NEW RELEASES

The Tiny Woman's Coat by Joy Cowley and Giselle Clarkson         $25
The tiny woman makes a coat of leaves with the help of friends in this vibrant, rhyming tale. The trees, geese, porcupine, horse, and plants all share something so the tiny woman can snip, snip, snip and stitch, stitch, stitch a coat to keep herself warm. An instant favourite. 
More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman          $37
On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili, along with the entire community, is celebrating the 90th birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. Onto the scene enters Nina—the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates a crisis in which mother, daughter and grandmother are forced to confront the past head-on. The three women embark on an epic journey to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, that permanently altered the course of their lives.
"This novel is about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. This is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year." —Guardian
The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine             $38
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.
Dulcinea in the Forbidden Forest by Ole Könnecke            $25
Dulcinea has been forbidden since she was small to enter the dangerous magic forest where the witch has her castle. But her father hasn't come home from collecting blueberries for her birthday pancakes. Did the witch cast a spell on him? Dulcinea must brave the dark forest and sneak into the witch's castle to steal the spell book and free him. Her father would hardly have named her after the brave Dulcinea if she couldn't break a witch's spell to celebrate her birthday with him, after all. 
Seahorses Are Sold Out by Constanze Spengler and Katja Gehrmann         $30
Mika's father works from home and he's very busy. He can never find time for the swimming trip he promised. So Dad allows Mika to choose a pet from the store while he finishes the project—something quiet like a mouse. And so begins a wonderfully turbulent story in which Mika brings home one animal after another. The mouse gets lost so they need a dog to find it. The dog is followed by a seal, then a penguin. How many animals can come to stay before Dad notices?
The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa        $20
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookshop he inherited from his beloved grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The cat needs Rintaro’s help to save books that have been imprisoned, destroyed and unloved. Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different labyrinths to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who locks up his books, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publisher who only wants to sell books like disposable products. Then, finally, there is a mission that Rintaro must complete alone...
Life Is Simple: How Occam's razor set science free and unlocked the universe by Johnjoe McFadden           $38
The medieval friar William of Occam first articulated the principle that the best answer to any problem is the simplest. This theory, known as Occam's razor, cut through the thickets of medieval metaphysics to clear a path for modern science. We follow the razor in the hands of the giants of science, from Copernicus, to Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Rubin and Higgs. Its success suggests that we live in the simplest possible habitable universe and supports the revolutionary theory that our cosmos has evolved. 

Marae—TeTatau Pounamu: A journey around New Zealand's meeting houses by Muru Walters, Sam Walters and Robin Walters      $65
A new edition of this superb book. The authors spent three years visiting some of this country's major wharenui as well as many of the more humble ones — houses that serve smaller hapu and iwi. They are intensively photographed, with detailed shots of their carvings, kowhaiwhai panels, tukutuku panels, and events.


Once Upon a Time There Was and Will Be So Much More by Johanna Schaible         $38
Hundreds of millions of years ago, land took shape. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs lived on Earth. Thousands of years ago, people built towering pyramids. Ten years ago, the landscape looked different. A month ago, it was still winter. A minute ago, the light was turned off. Now! Make a wish! What will you be doing in a week? How will you celebrate your birthday next year? What will you discover when you are older? What will hold you in awe forever? An inventively constructed picture book about time. 
In Love With Hell: Drink in the lives and work of eleven writers by William Palmer         $38
Palmer is interested in is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the whole private and social world of the drinker in their work. Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, Flann O'Brien, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Richard Yates, Elizabeth Bishop. 
How We Got Happy by J. Macfarlane and E. Nabbs          $45
The stories of twenty young New Zealanders who have faced depression and learned what helps them to stay well. Full of useful insights.

Emily Noble's Disgrace by May Paulson-Ellis        $38
When trauma cleaner Essie Pound makes a gruesome discovery in the derelict Edinburgh boarding house she is sent to clean, it brings her into contact with a young policewoman, Emily Noble, who has her own reasons to solve the case. As the two women embark on a journey into the heart of a forgotten family, the investigation prompts fragmented memories of their own traumatic histories — something Emily has spent a lifetime attempting to bury, and Essie a lifetime trying to lay bare.
'
Soviet Visuals by Varia Bortsova          $27
Welcome to the USSR. Marvel at the wonders of the space race. Delight in the many fine delicacies of food and drink. Revel in the fine opportunities for work and play. SOVIET VISUALS invites you back in time into the strangely captivating world of the Soviet Union, through a unique collection of photography, architecture, propaganda art, advertising, design, and culture from behind the Iron Curtain. 
VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

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Switch by A.S. King     {Reviewed by STELLA}
Imagine that time stands still — the clocks stop. In A.S.King’s latest young adult’s novel, Switch, that’s precisely what happens on the 23rd June 2020. Truda is sixteen and is navigating the wilds of teenage-hood, high school and family trauma. The students at her school are tasked with finding a solution to the ‘time problem’. While N3WCLOCK is useful at reinventing a time system, it doesn’t offer any reason why. Truda and her friends are the Psych Team believing that the human mind may be able to help with escaping the time/space fold they find themselves in. Here they bat around ideas of emotions and psychological paradigms to search for a solution or at the least an understanding of the time dilemma. Truda has also discovered she is good at something — very good, in fact. Javelin throwing. Is this a result of the rift in time? A phenomenon created by the fold? A talent that may be erased if she is able to restart time? Truda, as our narrator, appears to know more than she is letting on. As a reader, you have a sense that truth sits just below her conscious self, a mystery that she is shielded from, but if she was to turn towards it she would be keenly aware of it. The novel opens with a curious description of boxes. She tells us that she lives in box #7, her brother Richard box #11, box #2 is the living room and other boxes in her house are either sealed off (in reference to her older sister’s room) or unoccupied (her mother has recently walked out) or built around the Switch — which must not be touched. The Switch is encased in a multitude of boxes continuously built by her father, who can’t help but build more and more panelled rooms, making their home into a warren of almost impassable passages. This is A.S.King stretching us to the maximum with a surreal-meets-super-real scenario. On the one hand, you have a strange world stopped in its tracks with participants who may have more control over time than others, while on the other hand the very real and hard realities of dealing with anxiety (teen and adult), resolving family trauma impacted by aberrant behaviour (in this story a sibling is the family member who has wreaked havoc and created a chasm into which the family has fallen), and looking with clarity at one’s own behaviour and trying to make a change for the better. While the subject matter isn’t easy, A.S. King’s quirky approach gives the novel levity where it would otherwise sink into the maudlin and a positive outcome for our protagonist in the strong headwinds of her awareness of her own capabilities and the vulnerabilities of others close to her, is constructive. A.S. King has dedicated Switch to the class of 2020 in light, I imagine, of the isolation and in many cases the anxiety that many have felt — especially in the US where she resides — over the previous year. As always, intriguing, timely and taut writing (the writing in itself is a time/shift/fragmented experience) from this author, winner of the Michael. L. Printz Award in 2020 for her previous YA title, Dig. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Veilchenfeld by Gert Hofmann (translated by Eric Mace-Tessler)    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“One understands only what one expects, says Father.” Through the perspective of a young boy in a small town, Gert Hofmann’s pitch-perfect novel tells of the gradual, sure and awful destruction of a Professor Veilchenfeld, who comes to live in the town after (we deduce) his expulsion from a university position. Hofmann is careful to limit the narrative to what the boy knows, learns and asks, and the answers he gets from his parents — answers progressively unable to encompass or explain the situation. Although the novel does not contain the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Nazi’, but narrates the abuses heaped upon Veilchenfeld directly as the actions of persons upon another person — Hofmann provides no buffer of abstraction or identity to Veilchenfeld’s miserable fate (the abusers, after all, are the ones motivated by identity) — the novel, evidently set in the years preceding World War 2, gives subtle and devastating insight into how an attrition of civility in German society in the 1930s prepared it to both tolerate and perpetrate the Holocaust. The change in society is seen as a loss, a narrowing, a degradation, a stupification; the abusers themselves seem helpless and perplexed even at the height of their abuse. Fascism is the opposite of thought. For others, what cannot be accepted is erased from awareness. “What one does not absolutely have to know, one can also live without knowing,” says Father. What begins as some surreptitious stone-throwing and more general avoidance escalates over the three-year period of the book into community-approved violence and brazen cruelty. As Hofmann shows well, degradation also degrades the degraders, for which the degraders hate their victim still more and therefore subject them to yet greater degradation — thereby degrading themselves still more and hating the victim still more in a cycle that quickly becomes extreme. Veilchenfeld applies to leave Germany but has his passport torn up and his citizenship revoked by an official at the town hall. Ultimately, his abjection cannot be borne; he hides in his apartment, despairs, loses the will to live, awaits his ‘relocation’. Eventually even the narrator’s father, Veilchenfeld’s doctor, sees death as the only solution. For the degraded degraders, though, there is no such simple release from the degradation they have wrought, only further escalation. “Reality is a gruesome rumour,” says Father. Towards the end of the book the townsfolk hold — for the first time ever — a unifying and nationalistic ‘traditional folk festival’, with the children grouped into different cohorts supposedly emblematic of aspects of the town’s heritage (though nobody actually recognises the supposed woodsman’s costume the narrator is issued to wear). This ludicrous festival is an innovation, a lie, emotive quicksand; all Fascism is retrospective folk fantasy, fraudulent nostalgia, a mental weakness, a sentimental longing to return to an imagined but non-existent past. Hofmann was the age of the narrator in the period described and was concerned at the ongoing relevance of what happened then. History is a good teacher, Herr Veilchenfeld says, but, time and again, we are proven to be very poor students. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

Our Book of the Week is Gavin Bishop's distinctively beautiful and informative book Atua: Māori Gods and Heroes. 
Before the beginning there was nothing. No sound, no air, no colour—nothing. TE KORE, NOTHING. No one knows how long this nothing lasted because there was no time. However, in this great nothing there was a sense of waiting. Something was about to happen.
This wonderful large-format book belongs on every child's—and every adult's—bookshelf. From creation to migration, lively illustrations and text tell the unique stories of Aotearoa's gods, demigods and heroes.  
>>Your copy (or one to give away). 
>>Also just released from Gavin Bishop: Koro and Pops.!!
>>Old friends in our home. 
>>Some pages!
>>Meet Gavin Bishop. 
>>The book belongs alongside the wonderful Aotearoa: The New Zealand story and Wildlife of Aotearoa.
VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Children's books

 NEW RELEASES

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney          $33
A hugely successful young novelist is having trouble writing her third book. She meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Can these people find or remember or create what is supposed to be good about being alive in this world? The eagerly awaited third novel from the author of the hugely successful Conversations with Friends and Normal People. 
>>Author of her own discontent. 
No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian commute by Lauren Elkin           $33
Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit in this book written on her cellphone during her daily commute. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.
"Perhaps one of the most interesting voices claiming the streets for women at the moment." — Will Self
"Paris in intense, dramatic closeup — an insider's entrancing view. Lauren Elkin turns her phone outwards, like a camera to see with, she writes about the outside world while inside a glass container (the bus), she maps the inner world of self and indeed of the bus onto the outer world she is travelling through. She allows herself to catch moments most writers would think don't belong in a text. The book's form perfectly embodies its content. It is disarmingly modest and that is part of its charm. She is thinking about self / community. Re-making it." — Michèle Roberts
An Island by Karen Jennings          $36
Samuel has lived alone for a long time; one morning he finds the sea has brought someone to offer companionship and to threaten his solitude... A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history. In this new man's presence he begins to consider, as he did in his youth, what is meant by land and to whom it should belong.
"An Island concerns itself with lives lived on the margins, through the story of a man who has exiled himself from the known world only to find himself called to the service of others, themselves exiled from the world by cruelty and circumstance. It is on these grounds that this writer deftly constructs a moving, transfixing novel of loss, political upheaval, history, identity, all rendered in majestic and extraordinary prose." —judges' citation on long-listing for the Booker Prize
Bill Hammond: Across the Evening Sky             $70
A beautifully presented book of this outstanding artist. Includes an interview between the Bill Hammond and fellow artist Tony de Lautour; Texts by Rachael King, Nic Low, Paul Scofield, Ariana Tikao and Peter Vangioni: Images and details of some of Hammond’s finest paintings; Responses to Hammond’s practice by other artists, including Fiona Pardington, Marlon Williams and Shane Cotton. 
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen               $33
1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch. Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Drawing on actual historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear. It is a tale for our time. 
>>Rivka Galchen's unsettling powers. 
>>The heart of a prickle bush. 
>>History feels modern. 
After the Sun by Jonas Eika (translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg)        $36
Under Cancun's hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists' desires, seeing deep into the world's underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine. After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalised world that's both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika's fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical, he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.
"Eika's prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it's practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read." —Claire-Louise Bennett 
"Political fictions aren't supposed to be this personal. Satires aren't supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn't supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn't supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don't expect it to, and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature." —Marlon James
"Striking literary craftsmanship in an experimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time-scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole." —Annie Proulx
>>'Alvin'.
Hellzapoppin'! The art of Flying Nun edited by Peter Vangioni            $39
Does this look like your record collection? Published to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Flying Nun Records in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Hellzapoppin’! brings together original artwork and design, film, record covers, posters and photography from the label’s early years. From rare collectible records and vintage posters to original artworks and paste-up designs, this book explores the art and artists behind some of New Zealand’s favourite bands. Essays from Peter Vangioni, Kath Webster, Russell Brown and Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd will be interspersed with brief interview-style contributions from some of the people responsible for creating the art of the label. Heavily illustrated with original artwork for the records and posters, photography from the archives, and rarely seen vinyl releases and posters.
>>'Ambivalence'.
&c, &c, &c.
Night As It Falls by Jakuta Alikavazovic          $33
Paul, a student who works as a night guard in a hotel to make ends meet, falls under the spell of Amelia, the young woman who rents room 313. Everything about her is a mystery: where she goes, what she does - and where she comes from. Paul and Amelia enter into a love affair, but it is an ill-fated dance informed by sex, power and class struggles. One day Amelia suddenly disappears. Unknown to Paul, she has traveled to Sarajevo in search of her mother and to attempt to uncover the links that connect her personal history to the civil war that created ruptures that still affect Europe today.
>>Read an extract. 
Post Growth: Life after Capitalism by Tim Jackson         $36
The relentless pursuit of more has delivered climate catastrophe, social inequality and financial instability — and left us ill-prepared for life in a global pandemic. Tim Jackson's passionate and provocative book dares us to imagine a world beyond Capitalism — a place where relationship and meaning take precedence over profits and power.
"Empowering and elegiac." —Yanis Varoufakis
Broken Greek: A story of chip shops and pop songs by Pete Paphides         $28
When Pete's parents moved from Cyprus to Birmingham in the 1960s in the hope of a better life, they had no money and only a little bit of English. They opened a fish-and-chip shop in Acocks Green. The Great Western Fish Bar is where Pete learned about coin-operated machines, male banter and Britishness. Shy and introverted, Pete stopped speaking from age 4 to 7, and found refuge instead in the bittersweet embrace of pop songs, thanks to Top of the Pops and Dial-A-Disc. From Brotherhood of Man to UB40, from ABBA to The Police, music provided the safety net he needed to protect him from the tensions of his home life. It also helped him navigate his way around the challenges surrounding school, friendships and phobias.
Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened. We have now arrived at a remarkable moment—prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention.
The Sky by Hélène Druvert                         $45
This gorgeous, large-format book is filled with astounding laser cutouts that take readers away through the clouds, through the atmosphere and to the planets, the stars and beyond. On the way they'll learn about birds, insects and pollination, witness a tornado and an eclipse, and see all kinds of flying machines. 
>>Other books by Druvert.

Learning to Love Blue by Saradha Koirala              $25
The sequel to the excellent YA novel Lonesome When You Go.  With Vox Pop and high school behind her, 18-year-old Paige arrives in Melbourne with her suitcase and bass guitar; a copy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles and Joni Mitchell's Blue - a gift from her estranged mother that she's still learning to love. Following in the footsteps of her musical heroes, all of whom left home to make it in 1960s New York, Paige knows Melbourne's the new rock and roll capital of the world: if she can't make it here, she can't make it anywhere. Besides, her high school crush Spike lives here... Paige has always had music, but realises she still has a lot to learn about relationships: how to be vulnerable and how to be blue.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead          $35
From the author of The Underground Railroad, Harlem Shuffle’s story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. 

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin           $33
Meet Gilda. She cannot stop thinking about death. Desperate for relief from her anxious mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local church and finds herself abruptly hired to replace the deceased receptionist Grace. It's not the most obvious job - she's queer and an atheist for starters - and so in between trying to learn mass, hiding her new maybe-girlfriend and conducting an amateur investigation into Grace's death, Gilda must avoid revealing the truth of her mortifying existence.
"So fundamentally kind that you can feel the warmth coming off each page." —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan


The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin            $40
Perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture.
China in One Village by Liang Hong           $37
After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province. What she found was an extended family torn apart by the seismic changes in Chinese society, and a village hollowed-out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang's by turns moving and shocking account became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. Across China, many saw in Liang's remarkable and vivid interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own families, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed observer, one family, and one village.
When You Were Small by Sarah O'Leary and Julie Morstad               $19
For all children there is a whole early period of their life that they cannot remember and, for all they know, it could have been the most magical time of their life. Was it like this? Completely delightful. 







VOLUME BooksNew releases



BOOKS @ VOLUME #246 (10.9.21)

Read our newsletter and find out about literary news, what we've been reading, and what you'll be reading next. 




VOLUME BooksNewsletter

 


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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

 


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The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
A slice from the rump of a pig, he thought, raw and pink and veined with fat or crisped like a piece of dirty cardboard, is there a patron saint for a pig in this condition, he wondered, some other Francis, all animals are meat, some antisaint worthy of the name, his name, some name, insistent on the name and possessed of the rare ability to display both sides of his face when viewed from any angle, we’re little more than meat, he thought, meat animated by who knows what, some electricity wanting nothing more than to expend itself, arking between terminals, blurring instants, do and be done, the pain of the building charge, insufferability, release, vacuity, the whole works, no respite, images decaying on the retina, imitations but imitations failed to such an extent that they resemble originality, a resemblance only, each staled from inception, rancid cigarette breath overlaid with peppermint or mince, rot, some carcass that no amount of blows can animate, the painting “pretending it confronted death when all it did was illustrate again and again a lazy fear of it,” as Porter puts in this little book The Death of Francis Bacon, Porter nonetheless obsessed, splicing himself into the mind of the painter as he lies on his death-bed in Spain, hospitalised, wheezing, morphined, memories rising, incohering, there is no doubt some degree of biographical knowledge on display but there is no need to recognise this, it is not conveyed and who cares in any case, he thought, the degree of Porter’s invention is of no importance, these words the words of the writer ventirloquising who, Bacon, himself, the paintings, ventriloquising the moment of painting, if that can be termed ventriloquising, not “an attempt to get art history out of the way and let the paintings speak,” as Porter claims, or not in the sense that the paintings would or could or should speak to us and tell us anything other than the painting experienced from the point of view of the paint, not then representational but visceral, physical, coloured matter, paint has no interest in the image, such must be negotiated between the other parties, and there are many who would force meaning on the paint beyond the meaning it enjoys just by being spread when wet on canvas, or on whatever, “it’s an attempt to get at the sense of what is looming up behind the person being hurt,” Porter writes, “it’s an attempt to hold catastrophe still so you can get a proper sniff at it,” though I would say, he thought, it’s an attempt to decatastrophise through overemphasis, to forget through iteration, though it is unclear, he thought, whether these attempts are Bacon’s, Porter’s, the viewer’s, the reader’s, or whose, no matter, what if words came out where ordinarily you would expect paint, or vice versa, is this the nub of Porter’s project, he wondered, to reach into his subject and squeeze out words, not as he spoke but as he painted, “the mouth is the habit the eye has to teach,” writes Porter, words worked wet, out on the page, “it is exhausting to behold such huge quantities of paint being wasted,” writes Porter, perhaps as himself, but no such truck with his words, there on the page, each reading revealing a little less and what was there after all in the first place to reveal, this life, a little more than nothing but not much more. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

ECCENTRIC ORBITS POETRY COMPETITION. Our challenge was to 'translate' the poem an alien would write to send home to convey their experience of Earth, and we received a large number of excellent and thoughtful submissions from both established and aspiring poets of all ages from all over the motu — many thanks to you all! The winner was Elizabeth M. Williams for a formally inventive and original entry that was at once scientifically rigorous, philosophically speculative — and deeply poignant. >>Read Elizabeth's winning entry. 
VOLUME Books

 

Book of the Week. One of the great novels of isolation, Susanna Clarke's haunting and unusual novel PIRANESI has just been awarded the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. Piranesi is the sole living human inhabitant of a house of infinite dimensions: a labyrinth of rooms filled with statues, oceans, storms, jetsam, and birds. How does he make sense of his world, and why must he report his 'findings' twice a week to The Other—the only person he has ever seen? What happens when Piranesi's known world is shaken by an intrusion from beyond its lonely, austere beauty? 
>>Winning the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. 
>>A triumphantly unusual winner. 
>>"Women have such marvellous, varied stories."
>>Bound in one place by illness. 
>>The beauty of The House. 
>>Book trailer. 
>>"Write the way you can."
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

NEW RELEASES

Koro by Gavin Bishop              $18
The child and their koro explore the day – they go for a walk, collect food from the garden, eat, tell stories, and snuggle up for a rest to finish. A beautiful, simple board book in te reo Māori.
>>Also available in English as Pops. 
Things I Learned at Art School by Megan Dunn               $35
A hilarious and personal collection of essays from a distinctive and resonant voice. Things I Learned at Art School tells the story of Dunn's early life and coming-of-age in New Zealand in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. From her parents’ split-up to her Smurf collection, from the mean girls at school to the mermaid movie Splash!, from her work in strip clubs and massage parlours (and one steak restaurant) to the art school of the title, this book has been eagerly anticipated—and very much worth waiting for. Chapters include: The Ballad of Western Barbie; A Comprehensive List of All the Girls Who Teased Me at Western Heights High School, What They Looked Like and Why They Did It; On Being a Redhead; Life Begins at Forty: That Time My Uncle Killed Himself; Good Girls Write Memoirs, Bad Girls Don’t Have Time; Videos I Watched with My Father; Things I Learned at Art School; CV of a Fat Waitress; Nine Months in a Massage Parlour Called Belle de Jour; Various Uses for a Low Self-esteem; Art in the Waiting Room; and Submerging Artist. We sold out our first shipment in two days—secure your copy from the next shipment now.
Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy              $32
Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth's odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues—with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated snails)—delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.
Atua: Māori gods and heroes by Gavin Bishop          $40
Beautifully presented and endlessly fascinating, Bishop's new book belongs on every child's and every adult's bookshelf. Lively illustrations and text tell the unique stories of Aotearoa's gods, demigods and heroes.  
>>Other books by Gavin Bishop. 

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker          $37
Troy has fallen and the Greek victors are primed to return home, loaded with spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. The gods are offended — the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied — and so the victors remain in uneasy limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed. The coalition that held them together begins to fray, as old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester. Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, erstwhile queen Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can — with young, rebellious Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest — and she begins to see the path to revenge. The sequel to the acclaimed The Silence of the Girls. 

Stranger to the Moon by Evilio Rosero          $32
Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside history and geography, but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of Colombia's harrowing inequality and violence. A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house to serve the needs of 'the vicious clothed-ones', the novel describes what ensues when a single 'naked-one' privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order that its characters inhabit. Trained insects and reptiles spy on all the naked-ones, and only the most fortunate reach old age (often by taking up strategic spots near the kitchen and grabbing for the fiercely contested food).
The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani          $33
Alsace, 1944. Mathilde finds herself falling deeply in love with Amine Belhaj, a Moroccan soldier, billeted in her town, fighting for the French. After the Liberation, Mathilde leaves France, following Amine to Morocco. But life here is unrecognizable to this brave and passionate young woman. Where she she once danced, bickered with her sister, her life is now that of a farmer's wife - with all the sacrifices and vexations that brings. Suffocated by the heat, by her loneliness on the farm, by the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner and by the lack of money Mathilde grows restless. As Morocco's own struggle for independence grows daily, Mathilde and Amine find themselves caught in the crossfire.
"Compelling." —Guardian
The Pink Jumpsuit: Short fictions, tall truths by Emma Neale          $35
A woman meets up with an ex-lover after twenty years, to be told an outrageous secret; a mother takes her ailing son to a doctor for an undocumented condition; a bride is left at the altar; a brother and sister reel from a family tragedy decades after the event; a children’s birthday party turns all Queen of the Flies; a hidden family legacy appears in a grand-daughter’s strange affliction. From everyday realism to the speculative and imaginary, recurring motifs in these stories (the scientist father; the mystery of identity even within families; what we can’t know about even those closest to us) toy with the boundaries between memory and the unknown: the blending of the real and the invented.
The Verso Book of Feminism: Revolutionary words from four millennia of rebellion edited by Jessie Kindig          $25
Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People-of any and no gender-have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an 'I' and loudly proclaimed that there is a 'we'. The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force.   Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China's Tang Dynasty and accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus's expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote and the revolutionary petroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the 6th century and the 19th century to radical queer politics in the 20th and 21st.  
The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the tart, tender, and unruly by Kate Lebo                $40
Inspired by twenty-six fruits, essayist, poet and 'pie lady' Kate Lebo expertly blends the culinary, medical and personal. A is for Aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, superfruit with reputed healing power. D is for Durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifty odour – peaches, old garlic. M is for Medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. Q is for Quince, which, fresh, gives off the scent of ‘roses and citrus and rich women’s perfume’ but if eaten raw is so astringent it wicks the juice from one’s mouth. In this work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of twenty-six lyrical essays (and recipes!) that range from deeply personal to botanical, from culinary to medical, from humorous to philosophical. Delightful. 
"A beautiful, fascinating read full of surprises – a real pleasure." —Claudia Roden
Japanese Creativity: Contemplations on Japanese architecture by Yuichiro Edagawa                  $75
Edagawa sets out to try to determine the roots of a particularly Japanese architectural style by analyzing a wide variety of exemplary buildings from the sixth century to the present. Developing his theory out of close observation and practical knowledge and constantly shifting between historical and more recent examples, Edagawa isolates what he considers to be the distinctive characteristics of Japanese architectural creativity and composition: intimacy with nature, importance of materials, bipolarity and diversity, asymmetry, devotion to small space and an appreciation for organic form. He finds these qualities across Japanese design, and from these extrapolates a theory of Japanese architectural creation. 
The Hero's Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna by Tim Parks         $40
In 1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi fled Rome in the face of defeat by the French army, and struggled to Ravenna with a dwindling number of troops, hoping to reach Venice, which was still resisting the Austrian forces. Losing not only all his troops but his pregnant wife as well, Garibaldi escaped overseas to prepare himself for his successful campaign a decade later. Parks follows Garibaldi's footsteps across the Apennines and blends past and present in this well-written account. 
Ill Feelings: Stories of unexplained illness by Alice Hattrick            $35
In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary non-fiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness.
"Ill Feelings is a deeply personal and deeply political reckoning with the nature of illness, inheritance, time, silence, bodies and invisibility. Alice Hattrick offers both a radical redefinition of the dominant narratives surrounding health and pain, and the knowledge we need in order to name, understand and resist them. Hattrick has found a voice and form which open up new and exciting possibilities for writing the self and making sense of the collective past: I read this remarkable book with outrage, fascination and immense admiration." — Francesca Wade
>>Collecting / recollecting. 
Handmade: A scientist's search for meaning through making by Anna Ploszajski          $38
From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work. With knowledge accumulated over generations through hands-on trial and error, these experts understand the materiality of objects differently from a scientist. 
Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks          $37
1914;: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself fortunate—until his country declares war on hers. 1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick. 1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.
The Boy Who Tried to Shrink His Name by Sandhya Parappukkaran      $28
When Zimdalamashkermishkada starts a new school, he is sure he has to do something about his long name. ​ When no amount of shrinking, folding or crumpling works, he simply settles for Zim – but deep down, it doesn’t feel right. It’s not until a new friend sees him for who he truly is that Zimdalamashkermishkada finds the confidence to step boldly into his long name.






VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

“There was once a dad who had a little boy. It was a bit of a waste for this dad to have a boy, because he was much too interested in work.” Luckily for the boy—and luckily for the dad—the boy knew how to make things up, and tell some very good stories. Our Book of the Week this week is The Boy Who Made Things Up by Margaret Mahy, beautifully illustrated by Nelson illustrator Lily Emo. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Lily won the 2020 Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize. 
>>How does Lily make her illustrations? 
>>People doing their best in a crisis. 
>>Visit Lily's website. 
>>Margaret Mahy was one of New Zealand's most significant and deeply loved writers. 
>>The real Margaret Mahy. 
>>How did Mahy write her stories? 
>>Virtual play in the Margaret Mahy Playground. 
>>The event due to be held on 4 September at the Nelson Public Library has been postponed. 
>>We have a few signed copies left!

[Photograph by Martin Emo]

VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Children's books

 


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The Boy Who Made Things Up by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Lily Emo    {Reviewed by STELLA}
Margaret Mahy’s The Boy Who Made Things Up has just been republished by Hachette NZ with gorgeous new illustrations from local artist Lily Emo. Lily was awarded the 2020 Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize, an annual prize for an unpublished illustrator, launched by Hachette NZ and The Mahy Estate in 2019. Not only does it give an illustrator a wonderful opportunity, but we also get to have more of Mahy’s fantastic picture books in print. Mahy’s books, from her well-known picture books (A Lion in the Meadow, Bubble Trouble) to her magical and sometimes edgy books for older readers (Kaitangata Twitch, The Tricksters), are all excellent. Her storytelling, sometimes zany, sometimes unsettling, often charming and filled with humour, also explores our relationships with each other and our place in the world. The Boy Who Made Things Up is a delightful dive into the magic of storytelling and how the world can be imagined anew. From the first lines, you will be hooked. “There was once a dad who had a little boy. It was a bit of a waste for this dad to have a boy, because he was much too interested in work.” The boy, Michael, finds his own way to enjoy himself — he makes things up. When the car breaks, a walk home is a wondrous adventure. Michael knows how to tell a story, and Dad is initially perplexed by utilising his imagination, but he gets the hang of it. Lily Emo’s illustrations capture the wonder and joy in storytelling, and she adds another layer to this tale with her delightful imagery. On every page there is more to discover as creatures are drawn right into the boy's and Dad’s walk home, as the neighbourhood becomes vibrant and full of animals — and even a beach. Dad can’t quite believe that the brightly coloured path leads to the sea until Michael reminds him about making it up. As they venture onto the path, look around and see a girl and a bear having a party, a boy reading, a cat painting, kites flying and balloons floating up in a very Mahy style (the bunch of the balloons reminds me of her multi-coloured story-telling wigs), golden rabbits running free, a hot air balloon, a ballerina, a juggler, and a wizard. And that’s just one page! At the sea, you can spy a ghost ship, a mountain woman, a mermaid, buried treasure, a sea serpent, and wondrously coloured fish, as well as watching out for what the crabs are up to. And what did Dad finally make of all this making things up? Well, he can’t understand why there’s sand in his shoes and that he’s a little sunburnt, but he can understand that working less and making up stories might be just about the best thing one could do. 
VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella

 

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These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Minna Proctor)     {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The desire to understand must not be confused with the desire to know, especially in biography. Too often and too soon an accretion of facts obscures a subject, plastering detail over detail, obscuring the essential lineaments in the mistaken notion that we are approaching a definitive life. Such a life could not be understood. Instead a whittling is required, a paring from the mass of fact all but those details that cannot be separated from the subject, the details that make the subject that subject and not another, the details therefore that are the key to the inner life of the subject and the cause of all the extraneous details of which we are relieved the necessity of acquiring (unless we find we enjoy this as sport). Jaeggy, whose fictions remain as burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were all intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. How memorably Jaeggy gives us sweet De Quincey’s bifurcation, by a mixture of inclination, reading and opium, from the world inhabited by others, his house a place of “paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust”, and poor Keats, whose “moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes,” and Schwob, with his appetite for grief tracing and retracing the arcs of his friends’ deaths towards his own. These essays are so clean and sharp that light will refract within them long after you have ceased to read, drawing you back to read them again. Is the understanding you have gained of these writers something that belongs to them? Too bad, you will henceforth be unable to shake the belief that you have gained some access to their inner lives that has been otherwise denied.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

The Magician by Colm Tóibín            $38
Tóibín brings his immense sympathies and verbal prowess to bear upon the life of Thomas Mann, a writer forced to cope with the turmoil of both public and private life because of war, exile and suicide. Mann's re-evaluation of his relationship to his homeland and his family underlies his novels, and Tóibín reveals the many layers and contradictions of a complex genius. 
"This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world." —Katharina Volckmer
"The Magician is a remarkable achievement. Mann himself, one feels certain, would approve." —John Banville
Clairvoyant of the Small: The life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky          $60
"Susan Bernofsky's deep and decades-long involvement with Robert Walser's work has resulted in a meticulously researched, lively narrative and astute critical study of this complex and appealing writer. Clairvoyant of the Small is one of the best biographies I've read in a long time." —Lydia Davis
>>Some books by or about Walser (mostly translated by Bernofsky). 
How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy            $50
"I was tired of speed. I wanted to live tree time." Drawn to trees' wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees—from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves.
København: Urban architecture and public spaces by Eva Herrmann, Sandra Hofmeister, and Jakob Schoof            $130
This book reveals Copenhagen's enviable quality of life to be inseparable from the quality if its built spaces. It leads its readers on a tour of exploration, visiting architecture projects and surprising districts between Ørestad and Nordhavn. A total of over 25 exceptional buildings, urban squares and public spaces created in the past 10 years are presented. Documented with photographs, general plans and texts, these projects paint an image of a generation of architects and planners who are not afraid to employ novel solutions.
The Eloquence of the Sardine: The secret lives of fish and other underwater mysteries by Bill François        $38
Humans have identified just a fraction of the 2.2 million species living in the sea. Roughly 91% of all marine species remain unknown: myths still to be written, discoveries still to be made, blank pages with room to dream. François invites us on a whistle-stop global tour to reveal the mysteries of the sea, beginning with the simple eloquence of the sardine. He unpicks the sound of the sea - an underwater symphony orchestra voiced by a choir of fish - and deciphers the latest scientific discoveries on the immunity of coral and the changing gender of wrasses. We visit the depths of underwater Paris as François delves into the mysterious world of the eel and explore an extraordinary three-generational friendship between humans and killer whales, and the role a shoal of herrings played in Cold War tensions. Throughout, François brings the inner workings of fish to life - their language, their emotions, their societal rituals. He also makes a case for why we should look to the sea for inspiration for improving society and investigates the shocking journey from sea to plate.
The Red Deal: Indigenous action to save our Earth by The Red Nation           $35
An interesting and informative look at efforts towards decolonisation in North America, with parallels to those in contemporary Aotearoa. The Red Deal is a political program for the liberation that emerges from the oldest class struggle in the Americas—the fight by Native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. As the Red Nation proclaims, it is time to reclaim the life and future that has been stolen, come together to confront climate disaster, and build a world where all life can thrive. One-part visionary platform, one-part practical toolkit, The Red Deal is a call to action for everyone, including non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live on Indigenous land. Offering a vision for a decolonised society, The Red Deal is an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives; and a pact with movements for liberation, life, and land for a new world of peace and justice that must come from below and to the left. The Red Nation is dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism and centers Native political agendas and struggles through direct action, advocacy, and education.
Te Kuia me te Pūngāwerewere / The Kuia and the Spider by Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa (translated by Hirini Melbourne)                $20
Who's the best at weaving, the kuia or the spider? They decide to ask their grandchildren... The beloved 1981 story is now available in a dual reo Maori and English text. 
Te Tuna Wātakirihi me ngā Tamariki o Te Tiriti o Toa / Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street by Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa (translated by Hirini Melbourne)            $20
What special gifts does the magical Tuna bring the children of Cannon's Creek? Since its publication in 1984, this wonderful, joyous story about a magical eel that presents cultural treasures to a group of Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha children, who then use their gifts to enrich their neighbourhood, has been essential to any child's library.
Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism by Amelia Horgan             $38
 For young people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from equating to riches and fulfillment, 'work' increasingly means precarity, anxiety and alienation. Amelia Horgan poses three big questions: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it? Along the way, she explores the many facets of work under Capitalism: its encroachment on our personal lives; the proliferation of temporary and zero-hours contracts; burnout; and how different jobs are gendered or racialised. While abolishing work altogether is not the answer, Lost in Work shows that when workers are able to take control of their workplaces, they become less miserable, and become empowered to make change throughout society. 
Take Me With You When You Go by David Levithan and Jennifer Niven         $21
Ezra Ahern wakes up one day to find his older sister, Bea, gone. No note, no sign, nothing but an email address hidden somewhere only he would find it. Ezra never expected to be left behind with their abusive stepfather and their neglectful mother—how is he supposed to navigate life without Bea? Bea Ahern already knew she needed to get as far away from home as possible But a message in her inbox changes everything, and she finds herself alone in a new city—without Ez, without a real plan—chasing someone who might not even want to be found.   As things unravel at home for Ezra, Bea will confront secrets about their past that will forever change the way they think about their family. Together and apart, broken by abuse but connected by love, this brother and sister must learn to trust themselves before they can find a way back to each other.
The Dawn of Language: How We Came to Talk by Sverker Johansson           $38
Drawing on evidence from many fields, including archaeology, anthropology, neurology and linguistics, Sverker Johansson weaves these disparate threads together to show how our human ancestors evolved into language users. The Dawn of Language provides a fascinating survey of how grammar came into being and the differences or similarities between languages spoken around the world, before exploring how language eventually emerged in the very remote human past. Our intellectual and physiological changes through the process of evolution both have a bearing on our ability to acquire language. But to what extent is the evolution of language dependent on genes, or on environment? How has language evolved further, and how is it changing now, in the process of globalisation? And which aspects of language ensure that robots are not yet intelligent enough to reconstruct how language has evolved?
The Tiny Explorers by Kat Macleod            $30
If you were very very small, the back garden would be full of wonderful discoveries. In this beautifully illustrated book, some tiny children explore and find them. 
Flower: Exploring the world in bloom by Anna Pavord and Shane Connolly            $90
A journey across continents and cultures to discover the endless ways artists and image-makers have employed floral motifs throughout history. Showcasing the diversity of blooms from all over the world, Flower spans a wide range of styles and media — from art, botanical illustrations, and sculptures to floral arrangements, film stills, and textiles — and follows a visually stunning sequence with works, regardless of period, thoughtfully paired to allow interesting and revealing juxtapositions between them.



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A Year of Simple Family Food by Julia Busuttil Nishimura     {Reviewed by STELLA}
Lockdown sees you reaching for the tried and true recipes — the Edmonds Cookbook is the go-to for biscuits, and your favourite chefs are on call for inspiration as you look to see what you have left in the fridge and what clever recipes will require the least ingredients. And being in the winter season for vegetables, it’s always interesting to see which of your cookbooks is best at creating dishes from these sometimes seemingly uninspiring staples. Like last year, when Ostro became a favourite inspiration for home cooking, Jula Busuttil Nishimura's recipes are being made and consumed in our household, and her second collection, A Year of Simple Family Food, is making it onto the kitchen table on a regular basis. Firm favourites are anything pie! I never imagined that I would be a great fan of pies, but her pastries are perfect every time (ditto her focaccia bread recipes) — just the right proportions and clear instructions for getting the right texture for your dough. In Ostro, the Leek and Potato Pie is now a regular dish (and it doesn’t matter what cheese you have — I have used cheddar, feta, a combo of parmesan and other, and it’s always been delicious). In A Year of Simple Family Food, the pumpkin pie  (there is plenty of pumpkin right now!) was surprisingly light — that great pastry again —  and tasty (herbs and spices, as well as filling). And it looked excellent — that wonderful orange glow. Arranged around the seasons, the cookbook is easy to navigate, allowing us to match recipes to ingredient availability across savoury to sweet. While rhubarb was missing from our stash, that didn’t hold us back from consuming the Spiced Rhubarb Crumble Cake. Substituting frozen berries (thank you freezer!) for the rhubarb worked a treat, and the orange zest in the cake base lifted this out of ordinary crumble shortcake style territory. With recipes from her Maltese heritage making an appearance and the influence of her Japanese partner coming through, there is a wonderful variety, from pies, crumbles, and pasta (both lighter spaghetti-and-sauce style and hearty baked dishes) to noodles and Japanese breakfast. There are also hearty meat dishes with Mediterranean, as well as Asian influences. And a good smattering of fish and seafood. What stands out about her cookbooks is the sheer pleasure Busuttil Nishimura has for food, both its preparation and its eating. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella