Aleppo and Mosul. Displayed inside the structure are vitrines of porcelain vessels inspired by Daniel Bomberg's Renaissance printing of the Talmud. Visitors are invited to contemplate and respond to the books by writing notes on the ex libris bookplate inserted into each edition.
Notes from Childhood by Norah Lange           $35
The rediscovered Argentinian writer makes a laboratory of domesticity in this series of vignettes based on her own childhood in the early twentieth century. Lange's notes tell intimate, half-understood stories from the seemingly peaceful realm of childhood, a realm inhabited by an eccentric narrator searching for clues on womanhood and her own identity. She watches: her pubescent older sister, bathing naked in the moonlight; the death of a horse; and herself, a changeable and untimely girl. How she cried, when lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and how she laughed, climbing onto the kitchen roof in men's clothing and throwing bricks to announce her performance.
This is a book about abandoned places: exclusion zones, no man's lands, ghost towns and post-industrial hinterlands – and what nature does when we're not there to see it. Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered – offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

Temporary by Hilary Leichter            $33
"There is nothing more personal than doing your job." So goes the motto of the Temporary, as she takes job after job, in search of steadiness, belonging, and something to call her own. Aided by her bespoke agency and a cast of boyfriends — each allotted their own task (the handy boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the real estate boyfriend) — she is happy to fill in for any of us: for the Chairman of the Board, a ghost, a murderer, a mother. 
“Temporary is a demented, de-tuned love song for the working life. Hilary Leichter possesses the brute force of language and imagination to create ultra-vivid worlds, suffused with an eerie weirdo beauty. It is Leichter’s brilliance that these invented worlds reflect so directly, blindingly, on the secret, mythical workings of our own.” —Ben Marcus
"Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror." —The New York Times
Fundamentals: Ten keys to reality by Frank Wilczek             $48
Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover. 
The Limits of My Language: Meditations on depression by Eva Meijer         $25
Meijer avoids cliches and explores the meaning of depression and its philosophical implications. How can life be distorted by depression over time, and can this distortion be realigned to some sort of shared world? 





Liars: Falsehoods and free speech in an age of deception by Cass R. Sunstein          $45
An examination of why lies and falsehoods spread so rapidly these days, and how we can reform our laws and policies regarding speech to allow democracy to function without it being undermined. 
This is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist writers on turning crisis into change edited by The Feminist Book Society           $45
The pandemic has highlighted many inequalities around the world. This book gives a taste of the intersectional feminist resurgence, and of the urgency with which these issues must be faced. Includes Akasha Hull, Amelia Abraham, Catherine Cho, Dorothy Koomson, Fatima Bhutto, Fox Fisher, Francesca Martinez, Gina Miller, Helen Lederer, Jenny Sealey, Jess Phillips, Jessica Moor, Jude Kelly, Juli Delgado Lopera, Juliet Jacques, Kate Mosse, Kerry Hudson, Kuchenga, Laura Bates, Lauren Bravo, Layla F. Saad, Lindsey Dryden, Lisa Taddeo, Melissa Cummings-Quarry and Natalie A. Carter, Michelle Tea, Mireille Cassandra Harper, Molly Case, Radhika Sanghani, Rosanna Amaka, Sara Collins, Sarah Eagle Heart, Shaz, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sophie Williams, Stella Duffy, Virgie Tovar, and Yomi Adegoke.
Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zarate            $25
There is a war raging in the heartlands of Peru, waged on the land by the global industries plundering the Amazon and the Andes. In Saweto, charismatic activist Edwin Chota returns to his ashaninka roots, only to find that his people can't hunt for food because the animals have fled the rainforest to escape the chainsaw cacophony of illegal logging. Farmer Maxima Acuna is trying to grow potatoes and catch fish on the land she bought from her uncle — but she's sitting on top of a gold mine, and the miners will do anything to prove she's occupying her home illegally. The awajun community of the northern Amazon drink water contaminated with oil; child labourer Osman Cunachi's becomes internationally famous when a photo of him drenched in petrol as part of the clean-up efforts makes it way around the world. Joseph Zarate's work of documentary takes three of Peru's most precious resources — gold, wood and oil — and exposes the tragedy, violence and corruption tangled up in their extraction. He also draws us in to the rich, surprising world of Peru's indigenous communities, of local heroes and singular activists, of ancient customs and passionate young environmentalists. Wars of the Interior is an insight into the cultures alive in the vanishing Amazon, and a forceful, shocking expose of the industries destroying this land.
Undreamed Shores: The hidden heroines of British anthropology by Frances Larson            $45
In the first decades of the 20th century, five women arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters diploma in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all five were intent on travelling to the furthest corners of the globe and studying remote communities whose lives were a world away from their own. In the wastelands of Siberia; in the pueblos and villages of the Nile and New Mexico; in the midst of a rebellion on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interiors of New Guinea, they documented customs now long since forgotten, and bore witness to now-vanished worlds. Through their work they overturned some of the most pernicious myths that dogged their gender, and proved that women could be explorers and scientists, too. Yet when they returned to England they found loss, madness, and regret waiting for them.
"A deeply poignant account of five women who defied convention to pioneer female scholarship at immense personal cost. If you want to understand why there is so little historical evidence of women's intellectual achievement, read this. A devastating indictment of prejudice and how it held women back from achieving their potential." —Madeleine Bunting
"A vivid and moving history of a pioneering group of women, sensitively told and rigorously researched. Undreamed Shores is a compelling and memorable work." —Sarah Moss
Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin                $25
"My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours." (from Patti Smith's introduction). At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on a novel that would change her life forever. The book was Astragal, by Albertine Sarrazin. Sarrazin was an enigmatic outsider who had spent time in jail and who wrote only two novels and a book of poems in her short life—she died the year before Patti found her book, at the age of twenty-nine. Astragal tells the story of Anne, a young woman who breaks her ankle in a daring escape from prison. She makes it to a highway where she's picked up by a motorcyclist, Julien, who's also on the run. As they travel through nights and days together, they fall in love and must do whatever they can to survive, living their lives always on the edge of danger. 
>>Patron saint of delinquent writers. 
Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson         $45
Born into an age when women could neither vote nor own property once married, Barrett Browning seized control of her private income, overcame long term illness and disability, eloped to revolutionary Italy with Robert Browning—and achieved lasting fame as a poet. Feminist icon, political activist and international literary superstar, she inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf.
The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg           $35
A father throws one of his twin children from the train taking them to Auschwitz and returns years later to find her cared for by a Polish peasant who had longed for a child. What is the relationship between fairy tales and the most difficult aspects of real history? 
"The book implores readers to consider the relationships between storytelling and history, between myth and truth. The question is not whether this unlikely story is true, but rather what we talk about when we talk about true stories. The epilogue not only acknowledges that it is difficult to suspend disbelief when confronted with a fairy tale, but also asks us to consider the implications of suspending disbelief in the first place." —Los Angeles Review of Books

The Book of Trees: Visualising branches of knowledge by Manuel Lima          $65
Trees are in nature but also in our minds. Their shape have influenced how we communicate via diagrams, link ideas together and illustrate deeper human thoughts in art throughout history. Trees have been a recurrent metaphor for mapping information in numerous scientific domains, such as biology, genetics, sociology and linguistics and information visualisation is a growing area of interest amongst a variety of professional practices. This book exposes our long-lasting obsession with trees, as metaphors for organising and representing hierarchical information, and provide a broad visual framework for the various types of executions, many dating back hundreds of years.
Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown            $33
'The Rebecca Solnit of the body', Brown's essays grapple with subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the world's oldest anatomical theater, Eugenics, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
"Her writing is sensitive, intelligent, and above all, clear-eyed and curious about her own experience as a writer, a traveller, and a disabled person. This is an important and beautiful rethinking of how bodies move through the world." —Claire Dederer
We Will Not Cease by Archibald Baxter           $30
"To oppose the military machine means to accept the possibility that one may be destroyed by it." We Will Not Cease is the unflinching account of New Zealander Archibald Baxter's brutal treatment as a conscientious objector during World War I. A new edition of this pacificist classic. 
Elegy for Mary Turner: An illustrated account of a lynching by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams              $33
In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, USA, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their lives and their mourning matter. Includes an introduction by historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching's terror in American history.
Long Peace Street: A walk in modern China by Jonathan Chatwin              $35
Through the centre of China's historic capital, Long Peace Street cuts a long, arrow-straight line. It divides the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese emperors, from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite square constructed to glorify a New China under Communist rule. To walk the street is to travel through the story of China's recent past, wandering among its physical relics and hearing echoes of its dramas. Long Peace Street recounts a journey in modern China, a walk of twenty miles across Beijing offering a very personal encounter with the life of the capital's streets. At the same time, it takes the reader on a journey through the city's recent history.


Veggie Power by Olaf Hajek             $45
Olaf Hajek's wondrously imaginative and detailed illustrations of vegetables are paired with engaging texts. Organised by season, the book tells how each vegetable is grown, how it can be enjoyed on our plates, its health benefits, historical tidbits, and botanical fun facts. 





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Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing  {Reviewed by STELLA}
A collection of essays about art and emergency couldn’t be more fitting for the times we live in. Funny Weather is a collection of pieces written by Olivia Laing between 2015—2019 for various art magazines and newspapers. Laing is intrigued by the idea, and adamant that it is so, that art is a vehicle for resistance and repair in a world where crises pit us against systems, both capitalist and governmental, and where unexpected emergencies create social and cultural upheaval. While these writings predate the Covid crisis, the ideas and analysis can easily be applied to our present scenario. Laing discusses artists, writers, and their work related to the political and social upheavals that prefigure and inform their practice. Whether it’s documenting the AIDS crisis, as in the work of  David Wojnarowicz, or exploring our place in nature — Derek Jarman — or creating a place of least distraction — Georgia O’Keefe — or using language to counter political expediency — Ali Smith — or countering expectations — Jean-Michel Basquiat — Laing introduces us to artists who push against the rigidity of conformity, question authority and suggest alternatives. While the best works are in a biographical essay style, the longer pieces being more satisfying, the variety of work ensures fresh views on artists you may know, as well as introductions to some you don’t. Split into loosely thematic sections, the essays intersect across each other in ideas and study, with all drawing down to Laing’s insistence that art is important in the face of an emergency. This concept underlies her conversations about or with the artists, and her critique of their work in the context of political, social and cultural phenomena. Where Laing succeeds and keeps the reader engaged (compared with the stilted or pretentious nature of much art writing) is in her ability to write with insight, compassion and verve, by putting her own experiences into the dialogue and teasing at the edges, looking afresh (much in the same way that John Berger makes us look at art) to give the reader informative and complex, yet unwaveringly accessible, conversation. Laing avoids easy conclusions and gives us plenty to chew on, as we seek art to save us in an emergency.
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Mouthpieces by Eimear McBride   {Reviewed by THOMAS}

To remove from language the ornamental aspects of that language, to undercut the words until the uncuttable is all that’s left, to remove from a text all rationale, to leave all bare, is a path of negation, of austere interrogation, he wrote. “There is no occurrence upon which doubt cannot be thrown,” she wrote. The space cleared by Samuel Beckett surely is or could be an enterable space, not a fenced space, if there are any who would enter and could enter, some few perhaps, but some, he wrote. Space for a voice, a voice tied with the breath, or by the breath, whatever, to the body, to the mind, to the mouth and to the ear, if there is not no such thing as a body or a mind, or a mouth and an ear, he wrote. The most is nearest the least. Three pieces by McBride, I’m ear, call them pieces, call them texts, nothing else to call them, three voices, women’s voices, attrited by all that surrounds them and attrites, by all that expects, by all that intrudes upon them and demands, by all that surrounds them and occludes, but voices made more clear by all attempts, at all times and from all quarters, to stifle and occlude, he wrote. Kick away the crutch and see what walks. There is more threat or rage in the uneraseable than in that which has yet to be erased, though the impulse to erase remains, an impulse no longer able to be expressed, from which expression is exhausted, or denied, or is itself erased, he wrote. Some breath remains unsmothered, some unsmotherable breath or some breath not quite yet smothered, some voice will name, or if not name resist, with irresistable resistance or with what must pass for resistance, the smotherers whose smothering is not quite yet done, whose smothering will never now be done or whose smothering is at least postponed by the voice, the voice that therefore must not cease, he wrote. Three brief texts made powerful by their briefness. I read, I unread and reread, he wrote. I write this adminicle, this text as evidence of another text, the text I view and review, the text the reader of this adminicle would do well to read and reread rather than this rushed adminicle, this clumsiness, this crutchlessness, he wrote. How to go on? “She cannot find a way out because there is no way,” she wrote. “Because there is no out. Because there is no because. Just is.”
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

In our Book of the Week, Everybody: A book about freedom, Olivia Laing explores the capacities and vulnerabilities of the human body, and sees it as the locus of a political struggle for individual and collective freedom and authenticity. Laing uses the body as a way to consider significant and complicated figures of the past, and to understand their relevance today, when our bodies are facing both established and new threats and opportunities. 
>>The problems of inhabiting a body. 
>>William Reich and the 'sexual revolution'.
>>An interrogation of bodies.
>>The book came out of a moment of despair. 
>>Laing discusses the book with Maggie Nelson. 
>>On writing the global story of liberation. 
>>Finding renewal in a precision haircut. 
>>Of course the book has a playlist!
>>Laing's reading piles are far from organised...
>>Your copy of Everybody.
>>Other books by Olivia Laing. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

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Dead Souls by Sam Riviere              $38
A glorious and hilarious rant against the pretensions of the 'poetry scene', so to call it, and against pretty much everything else that falls under the author's notice, Dead Souls is also a metaphysical mystery and an exploration of the dual pitfalls of plagiarism and invention — a novel with a similar palette of barbs and pleasures to those of Thomas Bernhard. 
>>Read an extract. 
The Hard Crowd: Essays, 2000—2020 by Rachel Kushner            $37
In nineteen razor-sharp essays Kushner explores friendship, loss, social justice, art and more, taking us into the world of truckers, a Palestinian refugee camp, the American prison system and the San Francisco music scene, via the work of Jeff Koons, Marguerite Duras and the Rolling Stones. The book also details how, in her twenties, Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love — motorbikes — to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000, and how, following a crash at 200km/h, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.
A Clear Dawn: New Asian voices from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong               $50
This collection of poetry, fiction and essays by emerging writers is the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing. A Clear Dawn presents a new wave of creative talent. With roots stretching from Indonesia to Japan, from China to the Philippines to the Indian subcontinent, the authors in this anthology range from high school students to retirees, from recent immigrants to writers whose families have lived in New Zealand for generations. Some of the writers – including Gregory Kan, Sharon Lam, Rose Lu and Chris Tse – have published books; some, like Mustaq Missouri, Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, are better known for their work in theatre and performance. The introduction outlines New Zealand's long yet under-recognised history of immigration from Asia. 
"Breathtaking in its parts and as a whole. Even if you know a part of Asia well, even if you feel in touch with present-day Aotearoa, this anthology will surprise you again and again, as, voice by unique voice, truth by particular truth, its artists build a mosaic you have never seen before." —Rajorshi Chakraborti
A Door Behind a Door by Yelena Moskovich          $36
Olga immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
"Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind A Door reminded me, as I was speeding through it, for there was no other way to read a work of such momentum and force, that novels are made of sentences, and who else writes sentences like this, does anyone else, I thought, as if in a fever dream, opening up each portal and falling through it, write sentences like this juxtaposing despair and lust, tragedy and farce." —Kate Zambreno
Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan             $40
The devil's daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910 and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century. Over nine decades, No. 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls. An infamous madam, a spy, a famous Beat poet, a coal miner who fears daylight, a psychic: these are some of the residents whose lives are plagued by the building's troubled history in disparate, sometimes chilling ways. The curse creeps up the nine floors and an enraged spirit world swells to the surface, desperate for the true horror of the building's longest kept secret to be heard.
"One of the most stunning literary experiences I've had in years. Luckenbooth, sprawling the decades with its themes of repression and revenge, brings back something that has long been lacking in the British novel: ambition. If Alasdair Gray's Lanark was a masterly imagining of Glasgow, then this is the quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest." —Irvine Welsh
"A deeply powerful, compellingly vivid novel. Luckenbooth is a major work of Scottish fiction — possibly one of the most significant novels of the last ten years. —Alan Warner
"Brilliantly strange, this haunted panorama is a dazzling outsider history." —M. John Harrison, Guardian
"Radical, daring, and beautifully written." —The Scotsman
Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My life with the internet by Maël Renouard           $37
A fascinating series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless: the internet.
>>In search of lost time (with a little help from Google). 
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on lost time by Hugh Raffles             $55
An exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. When Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own. The Book of Unconformities is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897. As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they’ve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity, as capricious indifferent and willful as time itself.
“In a high-voltage jolt of insight, Mr. Raffles converts what might seem a dry scientific concept into a potent literary metaphor to help anyone whose sense of time has been fractured by loss. The Book of Unconformities is so rich in erudition and prose-poetry that I read it like a glutton, tearing off big bites of lost time until I was sated.” —The Wall Street Journal
“What intuition the book requires, what detective work—and what magic tricks it performs. Raffles is serenely indifferent to the imperatives and ordinary satisfactions of conventional storytelling. Character, coherence, a legible and meaningful structure—these are not his concerns. There are no attempts to suture together the various stories, no attempts to enact something 'learned' by the author. The photographs accompanying the text are dim  and blotchy, and Raffles favors slabs of prose unbroken by punctuation. I intend all this as praise.” —The New York Times 
“A spellbinding time travelogue. Raffles’s dense, associative, essayistic style mirrors geological transformation, compressing and folding chronologies like strata in  metamorphic rock.” —Harper’s Magazine
Choke Box by Christina Milletti             $38
When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective "counter-memoir" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting-and occasionally celebrating-her suspected role in her husband's disappearance. Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. The stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.
Snow Approaching on the Hudson by August Kleinzahler           $28
August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds. Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, that are at one historical and invented. The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, his first in eight years.
Niva and Yotam Kay of Pakaraka Permaculture on the Coromandel Peninsula share their long experience of organic gardening in this comprehensive book on how to create and maintain a productive and regenerative vegetable garden. Taking care of the soil life and fertility provides plants with what they need to thrive. The book reflects in the latest scientific research on soil health, ecological and regenerative practices. 


I Saw the Dog: How language works by Alexandra Aikhenvald            $33
 Every language in the world shares a few common features: we can ask a question, say something belongs to us, and tell someone what to do. But beyond that, our languages are richly and almost infinitely varied: a French speaker can't conceive of a world that isn't split into un and une, male and female, while Estonians have only one word for both men and women: tema. In Dyirbal, an Australian language, things might be masculine, feminine, neuter — or edible vegetable.

We All Play by Julie Flett          $30
A beautifully illustrated picture books gently encouraging an appreciation of nature, animals, seasons, and intergenerational friendship. Includes a glossary of Cree words for the various animals that appear in the book. 
Landfall 241 edited by Emma Neale            $30
Results from the 2021 Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition as well as new writing from established and new voices — work ranging from the wry, ludic and lyrical, to gripping body horror as social commentary — reviews of New Zealand books, and art by Claire Beynon, Ewan McDougall, and Bridget Reweti.



Bookstores: A celebration of independent booksellers by Horst A. Friedrichs and Stuart Husband          $100
Pay a photographic visit to a variety of new, second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, mostly in the US, the UK and Europe, in this sumptuous book. 
On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Eugene Thacker         $30
Schopenhauer's later writings mark a shift towards a philosophy of aphorisms, fragments, anecdotes and observations, written in a literary style that is by turns antagonistic, resigned, confessional, and filled with all the fragile contours of an intellectual memoir. Here Schopenhauer allows himself to pose challenging questions regarding the fate of the human species, the role of suffering in the world, and the rift between self and world that increasingly has come to define human existence, to this day. It is these writings of Schopenhauer that later generations of artists, poets, musicians, and philosophers would identify as exemplifying the pessimism of their era, and perhaps of our own as well. On the Suffering of the World is presented with an introduction that places Schopenhauer's thought in its intellectual context, while also connecting it to contemporary concerns over climate change, the anthropocene, and the spectre of human extinction.
>>A few cheerful words by Thomas. 
The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo          $38
The first picture book from the Nobel Prize-winning writer is a quiet meditation on happiness following the life of a busy man who loses his soul, beautifully illustrated by Concejo. 






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Bread is Gold: Extraordinary meals with ordinary ingredients by Massimo Bottura and friends    {Reviewed by STELLA}
A surfeit of stale bread and bruised bananas? Bread is Gold is the perfect cookbook for these dilemmas. Spearheaded by Italian chef Massimo Bottura (of Osteria Francescana fame), the Refettorio Ambrosiano was a project designed alongside the Food Expo in Milan in 2015. Its purpose was to use the waste ingredients (the leftovers) to produce free meals for the community — a soup kitchen with world-class chefs at the stovetops. With Bottura’s personal connections and chefs coming to cook for the Expo, there was a steady stream of willing cooks in town. Bread is Gold records some of the recipes they created, insights into their experience of inventive cooking using an array of seemingly unexceptional (or abandoned) ingredients to make food that was extraordinary for the community — dinner for the homeless, the poor and the hungry, as well lunches for school children — not just to feed, but to create a sense of community through sharing good food together. The fifty-odd chefs include Daniel Humm (3 Michelin star restaurant Eleven Madison Park), Rene Redzepi (Noma), Alain Ducasse (21 Michelin stars to his name), Ana Ros (Hisa Franko), Ferran Adria (elBulli), Cristina Bowerman (Glass Hostaria), and so many more — all willing to turn up on the day, walk into the chiller and make something out of nothing. Each chef is profiled, citing their daily experience: what they find in the cupboards and how they transform the ingredients into something not just edible, but delicious. Massimo Bottura's conversational style works well as he records his conversations in the kitchen with the chefs — conversations about food waste and their reaction to cooking for people who would rarely know how famous they were; the challenge of making do, and their eagerness to make a special meal. Following the insightful text pieces, are photographs of the trays of foodstuffs for the day — sometimes treasures, but often battered or nearly past-the-use-by-date ingredients — and the cooks working in the kitchen, the hard work and the camaraderie. Then the recipes and, yes, there are multiple ways to use day-old bread and battered bananas — ice cream variations feature highly. Yet each chef brings something from their own cultural background and culinary experience, along with inventiveness and sophistication — popcorn pesto, burnt lime soup, banana peel chutney, fennel and grapefruit salad with anchovy paste, caramelised bananas with crescenza cheese, cream of mixed grains with puffed rice and goat milk royale. Some recipes are hearty, others delicate, but all have that same sensibility of looking in the cupboard when it’s almost bare, when ingredients don’t seem to be a natural match, and coming up with something that will satisfy (or surprise) the taste buds and fill the stomach — and along the way reduce waste. Learn how to experiment in your kitchen — use the wilted herbs, the stale bread and very ripe bananas — and maybe pick up some new tips from world-class chefs and reduce your food waste footprint. Refettorio Ambrosiano went on beyond its six months and continues under the wider Food for Soul international project.
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 

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No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Is there such a thing as claustrophobia in your own skin, he wondered. He thought about the possibility of a collective mind, a species mind, but why stop at species, a global mind, trapped and compartmentalised into individuals. No wonder we all feel trapped in ourselves, he thought. No wonder we do everything we can, even the most stupid things, to join ourselves back up. The most inane things. And yet, and yet, we are all the time assailed by this collective mind, he thought, how do we protect ourselves from it, and from everyone else that comprises it, how do we hold back even a little space within ourselves to be just ourselves, if there is such a thing? Do we have, or have we ever had, anything that could pass for authenticity, anyway, he wondered, and would we know whether we had it or had lost it, or not? In the age of internet hyperconnectivity, so to call it, should we fear or celebrate that so much of our thinking is done for us outside our head, how liberating, how useful, how frightening, but has this not anyway always been the case, even for our ancestors’ ancestors, is this not where the collective mind came from, after all? Too many question marks, too many superfluous words, he thought. Let’s get on. Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This straddles these and other polarities, he wrote. It is both clever and moving, both piercingly funny and reassuringly sad, it is both about the bodilessness of the internet and about bodies in the world, about both isolation and intimacy, and about the burden that language bears—and the possibilities language offers—connecting or attempting to connect all these. Now he seemed to have written some sort of blurb instead of a review, he observed, not that what he had been writing or what he usually wrote could have passed as a review anyway, the blurb was closer. The first half of the book is probably the best encapsulation of the internet experience in fiction that he had read, he thought, if encapsulation is the word, though he had not read many fictions that attempted to capture the internet experience, so to call it. Actually there are very few novels that attempt this, he thought, which is surprising considering the way we all use the internet to do our thinking nowadays. Because we are all but a synapse away from everyone else on the planet, the speed of thought really is the speed of thought, he thought, by the time anyone responds to our thought, the world we thought it in has already changed, the collective mind has mutated and normalised the mutation. No One Is Talking About This is written in short paragraphs or sections of a postable size, the length of an internet thought, he thought, separated by blanks, just as thoughts seem to be. “Why were we all writing like this now?” wonders Lockwood’s narrator (that is to say Lockwood herself in the third person, past tense (he knew, he thought, why she wrote like that)). “Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote. ::: These disconnections were what kept the pages turning, these blank spaces were what moved the plot forward. The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair, willing herself to stand up.” Is this book a celebration or a satire of the internet—the portal—he wondered, who can tell the difference these days, the membrane between irony and sincerity is pretty well transparent, he wrote, avoiding a question mark where one had seemed to be called for. The portal had “once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other,” Lockwood wrote. All the time, though, as he had said in his blurb, call that the precis of his review, perhaps, the book is really about language and the ways it bears, releases, lets slip, distorts, mocks, grapples with and fails to grapple with whatever it is that language bears, releases, lets slip, etcetera, he wasn’t quite sure what, but language did it anyway, what was always protean was only more protean in the portal. The second half of the book concerns the brief six-month life of Lockwood’s niece, born with Proteus Syndrome, a growth disorder that eventually kills its subject under the chaotic asymmetric growth of their own body. He had forgotten the name of the syndrome and had to look it up in the novel later, only to find that he had used it adjectivally in his previous sentence, which was a bit awkward and unintentional, but there was no going back now. The Lockwood character is stricken (“If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did this leave her?”), goes to support her sister, and the rest of the novel about language revolves around the niece who would never attain language of her own. The narrator’s love for the doomed niece is the least meme-able thing you could imagine, he thought, and yet the voice continues, the thought length continues, the writing style spun by the portal proves, in Lockwood’s hands (hands? mind? fingers? keyboard?) at least, capable of authenticity and feeling. Perhaps we have always thought like this, or experienced like this, he thought, perhaps the world and we ourselves are comprised of instances, snippets, bundled together by language, and the portal has only helped us to see that this is so. If I feel claustrophobic in my own skin, he thought, imagine how the parts and sub-parts of me feel. Imagine how my thoughts feel, and how badly they want to get out. 
 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

Book of the Week: Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life by John Gray.
There can be no doubt that cats long ago domesticated humans for their own ends, and since then have both shown and withheld from us the secrets of living well. At once our close companions and completely inaccessible, what do cats know that we don't? They show little interest in philosophy and yet they can help us think about what it means to exist—and how we can do so better. With his wide-ranging knowledge of philosophy and his radical empathy for the experiences of animals in human association, there can be no better guide to feline philosophy than John Gray. 
>>What can we learn from cats? 
>>Cats, humans, and the good life. 
>>Contentment is the default condition for cats. 
>>We cannot know what it is like to be a cat. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

Second Place by Rachel Cusk              $33
From the author of the 'Outline' trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships. A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds. With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Second Place is both deeply affirming and deeply scathing of humanity. 
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri               $29
A woman moves through the city, her city, on her own. She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, through its shops and pools and bars. She slows her pace to watch a couple fighting, to take in the sight of an old woman in a waiting room; pauses to drink her coffee in a shaded square. Sometimes her steps take her to her grieving mother, sealed off in her own solitude. Sometimes they take her to the station, where the trains can spirit her away for a short while. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change forever. Written in Lahiri's adopted language, Italian, and translated by her into English, Whereabouts is spare and evocative, demonstrating the shift in the author's literary sensibilities. 
>>Lost, at sea, at odds. 
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones            $35
Short-listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, this well written multi-generational novel coils its way through issues of race, class and gender in a Barbados where poverty and misogyny lurk under the surface and where a cautionary folk tale takes on multiple meanings for three very different women.
The Voice Over: Poems and essays by Maria Stepanova            $38
Short-listed for 2021 International Booker Prize for In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova is one of the most distinctive voices of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. As Russia's political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country's past and present. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova's poetry and essays, showcasing her range and creative evolution.  
Events in the Life of Peter Tapsell by PhillipTapsell, edited by Jonathan Adams             $45
Hans Falk, born in 1790 in Copenhagen, took to the sea as a lad, changed his name to Phillip Tapsell, and after many adventures settled at Maketu in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty. There he became the key trader for Bay of Plenty iwi and married into the highest levels of Te Arawa, while helping other tribes to defend themselves against invasion from northern tribes. He was one of the original Pakeha-Maori. Yet Tapsell's life of daring is not well known today, and the memoirs he dictated to Edward Little shortly before his death were only ever published in newspaper form. Adams's research has given Tapsell's account a context in which to appreciate his importance. 
River Kings: A new history of the Vikings, from Scandinavia to the Silk Road by Cat Jarman            $40
Using a bioarchaeological approach, Jarman follows evidence that suggests a Viking-dominated trade and slave route from Northern Europe to the Middle East, India and beyond, and reconfigures our thinking about the Vikings themselves.  


Family Papers: A Sephardic journey through the twentieth century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein             $38
For centuries, the port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family's correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.
We Are Not in the World by Conor O'Callaghan             $35
Heartbroken after a long, painful love affair, a man drives a haulage lorry from England to France. Travelling with him is a secret passenger—his daughter. Twenty-something, unkempt, off the rails. With a week on the road together, father and daughter must restore themselves and each other, and repair a relationship that is at once fiercely loving and deeply scarred.
"Haunting, mesmerising, and so deeply intelligent about the interwoven strengths and frailties of the human heart." —Kamila Shamsie
"Wonderful, wrenching, full of enormous feelings very precisely rendered." —Sara Baume 
Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986-1999 by J.M. Coetzee             $24
Includes essays on Dostoevsky, Kafka, A.S. Byatt, Doris Lessing, Cees Nooteboom, Borges, and Mahfouz.
"For all the sharpness and sorrow of Coetzee's writing, there is something grandly calming about his style: his sentences seem to give off light, and not in a hard dazzle, but in the glow of a child's night-light." —The Age

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala        $38
The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. Told by a chorus of narrators—including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer—who flirt, lie, argue, and finish one another's stories, Marcial Gala's The Black Cathedral is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.
There are books out there, some shelved unwittingly next to ordinary texts, that are bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom, a medical librarian and a cofounder of the Death Salon, seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind this anthropodermic bibliopegy. Dozens of these books still sit on the shelves of the world's most famous libraries and museums. What are their stories? Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, mental patients, beautiful women, and indigents whose lives are bound together in this rare, scattered, and disquieting collection. It also tells the story of the scientists, curators, and librarians like Rosenbloom—interested in the full complicated histories behind these dark artifacts of nineteenth-century medicine—are developing tests to discover these books and sorting through the ethics of custodianship. 
Faking It: My life in transition by Kyle Mewburn             $39
Kyle Mewburn grew up in the sunburnt, unsophisticated Brisbane suburbs of the 1960s and '70s in a household with little love and no books, with a lifelong feeling of being somehow wrong — like 'strawberry jam in a spinach can'. In this book, Kyle describes this early life and her journey to becoming her own person — a celebrated children's book author, a husband and, finally, a woman.
The Power of Geography: Ten maps that reveal the future of the world by Tim Marshall            $38
Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed, but the world has. In this new book, Marshall takes us into ten regions that are set to shape global politics and power. Find out why the Earth's atmosphere is the world's next battleground; why the fight for the Pacific is just beginning; and why Europe's next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks. Chapters cover Australia, The Sahel, Greece, Turkey, the UK, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Space.

Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolaño           $25
Three novellas. In 'Cowboy Graves', Arturo Belano—Bolano's alter ego—returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. 'French Comedy of Horrors' takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen-year-old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in 'Fatherland', a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.
The Rise and Fall of Patriarchal Systems by Nancy Folbre            $35
Why is gender inequality so pervasive? In part, says Folbre, because of the contradictory effects of capitalist development: on the one hand, rapid technological change has improved living standards and increased the scope for individual choice for women; on the other, increased inequality and the weakening of families and communities have reconfigured gender inequalities, leaving caregivers particularly vulnerable. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems examines why care work is generally unrewarded in a market economy, calling attention to the non-market processes of childbearing, childrearing and the care of other dependents, the inheritance of assets, and the use of force and violence to appropriate both physical and human resources. Exploring intersecting inequalities based on class, gender, age, race/ethnicity, and citizenship, and their implications for political coalitions, it sets a new feminist agenda for the twenty-first century.
Oddity by Eli Brown               $22
When her physician father is murdered, thirteen-year-old Clover Elkin embarks on a perilous mission through warring frontier territories to protect the one secret Oddity he left behind. And as she uncovers the truth about her parents and her past, Clover herself emerges as a powerful agent of history.
 

Hume's radical rethinking of human nature and of our relationship with the world is presented by Baggini as a complete approach to life (and we learn quite a bit about Hume's life, too). 
The Book of the Earthworm by Sally Coulthard               $33
For Charles Darwin – who estimated every acre of land contained 53,000 earthworms – the humble earthworm was the most important creature on the planet. We take them for granted but, without the earthworm, the world's soil would be barren, and our gardens, fields and farms wouldn't be able to grow the food and support the animals we need to survive. 

The Alarmist: Fifty years measuring climate change by Dave Lowe           $40
His research was urgent fifty years ago. Now, it’s critical. In the early 1970s, budding Kiwi scientist Dave Lowe was posted at an atmospheric monitoring station on the wind-blasted southern coast of New Zealand’s North Island. On a shoestring salary he measured carbon in the atmosphere, collecting vital data towards what became one of the most important discoveries in modern science. What followed was a lifetime’s career marked by hope and despair. As realisation dawned of what his measurements meant for the future of the planet, Dave travelled the world to understand more about atmospheric gases, along the way programming some of the earliest computers, designing cutting-edge equipment and conducting experiments both dangerous and mind-numbingly dull. From the sandy beaches of California to the stark winters of West Germany, the mesas of the Rocky Mountains and an Atlantic voyage across the equator, Dave has faced down climate deniers, foot-dragging bureaucracy and widespread complacency to open people’s eyes to the effects of increasing fossil fuel emissions on our atmosphere. In equal parts adventure and a warning, and with the wisdom and frustration of half a century behind him, The Alarmist is the autobiography of a pioneering scientist who has dedicated his life to sounding the alarm on climate change.


VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

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The Loop by Ben Oliver     {Reviewed by STELLA}
With its stunning jacket design and the intriguing plot, The Loop, the first in Ben Oliver's trilogy, is a fast-paced sci-fi thriller for teens. Not only is the unwinding story compelling, and the mysterious experiments on the populace mind-bending, but there is also plenty of emotional heft too, with its diverse characters, developing relationships and consequential situations. Decisions may need to be made which could prove fatal. It’s Luka Kane’s birthday. He’s sixteen and he’s been in The Loop (a high-security prison) for almost two years, his daily companion—a computer AI called Happy (Happy also just happens to be a corporation). Apart from one hour of outdoor exercise (where he can hear the other inmates—they are walled off from each other) and the warden—a young woman who looks out for the ‘safe’ inmates and gives Luka books, the days are endless (that is until you go to The Block). Every six months you can delay your death sentence by letting scientists and doctors experiment on you and every night your energy is harvested to power The Loop. When the systems start to go haywire, the guards start behaving oddly and all the inmates are called up for an extra Delay, and The Loop starts to heat up. Getting out of The Loop might have been every inmate's dream, but outside the facility the city is in chaos and the leading men are up to something strange. Luka sets out with a handful of the other inmates intent on finding his family and untangling the mystery at the heart of the latest experiment. He has been genetically altered, but how and why are the big questions. The city has been attacked, the rebels from the Red Zone are coming and the inhabitants, some of them Regulars and other Alts (modified), are pitching a vicious battle where nothing makes sense. As the teens return to the city they are confronted by zombie-like people intent on murder. A disease has infected them, but not all are affected. Why are some people immune? And what was the purpose of this experiment? And that’s not the only problem—they are also on the government’s 'wanted' list, and a new type of super-soldier with curious behaviour is zoning in on them. Touching on genetic modification, mind control and power play, 'The Loop' is an exciting, high-stakes new series, bound to appeal to readers of 'Scythe', 'Maze Runner' and 'The Hunger Games'. There are echoes of Orwell’s Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in this not-so-far-fetched future of sky farms, controlled climate, distinct levels of human ability via modification and access to technology, and political power through marketing and its machinations. Add to this that Luka and his misfit friends are the perfect companions—you will want to keep running with them as far as this world can take you.
VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella

 

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The Table by Francis Ponge   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“The table is a faithful friend, but you have to go to it,” writes Francis Ponge, poet of ‘things’, in this extraordinarily subtle little book, written sporadically between 1967 and 1973, on his relationship with the table that lay beneath his elbow whenever he was writing. “The table serves as a support of the body of the writer that I sometimes {try to be | am} so that I don’t collapse (which is what I am doing at this moment) (not for fun) (not for pleasure) (but as a consolation) (so as not to collapse).” A thought may come, or not, and be expressed, or not, perhaps in some relationship with text, a problematic relationship at best, when you think of it, and go, and be perhaps forgotten, more and more commonly forgotten, or the text unread, for even the most-read text lies mostly unread, but the table continues, whatever it is, object or concept, and whatever the relationship between the table and the idea of the table that presses upon, or from, the word Table. The table lies under the work of the writer (the working of the writer), whatever that work might be, the labour of writing is supported by the table, under all writing lies the table. “The table has something of the mother carrying (on four legs) the body of the writer.” Once all the unnecessities have been removed from the act of writing, once the content and the intent have been removed, Ponge finds his table. Because the table is always beneath the writing, all writing is ultimately never on anything other than the table. “As I remember the table (the notion of the table), some table comes under my elbow. As I am wanting to write the table, it comes to my elbow and the same time the notion comes to mind.” If language could mediate the space between the object pressing at his elbow and the concept of the table, if language could allow this object to exist other than merely as the index of the idea that is imposed upon it, Ponge’s patient, precise, careful, playful rigour will approach it certainly closely enough to both deepen and dissolve the concept, to begin to replace ideas with thought. “It takes many words to destroy a concept (or rather to make of this word no longer a concept but a conceptacle).” Ponge’s operations are forensic, and his “table was (and remains) the operating table, the dissecting table.” As a support for the writer, the (t)able represents that which is able to be, and remains uncertain, and not that which must be. “One could say that this Table is nothing other than the substantification of a qualifying suffix, indicating only pure possibility.” All new thought comes from objects, from objects pushing back against the concepts imposed upon them, pushing through the layers of memory and habituation that separate us from them. If the aesthetic is not the opposite of an anaesthetic it is in fact the anaesthetic. Only objects can rescue us from the idea we have of them, but they are hard for us to reach. “The greater my despair, the more intense (necessarily intense) my fixation on the object.” Objects may be reached through the patient, precise, careful, playful abrasion of the language used to describe them, a process known as poetry, an operation Ponge performs upon a table. That which is horizontal is in a state of flux but that which is vertical has been hoisted to the plane of aspiration and display. Viewing the vertical we see that walls are built from bottom to top whereas text is built from top to bottom, but viewing on the horizontal we see that the labour of laying brick by brick and the labour of laying word by word are the same labour, or at least analogous labours. On the horizontal table the relationship between objects and language is co-operative, each operating on the other, each opening and redefining the other on the delimited space of the table. “I will remember you my table, table that was my table, any table, any old table,” writes Ponge of the object whose presence has written this book, but which still remains a presence beyond the language he uses to reach towards it (and he reaches closer to an object than language ordinarily can reach). “I let you survive in the paradise of the unsaid,” he says. Language can be stretched but not escaped. “We are enclosed within our language … but what a marvellous prison,” writes Ponge.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made; those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have dies, shopping and child-rearing; our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before — and what it means to be truly living. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn's crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.
>>Reading with the mouth. 
>>Am I human? 
>>Short-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel            $48
A wonderful graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise— set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times.
>>Climbing Desolation Peak. 
>>"These books all feel impossible at the outset—which is why I want to do them."

Corpsing: My body and other horror shows by Sophie White           $38
In this collection of non-fiction White asks uncomfortable questions about the lived reality of womanhood in the 21st century, and the fear that must be internalised in order to find a path through it. White balances vivid storytelling with sharp-witted observations about the horrors of grief, mental illness, and the casual and sometimes hilarious cruelty of life.
"Provocative and profound, full of brutal truths and unexpected humour. —Sarah Baume
Friday Prayers by Tony Beyer            $20
Three poems from one of Aotearoa's finest poets. 'Island time' is a meditation on impermanence and identity ("we who so loved the world / are its destroyers"); while the title poem in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque killings considers complicity; 'Crusade', an account of a rugby match between the Chiefs and the Crusaders. 
"Tony Beyer has never followed signposts; he has always attended to the road, rewarding us with a considered prosody that honours the moment yet goes beyond it. His language is disciplined, almost ascetic, but there is a generosity in even the most clipped line, a kind of 'elated patience' that is rare, and all the more welcome for its rarity, in New Zealand poetry." —David Howard
>>'Sage'.
a bathful of kawakawa and hot water by Hana Pera Aoake              $28
"Writing with radical tenderness, with beauty and pain and precision, Hana Pera Aoake envisions an anticapitalist, de-colonial, Indigenous way of living and being, transcending the borders of poetry and prose in a style similar to that of Claudia Rankine and Layli Long Soldier. A bath full of kawakawa and hot water is an essential poetic text in the literature of Aotearoa, and a call to action at the end of the world." —Nina Mingya Powles
"Part memoir, part myth, part rant, part dream, part chant. This is an exciting and poignant book from one of my favourite NZ writers." —Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
"Hybrid in form and theme, what cyborg melts hierarchies, what cyborg turns the gender binary to dust, what cyborg fights for our mana motuhake? This one! Read this book and then do something about it." —essa may ranapiri
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux               $28
Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married man where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.
"The triumph of Ernaux’s approach is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them. A monument to passions that defy simple explanations." —New York Times
"Annie Ernaux is one of my favorite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months." —Sheila Heti
>>Other books by Ernaux.
Survivors: Children's lives after the Holocaust by Rebecca Clifford      $60
How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, she charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them—as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children—often branded "the lucky ones"—had to struggle to be able to call themselves "survivors" at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford's narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.
"A wonderful piece of writing, its power and intelligence so delicately crafted, a truly significant contribution to our understanding of the consequences over time of the interplay between trauma, memory and identity." —Philippe Sands
Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli        $45
In June 1925, twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg, suffering from hay fever, retreated to a small, treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland. It was there that he came up with one of the most transformative scientific concepts—quantum theory. Almost a century later, quantum physics has given us many startling ideas—ghost waves, distant objects that seem magically connected to each other, cats that are both dead and alive. At the same time, countless experiments have led to practical applications that shape our daily lives. Today our understanding of the world around us is based on this theory. And yet it is still profoundly mysterious. In this book, Carlo Rovelli tells the story of quantum physics and reveals its deep meaning—a world made of substances is replaced by a world made of relations, each particle responding to another in a never ending game of mirrors.
>>Other excellent books by Rovelli. 
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly             $30
Valdin is still in love with his ex-boyfriend Xabi, who used to drive around Auckland in a ute but now drives around Buenos Aires in one. Greta is in love with her fellow English tutor Holly, who doesn’t know how to pronounce Greta’s surname, Vladisavljevic, properly. From their Auckland apartment, brother and sister must navigate the intricate paths of modern romance as well as weather the small storms of their eccentric Māori–Russian–Catalonian family. This novel by Adam Foundation Prize winner Rebecca K Reilly owes as much to Shakespeare as it does to Tinder. Greta and Valdin will speak to anyone who has had their heart broken, or has decided that they don’t want to be a physicist anymore, or has wondered about all of the things they don’t know about their family.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970—1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and their circle edited by Saskia Hamilton          $45
The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle (including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich), the book tells the story of the painful (at least for Bishop) destruction of of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation. Lowell's controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he appropriated freely from Hardwick's letters to him) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and the novel Sleepless Nights.
Fifty Years a Feminist by Sue Kedgley            $40
One of the most prominent advocates of second-wave feminism in Aotearoa looks back over five decades of campaigns and social and political change, takes stock of what has been achieved and considers what still needs to be addressed. 
Knox's excellent book has been updated and is now fully illustrated in colour. 

Dressed: Fashionable dress in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1840—1910 by Claire Regnault           $70
A beautifully presented look at colonial-era fashionable dress, based on the collections at Te Papa (of which Regnault is curator), and exploring the social context of the garments and of the women who wore or made them. How does clothing give us an insight into Women's historical experiences that might otherwise not be available to us? 


Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer           $37
Klemperer's remarkable study (first published in 1957) dissects the ways in which the use of the German language was distorted and manipulated by Nazi propaganda in order to control the thoughts of the German people. Klemperer was particularly interested in the use of 'buzz-words' to reduce thought and manipulate emotions.  "It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism."

Do Animals Fall in Love? by Katherina von der Gathen and Anke Kuhl            $33
All the most fascinating and astonishing facts about animal reproduction, from seduction methods and anatomy to family life and animal babies, in a compendium for the whole family. Bats give birth upside down. Swifts can mate while plummeting through the air. Scorpions attract their partners with a romantic dance. Male humpback whales sing together for days to bring females from many miles away. Dolphin babies come out tail first. Do Animals Fall in Love? is a compendium of all the weird and wonderful ways the animal kingdom reproduces. Wittily illustrated and frankly told, it covers courting rituals both elaborate and devious, extraordinary physiology, cleverly planned pregnancies, the most devoted fathers and the sweetest animal babies on Earth.
What You Made of It: A memoir, 1987—2020 by C.K. Stead             $50
"These are my encounters and engagements with the world of books and writers, and of teaching and writing about them," C. K. Stead writes in this third and final volume of his memoirs. Topical. 
>>Terrorism and two endings.


Over the last three centuries, huge leaps in our scientific understanding and, as a result, in our technology have completely transformed our way of life and our vision of the universe. Why is science so powerful? And why did we take so long to invent it - two thousand years after the invention of philosophy, mathematics and other disciplines that are the mark of civilisation? The Knowledge Machine gives a radical answer, exploring how science calls on its practitioners to do something not supremely rational but rather apparently irrational: strip away all previous knowledge — such as theological or metaphysical beliefs — in order to channel unprecedented energy into observation and experiment.
Women by Mihail Sebastian            $28
Stefan Valeriu, a young Romanian student, holidays alone in the Alps, where he soon becomes entangled in romantic relationships with three different women who pass through his guesthouse. We follow Stefan after his return to Paris as he reflects on the women in his life, at times playing the lover, and at others observing shrewdly from the periphery. Women's four interlinked stories offer nuanced portraits of romantic relationships in all their complexity, from unrequited love and passionate affairs to tepid marriages of convenience. Mihail Sebastian, often regarded as the greatest Romanian writer of the 20th century, explores longing, otherness, empathy, and regret. Introduction by John Banville. 
"His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation." —Arthur Miller
"I love Sebastian's courage, his lightness, and his wit." —John Banville
Without Ever Reaching the Summit by Paolo Cognetti              $30
Paolo Cognetti marked his 40th birthday with a journey he had always wanted to make: to Dolpo, a remote Himalayan region where Nepal meets Tibet. He took with him two friends, a notebook, mules and guides, and a well-worn copy of The Snow Leopard. Written in 1978, Matthiessen's classic was also turning forty, and Cognetti set out to walk in the footsteps of the great adventurer. Without Ever Reaching the Summit combines travel journal, secular pilgrimage, literary homage and sublime mountain writing. From the author of The Eight Mountains. 

The Alignment Problem: How can machines learn human values? by Sean Christian             $33
Artificial intelligence is rapidly dominating every aspect of our modern lives influencing the news we consume, whether we get a mortgage, and even which friends wish us happy birthday. But as algorithms make ever more decisions on our behalf, how do we ensure they do what we want? And fairly? This conundrum—dubbed 'The Control Problem' by experts - is the subject of this timely and important book. From the AI program which cheats at computer games to the sexist algorithm behind Google Translate, Christian explains how, as AI develops, we rapidly approach a collision between artificial intelligence and ethics. 
Tiger Daughter by Rebecca Lim          $19
Wen Zhou is the daughter and only child of Chinese immigrants whose move to the lucky country has proven to be not so lucky. Wen and her friend, Henry Xiao — whose mum and dad are also struggling immigrants — both dream of escape from their unhappy circumstances, and form a plan to sit an entrance exam to a selective high school far from home. But when tragedy strikes, it will take all of Wen's resilience and resourcefulness to get herself and Henry through the storm that follows.
"This gem of a book is packed with moments of unbearable tension and characters so complex and vivid they will stay with you long after it ends. At once heartbreaking and uplifting, Tiger Daughter is a testament to the strength of women and girls — and a terrific read. I couldn't put it down. Beautiful. Brutal. Brilliant." —Ambelin Kwaymullina
Boy, Everywhere by A.M. Dassu             $22
What turns citizens into refugees and then immigrants? Sami loves his life in Damascus, Syria. He hangs out with his best friend playing video games; he's trying out for the football team; he adores his family and gets annoyed by them in equal measure. But his comfortable life gets sidetracked abruptly after a bombing in a nearby shopping mall. Knowing that the violence will only get worse, Sami's parents decide they must flee their home for the safety of the UK. They start on a journey with more hazards than they could have imagined. 

An Unquiet Heart by Martin Sixsmith        $23
A novel based on the life of the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. Soviet schoolchildren learned his verses by heart. Red Army soldiers carried them going into battle. Yuri Gagarin would took them into space. But Yesenin's obsession with fame was dangerous and destructive, for him, and for those near him.


Our brains aren't intended to remember everything, but how is it that we remember some things in some circumstances and not other things in other circumstances?








VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Our Book of the Week, Bug Week by Airini Beautrais, has just been awarded New Zealand's premiere fiction prize, the Jann Meddlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. On awarding the prize, the judges said, "Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic." We agree!




VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 Find out about the books celebrated in the 2021 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS!

Read the judges' citations below and click through to our website to obtain your copies.


JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

Bug Week, And other stories by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press)
There’s nowhere to hide with a short story. It must say a lot by saying very little. With its spiky confidence and mordant humour, short story collection Bug Week is a knockout from start to finish. Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic. Guest international co-judge Tommy Orange said, “I was consistently surprised by sentences, the beauty and singular language. If the book were a bug it would be a big one, with teeth and venom, with wings and a surprising heart, possibly several, beating on every page with life."



MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press)
Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book is an enthralling performance, from Pati Solomona Tyrell’s striking dried-blood and plaster-masked cover, to the titles, to the spell-binding poems within. The violence of shared and fractured histories surfaces throughout the collection like liquefaction, unsettling, displacing, disrupting. In a year of outstanding poetry publications that respond to Covid, Black Lives Matter, the Christchurch Massacre, and ongoing violence against women, Avia expresses the outrage shared by many, while maintaining faith that love helps the healing process. This is a book bursting with alofa, profound pantoums, profanity and FafSwaggering stances, garrulously funny, bleakly satirical, magnificent.



BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Hiakai: Modern Māori cuisine by Monique Fiso (Godwit, Penguin Random House)
The recipes in Monique Fiso’s first, extraordinary book occupy fewer than half of its pages. The rest is a tour de force of Māori knowledge, written from a Māori perspective. For many of us this will be our introduction to the indigenous cuisine of our own land, and its ingredients, practice, culture, history and knowledge. Fiso’s text is hard-won, inspiring and utterly original in scope; the book is also beautifully designed and photographed. The judges were all drawn to it, coming back to it again and again; finding a careful, kind and generous work which never lectured, but took them on a journey and left them hungry for more.



GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD
The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan (Penguin Random House)
When Ralph Hotere asked his old friend to write his biography, Vincent O’Sullivan hesitated. As a Pākehā, and an outsider to the art world, was he the right person for the job? Hotere saw no problem. This is a sensitive, detailed portrait of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important modern artists, shaped around the four pou of Hotere’s identity: his Māoritanga, faith, whenua, and whānau. O'Sullivan displays masterly skill in the layering of information, observation and anecdote. He gives us a deep understanding of the forces and passions that drove one of New Zealand's greatest artists. The judges commended Vincent O’Sullivan for an extraordinary achievement in biography.



MŪRAU O TE TUHI - MĀORI LANGUAGE AWARD
Mātāmua ko te Kupu! nā Tā Tīmoti Kāretu ( Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, Auckland University Press)        
He kupu Hautoa mō Mātāmua ko te Kupu! Mātāmua ko te kupu! Koinei te kōrero a Tā Tākuta Tīmoti Kāretu, ka mutu, kāore i tua atu i a ia hei whakatauira i tēnei tauākī āna, i ōna hekenga werawera ki te reo i āna kaupapa huhua, mai, mai. Ko tana mahi hoki tērā mō te reo i ngā mahi a Tānerore, e tātai mai ana i roto i tana pukapuka nei, āna kitenga, ōna mōhiotanga, huri noa i tana takahi i roto i tērā ao hei kaihaka, hei kaitito, hei kaiako, hei kaiwhakawā, anō hoki. Tō tātou māri hoki kua kōpakina ōna whakaaro ki āna anō kupu ki te reo, i roto hoki i te wana, me te kupu horipū. / Lyric is paramount! This is the axiom of Tā Tīmoti Kāretu, and there is no other than he who best personifies this statement in all his labours for the Māori language over countless years. His efforts for te reo in traditional Māori performing arts are also recounted in this book, his views and knowledge informed by his journey in that realm as a performer, a composer, a tutor and a judge. We are fortunate that his reflections are encapsulated in his own words in the Māori language with such passion and candour.



MitoQ Best First Book Awards

HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION
Victory Park by Rachel Kerr (Mākaro Press)           
Five debut novels made the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2021 longlist, and the judges were particularly impressed by the big-hearted social realism of Victory Park, which follows the quiet heroics of a widowed solo mother of squeezed means. Sensitively examining the emotional and mental labour of being careful with money and the blind spots people have when they don’t need to worry about it, this quietly powerful novel is about privilege, community, compassion and care.




JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY
I Am a Human Being by Jackson Nieuwland (Compound Press)          
Jackson Nieuwland’s I Am a Human Being asserts a Whitmanesque ecstasy of holistic oneness with the world. The poems’ insistent ‘I am’ refrain merges selfie and panoramic view, close-up and long shot in a whirl of words. Nieuwland’s dramatic monologues assail the reader with absurd, appealing, poignant, and humorous scenarios that are gleefully illogical, grandiose, deflating, and bulging with insight. The writing frequently overspills its lyrical open form and flows into newly imagined dimensions. It’s fun, fast, sometimes fragile, and full-on.



JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Hiakai: Modern Māori cuisine by Monique Fiso (Godwit, Penguin Random House)
Hiakai is an astounding first book. Monique Fiso shares her personal journey as a chef alongside her journey into the knowledge of her tūpuna/ancestors. Hiakai weaves understanding of our unique environment, hunting, foraging, cooking, eating and preserving into an expansive but very accessible offering. Fiso does not shy away from unusual ingredients and this makes it all the more fascinating. The images are beautiful and combined with inspiring text, they ensure this book will be a favourite for many years to come.


E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

Specimen: Personal essays by Madison Hamill (Victoria University Press)
'Think of it this way. You're a horse but you live in the Namib Desert and all your friends are oryx. You think of yourself as a deformed oryx. What else could you be? You live in a habitat that doesn't accommodate horses'. In this compulsively readable first book, Madison Hamill observes her own difference with an outsider’s detached gaze, and the ordinary people around her with tender curiosity. This is a work of a luminous new talent in New Zealand life writing.









VOLUME BooksBook lists

  

 CULTURE SALE. Some excellent books are clamouring for a spot on your shelves, and to make this easier we have reduced the prices on a selection of books on art, literature, architecture, design, cooking, music, photography, and graphic novels. >>Make your selection now (first in, first served—single copies only are available at these prices for most titles). 


VOLUME BooksBook lists

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.








 














 

The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne by Jonathan Stroud    {Reviewed by STELLA}
Wanted for audacious crimes across England: a sassy young woman adept at robbing banks, outwitting the law, dealing with the Faith and keeping the Tainted at arm's length, not to mention the beasts in the Wildness and the other hustlers in the Surviving Towns. This is the wild west of a dystopian and flooded England. London is covered by water — and at the centre of this lagoon are the Free Isles, while the rest of the country has reverted to wildness and walled towns with strict codes of conduct. The unusual and challenging are not wanted: others are cast into slavery and the Council of the Faith is all-powerful in rhetoric and financial dealings. We meet Scarlett McCain just after she has pulled off a bank robbery and is escaping by taking a route through the wild lands. The trick is to get through and out before darkness falls, evading her pursuers who won’t dare follow under the stars. The problem is she is sidetracked by a bus that has crashed into the woods and the sole survivor, a hapless teen boy, Albert Browne. Help the boy (get him back to the road) and still have time to make it through the trees. This plan doesn’t pan out. The boy is even more mysterious than the evasive Scarlett and some things about the crash and where Albert comes from don’t add up, and now they have pursuers on their tail that aren’t so scared of the beasts coming out to hunt. Scarlett now has a seemingly useless companion with her as she travels cross-country, trying to outrun an enemy she doesn’t know. Let's just say there will be gunshots, wounds, jumping off a cliff, and almost drowning in a river. And, most oddly, pursuers in jackets and bowler hats (sinister!) are after Albert. But why? As they travel together, despite Scarlett’s threats to ditch him (trouble follows Albert and maybe Albert makes trouble), a frightening spectre is rising, and a woman who won’t give up on her desire to recapture Albert enters the picture. While Scarlett puzzles Albert’s abilities, strange as they are, and questions her sanity in sticking with him, she’s also drawn to this unusual young man trying to find a place to belong in this strange, and often uninviting, new world. Putting their faith in a grizzled and grumpy old seafarer (travelling the waterways with his mute granddaughter), his ‘trusty’ boat and his knowledge of the rivers and byways they head in search of the Free Isles where Albert hopes to find a new home. It won’t be plain sailing, at all. There are plenty of twists and turns, daring adventuring and an exciting plot to entice you into this new intriguing world and keep you hooked, wanting more. The first in a new series from the author of 'Lockwood & Co.' (and if you haven’t read these you have been missing out), The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne is mesmerisingly good, their world is fascinating, and Stroud doesn’t miss a beat in laying down some great challenges: climate change, species mutation, psychological manipulation, and power struggles as well as more endearing qualities of humanity in bravery, loyalty and friendship — for his characters as well as the reader.
VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella