NEW RELEASES

Mary's Boy, Jean-Jacques; And other stories by Vincent O'Sullivan          $35

In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, we last see Dr Frankenstein’s Creature shunned by human society and crossing the Arctic wasteland. What if he were rescued by an eccentric English expedition intent on sailing from pole to pole and back – only to be cast away again in a remote fiord in Aotearoa’s deep south? This intriguing speculation ignites the novella that lies at the heart of Vincent O’Sullivan’s electrifying new story collection. Elsewhere, O’Sullivan takes us deep into other times and minds. Two siblings relive a sinister memory of their childhood, an isolated young man learns to walk around the city alone, a Victorian adventurer purchases a human head, and always there is memory, like ‘Stonehenge from a choice of angles’.

"A bold and unnerving book full of mischief and wonder. O’Sullivan’s eye for why people want the wrong things is wincingly good. And always there’s the striking move from the senses and the physical world to a kind of philosophical tussle. You finish an O’Sullivan story feeling implicated and enlivened." —Damien Wilkins

>>A man of letters. 
>>A few other books. 

The Fish by Lloyd Jones             $36

In this fable-like novel from the author of (most famously) Mister Pip and (most recently) The Cage, the narrator's sister gives birth to a very different sort of child, who reveals the family's capacities for both love and shame, and attracts the opprobrium of small-town small-minded New Zealand in the 1960s. Just what is Fish's relationship with the sea beside which he was born, and what bearing might this have on the Wahine disaster? And what is the relationship between the narrator writing this account and the events that are contained within it? 

House & Contents by Gregory O'Brien           $30

Our mother's clouds and insects fly to embrace your clouds and insects. Her architecture, roads, bridges and infrastructure rush to greet yours. Her molecules on their upward trajectory entwine with yours, the colour of her eyes, hair and skin. Her language, with its past participles, figures of speech, the sounds and tremors which are its flesh and bones these words go out to greet your words and to greet you - these words which will never leave her.

House & Contents is a meditation on earthquakes and uncertainties, parents and hats, through Gregory O'Brien's remarkable poetry and paintings.

Island Zombie: Iceland writings by Roni Horn              $75

Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a beautifully written meditation on being present. It conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena—the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety—we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. A remarkable book.

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf et al               $40

 In her essay 'On Being Ill', Virginia Woolf asks whether illness should not receive more literary attention, taking its place alongside the recurring themes of "love, battle and jealousy". In this collaborative volume, authors, translators and illustrators have come together to represent past, present and future thinking about illness. Includes work by Audre Lorde and Sinead Gleeson. 

>>Interpreter of maladies. 

Actions & Travels: How poetry works by Anna Jackson             $35

Through readings of one hundred poems — from Catullus to Alice Oswald, Shakespeare to Hera Lindsay Bird — this is an engaging introduction to how poetry works. Ten chapters look at simplicity and resonance, imagery and form, letters and odes, and much more. In Actions & Travels Anna Jackson explains how we can all read (and even write) poetry.

>>Language is complicated!

Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima (translated by Gerladine Harcourt)              $38

Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to accommodate him. At first Takiko seeks refuge in the company of other women, in the maternity hospital, in her son's nursery, but as he grows, her life becomes less circumscribed, expanding outward into previously unknown neighborhoods in her city and then beyond, into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and feeling for a wilder freedom. First published in Japan in 1980, Woman Running in the Mountains is as urgent and necessary an account today of the experience of the female body and of a woman's right to self-determination.

"Woman Running in the Mountains captures the private intensity of early motherhood like none other. Everyone should read Tsushima, a fierce marvel of a writer, who seems to write to us at once from the past and the future." —Rivka Galchen

>>Quietly defiant sensualities. 

Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni             $30

This book bridges two anniversaries. Ulysses by James Joyce was published in 1922. Venice was founded in 421. The title Breach of All Size is Joyce’s pun on Venice landmark Bridge of Sighs but could as easily describe his sprawling modernist classic, which clocks in at 265,222 words. To celebrate both anniversaries, 36 Aotearoa writers were asked to write love stories set in Venice and inspired by words from Ulysses, but to steer the opposite course and keep them short. How short? 421 words, of course.

Featuring stories by: Anita Arlov • Ben Brown • Diane Brown • Gina Cole • Rijula Das • Lynley Edmeades • Alison Glenny • Trish Gribben • Jordan Hamel • Jenna Heller • Lloyd Jones • Anne Kennedy • Erik Kennedy • Fiona Kidman • Kerry Lane • Wes Lee • Renee Liang • Emer Lyons • Becky Manawatu • S J Mannion • Selina Tusitala Marsh • Paula Morris • Emma Neale • James Norcliffe • Karen Phillips • Patrick Pink • Sudha Rao • Renée • Harry Ricketts • Jack Ross • Tracey Slaughter • Apirana Taylor • Catherine Trundle • Hester Ullyart • Ian Wedde • Sophia Wilson

Let's Have a Talk: Conversations with women on arts and culture by Lauren O'Neill-Butler             $55

An amazing resource: 80 interviews published mostly in Artforum across a 13-year span. Interviewees include Judy Chicago, Shannon Ebner, Carolee Schneemann, Lucy R. Lippard, Joan Semmel, Liz Deschenes, Eleanor Antin, Andrea Fraser, Anohni, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, Adrian Piper, fierce pussy, Nan Goldin, Nell Painter, Frances Stark, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex Bag, Agn s Varda, Lisi Raskin, Mary Mattingly, Carol Bove, Jennifer West, Aki Sasamoto, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rebecca Solnit, Rita McBride and Kim Schoenstadt, Karla Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Sturtevant, Rachel Foullon, Ellie Ga, Lisa Tan, Mira Schor, Jo Baer, Ruby Sky Stiler, Suzanne Lacy, Rebecca Warren, Katy Siegel, Marlene McCarty, Rachel Mason, Mary Kelly, Dianna Molzan, Lynne Tillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Jesse Jones, Dorothea Rockburne, Sarah Crowner, Lucy Skaer, Sophie Calle, Mary Beth Edelson, W.A.G.E., Mary Heilmann, Pauline Oliveros, Kathryn Andrews, Jessamyn Fiore, Aura Rosenberg, Lucy McKenzie, Rhonda Lieberman, Lucy Dodd, Hong-Kai Wang, Sakiko Sugawa, Beverly Semmes, Virginia Dwan, Jeanine Oleson, Tauba Auerbach, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Donna J. Haraway, and more.

Super Model Modernity by Chris Tse             $25

From making boys cry with the power of poetry to hitting back against microaggressions and sucker punches, these irreverent and tender poems dive head first into race and sexuality with rage and wit, while embracing everyday moments of joy to fortify the soul.

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, 2022 edited by Tracey Slaughter            $37

Aotearoa's longest-running poetry journal, first published in 1951 and still a vital barometer of the year's poetic activity. #56 features 130 new poems, including by this year's featured poet, Wes Lee, and by David Eggleton, Janet Newman, Amber Esau, Elizabeth Morton, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor, Alistair Paterson, essa may ranapiri, Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Iain Britton, Jordan Hamel, Jack Ross, Dominic Hoey, Owen Bullock, Semira Davis, Rata Gordon, Adrienne Jansen, Olivia Macassey, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Kerrin P Sharpe — along with essays and reviews of new poetry collections.

The Song of Youth by Monserrat Roig (translated by Tiago Miller)         $38

Eight remarkable stories that use language as a weapon against political and social 'dismemory'. Roig's striking prose allows the important stories of those silenced by the brutal Franco regime to come to the fore. 

"Montserrat Roig, before her untimely death, was a shining light of Catalan literature. The stories in The Song of Youth show her at her most urgent, energetic and inventive. While most of the stories are clearly set in the Catalonia of the 1970s and 1980s, they also have the quality of timeless fable." — Colm Toibin

"Montserrat Roig is one of far too many women authors whose work has taken far too long to be translated into English. These stories, in this excellent translation, will introduce readers to a remarkable writer, who, though not always comfortable to read, is always searingly honest." —Margaret Jull Costa

>>Meet Montserrat Roig. 

There Are Birds Everywhere by Britta Teckentrup and Camilla de la Bedoyere      $28

There are birds everywhere! Some of them live by the sea, some of them in the savannah, and some might live in your roof.

Sleeping with Stones by Serie Barford           $25

Short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

"Through a kind of verse novel, Serie Barford builds the story of a person, a loss and a life that continues on despite it all. Sleeping with Stones is a skillfully structured collection in which each poem accumulates and moves through time. Barford’s gift is her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. This collection does what poetry should do: give words to the things for which there are no words." —Judges' citation

Lost in the Museum by Victoria Cleal and Isobel Joy Te Aho-White       $30

A visit to Te Papa launches a boy and his whānau on a magical adventure to find Pāpā after he gets lost. He has gone missing inside one of the museum's taonga, but which one? Will they find Pāpā before the museum closes? Searching with the help of a museum host, the family encounters moa, paddles a vaka, flees war-time Hong Kong and rides the famous Britten Bike.

Tumble by Joanna Preston          $28

Short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

"Each poem in Tumble is a glimpse into a different world, and no two poems inhabit the same reality. Drawing from lines of art, history, contemporary journalism and fellow poets, the collection confidently shifts perspectives and registers, points of view and tone, while being held together by Joanna Preston’s light touch. Her pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means every poem — and the book itself — is a celebration of poetry." —Judges' citation

Tāngata Ngāi Tahu | People of Ngāi Tahu, Volume 2           $50

Completing the project begun in Volume One, fifty biographies bring Ngai Tahu history into the present. The people in the book have contributed to their iwi, hapu and whanau in myriad ways: here are wahine toa, rangatira and tohunga, community leaders, activists and scholars, social workers, politicians, fishermen and farmers, sportspeople, adventurers, weavers, performers, and many more. With a special emphasis on mana wahine, more than half of the biographies in Volume Two celebrate the stories of Ngai Tahu women. The book is illustrated with photographs sourced from the Ngai Tahu archive, external institutions and whanau collections. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #268 (4.3.22)

Read our latest newsletter!

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly   {Reviewed by STELLA} Greta and Valdin are siblings. They live together in central Auckland. Greta is working on her Master’s thesis in comparative literature, enamoured with fellow student Holly and navigating her queerness and her mixed cultural heritage. Valdin has thrown in his career in astrophysics at the University, and has found a new role as a TV presenter — something he is unexpectedly doing well at — and is pining for his ex-boyfriend, Xabi. Basically, he’s having a crisis. In Rebecca K Reilly’s assured debut novel the chapters move between the narratives of these two siblings, their voices distinct and compelling, as they live and love in Tāmaki Makaurau. The city itself, richly described and lively, is a character in itself. While some readers will fall into this novel with little effort — the dialogue and character interactions relatable and the cultural references (films, music and memes) relevant — others will ease in more slowly as they walk along with these 20-somethings in contemporary Aotearoa. For this is a story at first glance about being young, about finding your way and being in love. It has those Sally Rooney hooks. But Reilly has more going on here and you can take this as a sharp, funny and romantic escape or dig a little deeper. The Vladisavljevic family is a blend of Maori, Russian and Catalan, which makes for some great family conversations and interesting experiences for the characters. Here, Reilly, uses humour as well as anger to put the spotlight on racism and prejudice. From the outburst of Valdin on location in Queenstown to the more subtle undercurrents in Betty’s life, from Greta’s annoyance at being pigeonholed to Ell’s exclusion from her family. As we get a glimpse into the lives of other family members, Greta & Valdin becomes a richer novel — more assertive and nuanced. What is family? Why and how does circumstance dictate choices made, paths taken. And how can love be exhilarating, sad and wonderful simultaneously? Whether it is Reilly’s intention or not, Greta & Valdin sings from a similar song sheet as a Dickensian family saga or a Jane Austin classic. The novel opens with despair and ends with a wedding, and is an emotional rollercoaster in-between. There are the complex family interchanges, the tales of woe and happiness, and machinations between characters that lead to both misunderstanding and revelation and acceptance, hurt and forgiveness, romantic and familial love, and humour — complete with witty dialogue.  And all set in a distinctly vibrant contemporary Aotearoa complete with all its flaws and charm. And who can resist a happy ending? Shortlisted for the Acorn Prize 2022.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

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 I 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.”

Our superb Book of the Week has just been short-listed for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The Architect and the Artists: Hackshaw, McCahon, Dibble by Bridget Hackshaw looks at a particularly fertile but hitherto little-considered period of collaboration between the Modernist architect James Hackshaw, painter Colin McCahon, and sculptor Paul Dibble. The book examines twelve projects, spanning from 1965 to 1979, and is well supported with photographs, plans, and journal entries, along with essays by Peter Simpson, Julia Gatley, Peter Shaw and Alexa Johnston.
>>Read an extract.
>>Have a look inside the book. 
>>Ten questions. 
>>Collaboration at the core. 
>>Something about light. 
>>James Hackshaw's public buildings. 
>>An interview with the author. 
>>The McCahon House. 
>>Your copy. 
>>Some books about Colin McCahon. 
>>Some books about Paul Dibble. 
>>The short lists for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

 NEW RELEASES

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes)               $37

The unflinching new novel from the author of the acclaimed Hurricane Season. Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasises about seducing his neighbour—an attractive married woman and mother—while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener in the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Facing the impossibility of getting what they think they deserve, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Melchor is a thrilling writer, her electric prose charged with the power to transform the reader. Paradais explores the explosive nature of Mexico's brittle society, fractured by issues of race, class and violence-and confronts us with teenagers whose desires and hardships can tear life apart.

"Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off." —Samanta Schweblin 

"Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon's precision for cruelty. Paradais is a short inexorable descent into Hell." —Mariana Enriquez 

Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon by Mark McGurl           $45

What has happened to fiction in the age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorised as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. McGurl contests that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic has reorganised the  fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. As other standards of quality have been overwhelmed by pure 'customer satisfaction'—even in university literature courses—and literary culture has been subsumed by corporate culture in search of the 'perfect product', are we better off, or worse?

"Explains the place of culture in a neoliberal economy." —New York Times

>>Read an excerpt. 

>>Sense and saleability. 

After Lockdown: A metamorphosis by Bruno Latour              $36

After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to 'the world as it was before the pandemic'. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis — that brought about by climate change. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we — inhabitants of the Earth — live, what kind of place 'Earth' is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible — a freedom differently situated and differently understood.

August by Christa Wolf (translated by Katy Derbyshire)              $23

 "You can only fight sorrow when you look it in the eye." August is Christa Wolf's last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as a gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, her fictional perspective is very different. The story unfolds through the eyes of August, a young patient who has lost both his parents to the war. He adores an older girl, Lilo, a rebellious teenager who controls the wards. Sixty years later, August reflects on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, August offers a new entry into Christa Wolf's work.

Life As We Made It: How 50,000 years of human interventon refined — and redefined — nature by Beth Shapiro              $43

Virus-free mosquitoes, resurrected dinosaurs, designer humans — such is the power of the science of tomorrow. But the idea that we have only recently begun to manipulate the natural world is false. We've been meddling with nature since the last ice age. It's just that we're getting better at it. Shapiro reveals the surprisingly long history of human intervention in evolution through hunting, domesticating, polluting, hybridising, conserving and genetically modifying life on Earth. Looking ahead to the future, she casts aside the scaremongering myths on the dangers of interference, and outlines the true risks and opportunities that new biotechnologies will offer us in the years ahead. 

Revolution: An intellectual history by Enzo Traverso               $55

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of dialectical images: Marx's locomotives of history, Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals—from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jos Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South—as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.

"Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it.” –China Miéville

The Walker: On losing and finding yourself in the modern city by Matthew Beaumont            $25

A fascinating literary history of walking—would we have literature without it? From Charles Dickens's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?

Drilling through Hard Boards by Alexander Kluge (translated by Wieland Hoban)           $35

Max Weber described politics as "a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgment." Weber's metaphorical drill certainly embodies intelligent tenacity as a precondition for political change. But what is a hammer in the business of politics, Kluge wonders, and what is a subtle touch? What is political in the first place? In the book, Kluge unspools more than one hundred vignettes, through which it becomes clear that the political is more often than not personal. Politics are everywhere in our everyday lives, so along with the stories of major political figures, we also find here the small, mostly unknown ones: Elfriede Eilers alongside Pericles, Chilean miners next to Napoleon, a three-month-old baby beside Alexander the Great. 

Cat Eyes and Dog Whistles: The seven senses of humans and other animals by Cathy Evans and Becky Thorne            $35

Highly sensitive receptor cells in our eyes, ears, noses, tongues and skin relay messages to the brain and allow us to interpret the things going on around us, creating our sense of reality. But how do our senses work? And how do they differ from the senses of other animals? Did you know that, unlike the other senses, smells are delivered directly to the parts of our brain that are responsible for memory and emotion, meaning that smells can trigger feelings in a way that sight or sound can't? Did you know that a cow has about 250,000 tastebuds, compared to 5,000 of a human, and a mere 30 of a chicken? Or that earwax is 80% dead skin? A well-illustrated large-format hardback. 

Yellow Kayak by Nina Laden and Melissa Castrillon     $30

You just never know what a new day will hold if you are brave enough to find out. On one quiet afternoon, a boy and his special friend's unexpected adventure bring joy and excitement and sights never imagined. And the best part of any adventure is returning home with stories to tell and you best friend at your side. From the creators of If I Had a Little Dream. 

"Castrillon's beautifully surreal artwork is captivating. Each scene is full of imaginative sea creatures, crashing waves, blue-green tendrils of rain, and moonlit skies, all rendered in swirling organic shapes and lines and a dense palette of saturated tones." —Booklist

This is the Canon: Decolonise your bookshelf in 50 books by  Kadija Sesay, Deirdre Osborne, and Joan Anim-Addo           $38

A corrective to the many 'required reading' lists dominated by white men, this book gives excerpts from a great diversity of work and is an excellent way to broaden your reading and discover authors previously unknown to you. 

The Monsters of Rookhaven by Pádraig Kenny      $20

Sometimes the monsters take us. Sometimes we become the monsters. Mirabelle has always known she is a monster. When the glamour protecting her unusual family from the human world is torn and an orphaned brother and sister stumble upon Rookhaven, Mirabelle soon discovers that friendship can be found in the outside world. But as something far more sinister comes to threaten them all, it quickly becomes clear that the true monsters aren't necessarily the ones you can see. 

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War by Paul Betts          $28

In 1945, Europe lay in ruins - its cities and towns destroyed by conflict, its economies crippled, its societies ripped apart by war and violence. In the wake of the physical devastation came profound moral questions: how could Europe - once proudly confident of its place at the heart of the 'civilised world' - have done this to itself? And what did it mean that it had? In the years that followed, Europeans - from politicians to refugees, poets to campaigners, religious leaders to communist revolutionaries - tried to make sense of what had happened, and to forge a new understanding of civilisation that would bring peace and progress to a broken continent. As they wrestled with questions great and small - from the legacy of colonialism to workplace etiquette - institutions and shared ideals emerged which still shape our world today.

"Marvellously subtle and wide-ranging. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the world of today." —Margaret MacMillan

You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao          $28

Seventeen-year-old Julie has her future all planned out-move out of her small town with her boyfriend Sam, attend college in the city, spend a summer in Japan. But then Sam dies. And everything changes. Heartbroken, Julie skips his funeral, throws out his things, and tries everything to forget him and the tragic way he died. But a message Sam left behind in her yearbook forces back memories. Desperate to hear his voice one more time, Julie calls Sam's cellphone just to listen to his voicemail. And Sam picks up the phone. In a miraculous turn of events, Julie's been given a second chance at goodbye. The connection is temporary. But hearing Sam's voice makes her fall for him all over again and, with each call, it becomes harder to let him go. However, keeping her otherworldly calls with Sam a secret isn't easy, especially when Julie witnesses the suffering Sam's family is going through. 

From Another World by Evelina Santangelo (translated by Ruth Clarke)       $33

The seas are filled with drowning migrants; Europe is awash with xenophobia and fear. In the cities and towns, in the schools and shops, strange children are starting to appear: enigmatic and unnerving, they disappear like ghosts, causing uproar. Amid mounting paranoia, Khaled, a young teenager, by chance meets Karolina in a discount store in Brussels. She buys him a red suitcase, and they part ways: Karolina to both mourn and search for her missing son, whose laptop betrays his entanglement with extremist groups; Khaled to head south, against the flow of other Syrian refugees — travelling with urgent intent, desperately protecting the contents of his suitcase.

Autobibliography by Rob Doyle               $33

In my case, reading has always served a dual purpose. In a positive sense, it offers sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination. In a negative sense, it is a means of withdrawal, of inhabiting a reality quarantined from one that often comes across painful, alarming or downright distasteful. In the former sense, reading is like food; in the latter, it is like drugs or alcohol. Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two of his favourite books.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy              $26

Told in the willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas, The Long Song is at once a defiant, funny, and shocking novel of life on a nineteenth century Jamaican slave plantation. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her "Marguerite." Resourceful and mischievous, July soon becomes indispensable to her mistress. Together they live through the bloody Baptist war, followed by the chaotic end of slavery. Taught to read and write so that she can help her mistress run the business, July remains bound to the plantation despite her "freedom." It is the arrival of a young English overseer, Robert Goodwin, that will dramatically change life in the great house for both July and her mistress. Short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

XX by Rian Hughes           $38

Wrapping stories within stories, Rian Hughes's XX unleashes the full narrative potential of graphic design. It uses the visual culture of the twenty-first century to ask us who we think we are - and where we may be headed next. At Jodrell Bank Observatory a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin has been detected. Jack Fenwick, artificial intelligence expert and on the autistic spectrum, thinks he can decode it. But when he and his associates at tech startup Intelligencia find a way to step into the alien realm the signal encodes, they discover that it's already occupied - by ghostly entities that may come from our own past. Have these 'DMEn' (Digital Memetic Entities) been created by persons unknown for just such an eventuality? Are they our first line of defence in a coming war, not for territory, but for our minds? Including transcripts from NASA debriefs, newspaper and magazine articles, fictitious Wikipedia pages, a seventeenth-century treatise called Cometographia by Johannis Hevelius, and a spread on the so far undeciphered written language of Easter Island, Rongorongo, from a book called Language Lost: Undeciphered Scripts of the Ancient World. The battle for your mind has already begun. Also by Rian Hughes: The Black Locomotive. 

"Vastly ambitious, XX is the most astonishing blend of narrative, meta-narratives and visuals. Real 'wow' moments and big ideas combine with brilliant typographical flourishes to create the Moby-Dick of sci-fi." —Daily Mail 

Behind Enemy Lines: War, news and chaos in the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn           $28

The West seems unable to disentangle itself from the 'forever wars' in the Middle East. The US and its allies do not have the strength to win, but they do have the power to avoid defeat, protracting conflicts interminably in the process. Cockburn examines the causes of these endless wars and why reporting on them in the West has markedly deteriorated in recent years. Governments and the public know less and less about who is fighting and why; propaganda increasingly replaces well-informed reporting. The modern era in the Middle East is notable not only for failed states but for failed journalism. 

Going to Town: High Street, Motueka by Carol Dawber         $50

 In the 1850s it was a cart track with stumps that needed dodging but it soon took on the appearance of a settlement, defined at each end by hotels and gradually filling with homes, shops and service industries. There were stables and sawmills, bakeries and bootmakers, and as the wider district was cleared and developed the town of Motueka became a business hub for hop and tobacco farmers, orchardists and agriculturalists. It was also a transport hub linking Nelson, Richmond, Ngātimoti, Riwaka and Golden Bay by land and sea. Today High Street is more intensely concentrated, with three or four businesses where one used to be but it is as vibrant as ever. This book records old family names and businesses, fires, floods and parades and the development of industry, services and tourism. It also documents the strong sense of community which still exists in a district which has High Street as its heart. An exemplary photographic history. 

A very strong set of books have been short-listed for the 2022 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS. 

Read below what the judges have to say about each book, and click through to our website to read the books yourself (or to give them to your friends).

The category winners will be announced on 11 May.

Use the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer) to vote for the books you would like to win—or you think will win—each category, and go in the draw to win a copy of each of the eventual winners (courtesy of the wonderful publishers). >>Click here to enter. 

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (Text Publishing)
Word by word, inch by inch, Gigi Fenster immerses us in the increasingly unsettling psyche of her narrator. Olga lends a hand with her friend’s daughter, who has recently given birth, but the helpful old woman gradually takes on a more sinister role. It is an unnerving and absorbing reading experience as the darkness gradually closes in. Fenster creates an unforgettable voice, which at first seems so light and benign as — impeccably paced — the psychological tumult builds to a truly mesmerising crescendo.

Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press)
Dazzlingly intelligent and ambitious in scope, Entanglement spans decades and continents, explores the essence of time and delves into topics as complex as quantum physics. But at the heart of Bryan Walpert’s novel is the human psyche and all its intricacies. A writer plagued by two tragedies in his past reflects on where it all went wrong, and his desperation leads him back to Baltimore in 1977. A novel unafraid to ask difficult questions, and a novelist unwilling to patronise his readers.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
From the very first page, this novel has readers laughing out loud at the daily trials of these two Māori-Russian-Catalonian siblings. The titular characters navigate Auckland while dealing with heartbreak, OCD, family secrets, the costs of living, Tinder, public transport and more, and they do it all with massive amounts of heart. Greta & Valdin is gloriously queer, hilarious and relatable. Rebecca K. Reilly's debut novel is a modern classic.

Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia Publishers)
Ten years ago, Whiti Hereaka decided to begin the task of rescuing Kurangaituku, the birdwoman ogress from the Māori myth, 'Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman'. In this extraordinary and richly imagined novel, Hereaka gives voice and form to Kurangaituku, allowing her to tell us not only her side of the story but also everything she knows about the newly made Māori world and after-life. Told in a way that embraces Māori oral traditions, Kurangaituku is poetic, intense, clever, and sexy as hell.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1840 to 1910 by Claire Regnault (Te Papa Press)
This beautiful and beguiling book will seduce a wide audience with its stunning images and informative text, focusing on our ancestors’ lives through the lens of their clothing. Elegantly designed and sumptuously presented, it covers the diversity of sartorial experience in 19th Century Aotearoa as it addresses simple questions such as: Who made this garment? Who wore it, and when? A valuable addition to our nation’s story, it will have wide cultural and educational reach, and is an outstanding example of illustrated non-fiction publishing.

NUKU: Stories of 100 Indigenous Women by Qiane Matata-Sipu (QIANE+co)
The strikingly successful outcome of an ambitious project to showcase indigenous women going about their daily lives, doing both ordinary and extraordinary things. The 100 varied examples of talent and triumph are presented in a simple magazine-style format that is as accessible as it is effective. The author gracefully presents her subjects in their own words, stepping aside in the text but being wonderfully present through her tremendous portrait photography, which works seamlessly with the elegant, unpretentious typography in a beautifully cohesive package.

Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland by Lucy Mackintosh (Bridget Williams Books)
A fresh and timely study that weaves multiple narratives across time and space into a highly readable story, revealing the deep histories and continuous remaking of selected landscapes across Tāmaki Makaurau. The clean presentation of both often startling historic images and contemporary photography, and the skilfully written text informed by serious scholarship, fill some of the gaps in the stories of Auckland. The inviting format and careful, uncluttered design will appeal to a wide audience. An impressive first book.

The Architect and the Artists: Hackshaw, McCahon, Dibble by Bridget Hackshaw (Massey University Press)
A thorough and beautifully produced triangulation of creative practice that shows the value of collaboration in the arts, as evidenced in the collective projects of James Hackshaw, Colin McCahon and Paul Dibble. Archival material (including personal correspondence and sketches), informative and reflective text, and powerfully evocative photography are delivered cohesively through clean and lively design and typography. The author’s clear labour of love is reinforced by excellent external contributions, making for an enlightening and brilliant whole. Another impressive and assured first book.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

From the Centre: A Writer’s Life by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House)
On one level this is a personal memoir of love and of family — Patricia Grace writes of her husband, her children and her extended family, of being schooled and of teaching — but her life is also played out in the context of social history, the time when many Māori began to move from rural to urban environments; Grace is always aware that she lives within a much larger community. Hers is a rare literary memoir, free of egotism.

The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change by Dave Lowe (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
In this wide-ranging autobiography, Dave Lowe follows New Zealand’s critical role in charting carbon emissions from the 1970s onwards. Writing of the methodical collection of critical data allows Lowe to convey major scientific concepts to the general reader in a very accessible way. The Alarmist has a rich texture of family and a clear awareness that members of the scientific community are not always in harmony. It is enlightening as well as very readable.

The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin Random House)
A writer of novels and short fiction turns to non-fiction with a memoir par excellence. In this book of trauma, recovery and self-discovery, the prose is exquisitely precise in its navigation of the complexity of the author’s family dynamics and its interrogation of how it has shaped the construction of her identity and influenced her writing. The Mirror Book combines the personal and the literary with the sociological. It has been — and deserves to be — widely read.

Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books)
An admirable work of historical scholarship drawing on many sources, Māori and Pākehā. Vincent O'Malley's craft lies in unpacking those sources in an eloquent and incisive way, and he helps readers to think critically as he presents balanced arguments about contested battles and other conflicts. In the process, he weaves a coherent history of the New Zealand Wars. Essential reading for New Zealanders, with the bonus of excellent book production by the publishers.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY



Rangikura by Tayi Tibble (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
In Rangikura, Tayi Tibble further enhances her deserved reputation as a poet who writes with vibrant energy and talent. She has vision, and here sets out to combine vernacular with refined poetics, giving a voice to urban Māori. The result is dense and rich with life and language. These poems pay tribute to Millennial culture and use the power of humour, sexuality and friendship to create a collection that encapsulates this generation of Aotearoa.

Sleeping with Stones by Serie Barford (Anahera Press)
Through a kind of verse novel, Serie Barford builds the story of a person, a loss and a life that continues on despite it all. Sleeping with Stones is a skillfully structured collection in which each poem accumulates and moves through time. Barford’s gift is her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. This collection does what poetry should do: give words to the things for which there are no words.

The Sea Walks into a Wall by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press)
An up-to-the-minute contemporary collection that tests the very limits of what poetry can do. With her playful intellect and supreme confidence, Anne Kennedy creates poems that are consistently engaged with issues of the anthropocene, beneath which a constant, powerful tide flows and pulls. Worldly, and deeply in the world, The Sea Walks into a Wall bears witness to the grit and gravity of contemporary life.

Tumble by Joanna Preston (Otago University Press)
Each poem in Tumble is a glimpse into a different world, and no two poems inhabit the same reality. Drawing from lines of art, history, contemporary journalism and fellow poets, the collection confidently shifts perspectives and registers, points of view and tone, while being held together by Joanna Preston’s light touch. Her pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means every poem — and the book itself — is a celebration of poetry.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #267 (25.2.22)

Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what you'll be reading next!

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

The Block by Ben Oliver   {Reviewed by STELLA} You can run, you can hide, but eventually Happy will find you. Luka and his friends made it out of The Loop in book one of this trilogy to join an uprising — a revolution of the Regulars against the Alts and Galen Rye’s plans. Yet Luka’s freedom was short-lived and now he’s imprisoned again — you can’t always escape super soldiers no matter how determined you are — this time in The Block. If you thought The Loop was repressive, it’s a walk in the park compared with Luka Kane’s new residence. Hours paralysed on a bed, only to be awoken for energy harvesting and mind games are taking a toll on Luka’s sanity and his desire to find The Missing is a distant dream. So is the chance he’ll ever see his friends again, in particular Kina. Yet the unthinkable happens and he finds someone he can outwit — someone who empathises — just in time for a daring rescue. Although is this just another simulation from Happy? Is it real? Well, it turns out that it is, and once again Luka is in hiding and trying to find a way to avoid the wave of destruction that is bearing down on him, and those that don’t wish to be absorbed into the new world dictated to them by a corrupt, and possibly insane, entity. There are more daring explorations in the ruined city, a hiding place through a maze of underground tunnels, and a new plan to find The Missing while avoiding the increasing surveillance of Happy. Drones are everywhere (only one is a friend), as are Alt soldiers, and the AI, Happy, is up to something sinister at the Arc. Luka finds himself propelled into taking things into his own hands, even though it means he will need to abandon his friends again. To save them, he must go his own way and Tyco — his nemesis — has turned up again. stronger and more dangerous. Can Luka keep his promise to Kina? Can he find his sister, Molly, and what is the strange place called Purgatory? The second book in this trilogy is just as action-packed and fast-paced as The Loop, with plenty of emotional heft and some humour to temper the more gruesome moments and weighty themes. No surprise the second book ends on a cliffhanger! Roll on the third.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz (translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff)  {Reviewed by THOMAS} If a thought is thought it must be thought through to its end. This formula is productive both of great misery and of great literature, but, for most people, either consequence is fairly easily avoided through a simple lack of tenacity or focus, or through fear. Unfortunately, we are not all so easily saved from ourselves by such shortcomings. The narrator of Ariana Harwicz’s razor-fine novel Die, My Love finds herself living in the French countryside with a husband and young child, incapable of feeling anything other than displaced in every aspect of her life, both trapped by and excluded from the circumstances that have come to define her. She both longs for and is revolted by family life with her husband and child, the violence of her ambivalences make her incapable of either accepting or changing a situation about which there is nothing ostensibly wrong, she withdraws into herself, and, as the gap separating herself from the rest of existence widens, her attempts to bridge it become both more desperate and more doomed, further widening the gap. Every detail of everything around her causes her pain and harms her ability to feel anything other than the opposite of the way she feels she should feel. This negative electrostatic charge, so to call it, builds and builds but she is unable to discharge it, to return her situation to ‘normal’, to relieve the torment. In some ways, the support and love of her husband make it harder to regain a grip on ‘reality’ — if her husband had been a monster, her battles could have been played out in their home rather than inside her (it is for this reason, perhaps, that people subconsciously choose partners who will justify the negative feelings towards which they are inclined). The narrator feels more affinity with animals than with humans, she behaves erratically or not at all, she becomes obsessed with a neighbour but the encounters with him that she describes, and the moments of self-obliterative release they provide, are, I would say, entirely fantasised. Between these fantasies and ‘objective reality’, however, falls a wide area about which we and she must remain uncertain whether her perceptions, understandings and reactions are accurate or appropriate. At times the narrator’s love for her child creates small oases of anxiety in her depression, but these become rarer. Harwicz’s writing is both sensitive and brutal, both lucid and claustrophobic, her observations both subtle and overwhelming. As the narrator loses her footing, the writer ensures that we are borne with her on through the novel, an experience not dissimilar to gathering speed downhill in a runaway pram*.    *Not a spoiler. >>Harwicz continues her 'Involuntary Trilogy' project in Feebleminded and Tender.

Our Book of the Week is The Magician by Colm Tóibín         

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. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Inside the mind of Thomas Mann. 
>>At the Thomas Mann House. 
>>What's the story?
>>"Stop this nonsense!"
>>"I grew up in a society where homosexuality was unmentioned." 
>>Socks. 
>>Shortlisted for the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize. 
>>Your copy. 

 

 NEW RELEASES

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au             $30

A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city's most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here—is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey?

Winner of the 2021 Novel Prize.

"Au’s is a book of deceptive simplicity, weaving profound questions of identity and ontology into the fabric of quotidian banality. What matters, the novel reassures us, is constantly imbricated with the everyday, just as alienation and tender care can coexist in the same moment." —Claire Messud

The Surgeon's Brain by Oscar Upperton           $25

I can be of use beyond myself. There is no question

of my right to board a ship, or take a room.

It is as though I were a ghost and I have now been given form.

Dr James Barry was many things. He was a pistol-toting dueller, an irascible grudge-holder, a vegetarian, an obsessive cleaner – and a brilliant, humane military surgeon who served throughout the British empire, travelled the world with a small menagerie of animals, and advocated for public health reform. Barry was also a transgender man living in the Victorian era, a time when the term ‘transgender’ was unknown in Western thought. The poems of The Surgeon’s Brain imagine Barry’s inner worlds and the historical and social pressures that he resisted. As this story unfolds and begins to fragment, it speaks to both our past and future ghosts.

"Upperton has a way of linking the urgency of poetry to the urgency of being human." —Piet Nieuwland, Landfall
>>RNZ interview. 

The Flying Mountain by Christoph Ransmayr (translated by Simon Pare)             $30

The story of two brothers who leave the southwest coast of Ireland on an expedition to Transhimalaya, the land of Kham, and the mountains of eastern Tibet—looking for an untamed, unnamed mountain that represents perhaps the last blank spot on the map. As they advance toward their goal, the brothers find their past, and their rivalry, inescapable, inflecting every encounter and decision as they are drawn farther and farther from the world they once knew. ​Only one of the brothers will return. Transformed by his loss, he starts life anew, attempting to understand the mystery of love, yet another quest that may prove impossible. This remarkable novel, written in blank verse, was long-listed for the 2018 Booker International Prize. 

Vā: Stories by women of the Moana edited by Lani Wendt Young and Sisilia Eteuati          $42

50 stories from Cook Island, Chamorro, Erub Island (Torres Strait), Fijian, Hawaiian, Māori, Ni-Vanuatu, Papua New Guinean, Rotuman, Samoan and Tongan writers. Never before have so many Moana women writers gathered together to share their stories. Contributors: Amy Tielu, Arihia Latham, Ashlee Sturme, Audrey Teuki Brown Pereira, Caroline Matamua, Cassie Hart, Courtney Leigh Sit-Kam Malasi Thierry, Dahlia Malaeulu, Denise Carter Bennett, Emmaline Pickering Martin, Filifotu Vaai, Gina Cole, Isabella Naiduki, Karlo Mila, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Lani Wendt Young, Laura Toailoa, Lauren Keenan, Lehua Parker, Lily Ann Eteuati, Mere Taito, Momoe Malietoa Von Reiche, Nadine Anne Hura, Nafanua PK, Nichole Brown, Nicki Perese, Niusila Faamanatu-Eteuati, Ria Masae, Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen, Salote Timuiapaepatele Vaai Siaosi, Shirley Simmonds, Sisilia Eteuati, Stacey Kokaua, Steph Matuku, Sylvia Nakachi, Tanya Kang Chargualaf, Tulia Thompson, Vanessa Collins.

Museum by Frances Samuel                $25

For many years, poet Frances Samuel worked at a museum, writing the text for exhibitions. In her new book she redefines the notion of a museum, making it infinite and wild. Like freewheeling thought experiments, Samuel’s poems blur the lines between material and immaterial, natural and supernatural, to funny and surreal effect. Objects of significance include water bears and tornadoes, ancient penguins and robots, and a paper-cut skeleton that walks off the page. In this book, a museum is the air itself, and the idea that everything we love survives. The result is continually surprising, intimate and imaginative.

"Frances Samuel's Museum is full of wonders. It's a storehouse of words, objects, feelings – at once strange and marvellous." —Jenny Bornholdt

Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris            $23

A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock. A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris's novel has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.

"The Guyanese William Blake." Angela Carter

"One of the great originals. Visionary. Dazzlingly illuminating." —Guardian

The Last One by Fatima Daas (translated by Lara Vergnaud)            $33

The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transport to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy — her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn't know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.

"Hypnotising and lyrical." —Guardian

>>"People like her didn't exist in French novels —until she wrote one." 

Tender by Ariana Harwicz (translated by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff)             $33

The third and final book in Ariana Harwicz's loose 'Involuntary Trilogy' finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother's madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior. Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality. 

>>Read a sample. 
>>Read Thomas's review of Die, My Love. 
>>Feebleminded. 

The Book of Nonexistent Words by Stefano Massini (translated by Richard Dixon)                        $43

Words are meant to be invented. In this fascinating illustrated book, Massini traces the 'origin stories' of words he himself has invented back to real people and events. Recommended. 

"Massini is the real thing. His writing is smart, electric, light on its feet." —New York Times

Twelve Caesars: Images of power from the Ancient world to the modern by Mary Beard              $55
This well-illustrated book examines how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years   What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today's "sculpture wars"—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the "Twelve Caesars," from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. 

>>Six lectures.

>>Meet The Twelve Caesars with Suetonius. 

Index, A history of the by Dennis Duncan               $50

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index- an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.

The Labyrinth by Simon Stålenhag           $60

Stålenhag's lush painterly visual storytelling make his books memorably —and hauntingly — immersive. A world covered by ruins and ash, the remnants of an otherworldly phenomenon that has ravaged the earth's atmosphere and forced the few survivors deep underground. Matt, Sigrid and Charlie leave the safe harbour of the enclave for an expedition onto the wastelands of the surface world. During their journey they are forced to confront dark secrets from the time before civilisation's fall.
>>Something like this. 
>>The world according to Simon Stalenhag. 

Books: Art, craft and community by Simon Goode and Ira Yonemura      $65

A survey of papermakers, printers, bookbinders, artists, designers, and publishers from around the world, who use traditional skills, art and experimentation to make books. With over 30 profiles, spanning traditional craftspeople to modern makers reimagining the book for new audiences, and contributions from experts, we are given an insight into the history and contemporary context of the processes behind the books. Nicely presented. 

The Free World: Art and ideas in the Cold War by Louis Menand            $70

Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of "freedom" applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Rights spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

For the Good of the World: Is global agreement on global challenges possible? by A.C. Grayling             $37

Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face? Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not impossible extreme, might be extinction? To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world- climate change, technology and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects. If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement on how the world's various problems are to be confronted at least managed, if not solved the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia — the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE.

The Struggle for India's Soul: Nationalism and the fate of democracy by Shashi Tharoor             $35

Tharoor, the author of Inglorious Empire, explores hotly contested notions of nationalism, patriotism, citizenship and belonging. Two opposing ideas of India have emerged: ethno-religious nationalism, versus civic nationalism. This struggle for India's soul now threatens to hollow out and destroy the remarkable concepts bestowed upon the nation at Independence: pluralism, secularism, inclusive nationhood. The Constitution is under siege; institutions are being undermined; mythical pasts propagated; universities assailed; minorities demonised, and worse.
>>In the news today. 

Major Labels: A history of popular music in seven genres — Rock, R&B, Country, Punk, Hip-Hop, Dance, Pop by Kelefa Sanneh            $45

From his own adolescence, when his allegiance was to punk rock, to his work as one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture at the New York Times and the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh has made a deep study of how our popular music unites and divides us, the tribes it forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn't transcendent: it expresses our grudges as well as our hopes, and it is motivated by greed as well as inspiration. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there's always been a 'Black' audience and a 'white' audience, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there is Black music and white music (and some very white music), and a whole lot of confusing of the issue, if not to say expropriation.

>>Subgenres upon subsubgenres. 

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers          35

A novel exploring the history of an African-American family in the American South, from the time before the Civil War and slavery, through the Civil Rights movement, to the present. 

"This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain, and so much more. In Jeffers's deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel." —Jacqueline Woodson

Gathering Moss: A natural and cultural history of mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer            $26

Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world. From the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. 

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, exploration, and life on Earth by Kate Greene          $25

In 2013 Kate Greene moved to Mars. On NASA's first HI-SEAS simulated Mars mission in Hawaii, she lived for four months in an isolated geodesic dome with her crewmates, gaining incredible insight into human behaviour in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory. Greene draws on her experience to contemplate what makes an astronaut, the challenges of freeze-dried eggs and time-lagged correspondence, the cost of shooting for a Planet B. The result is a story of space and life, of the slippage between dreams and reality, of bodies in space, and of humanity's incredible impulse to explore. From trying out life on Mars, Greene examines what it is to live on Earth.

Sweat: A history of exercise by Bill Hayes           $33

Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats, and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time, dissecting the dynamics of human movement.   Hippocrates, Plato, Galen, Susan B. Anthony, Jack LaLanne, and Jane Fonda, among many others, make appearances in Sweat, but chief among the historical figures is Girolamo Mercuriale, a Renaissance-era Italian physician who aimed singlehandedly to revive the ancient Greek "art of exercising" through his 1569 book De arte gymnastica. Though largely forgotten over the past five centuries, Mercuriale and his illustrated treatise were pioneering, and are brought back to life in the pages of Sweat. Hayes ties his own personal experience to the cultural and scientific history of exercise, from ancient times to the present day, giving us a new way to understand its place in our lives in the 21st century.

The Best American Poetry, 2021 edited by Tracy K. Smith and David Lehman         $38

Since 1988, 'The Best American Poetry' series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets).

BOOKS@VOLUME #266 (11.2.22)

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>> Read all Stella's reviews.

A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster     {Reviewed by STELLA} Olga’s helping Lara. They are both looking after the baby because Sophie needs them. Lara and Olga are neighbours. They live in the same building. Sophie, Lara’s daughter, is having a tough time with the new baby. Her husband died six months before their child’s birth. Lara puts her life on hold so she can step in to care for her daughter and new grandchild. Thankfully, there is Olga, so sensible and dependable. Olga, who can come at a moment's notice and is a wonderful support for them all, especially Lara. Gigi Fenster, in A Good Winter, convincingly, and without pause, keeps us in the grips of Olga’s mind and perspective. The novel is Olga’s story — her telling. Through her actions and encounters alone we ‘know’ Lara and her family. As the winter progresses, the two women build their routine, a routine that Olga makes happen, making small adjustments in her previous daily structure, unbeknown to Lara. Olga sees her relationship with Lara as special, unlike the other friends, and her obsession with Lara builds as Winter progresses into Spring. They have their special films, their cafe and funny shared phrases. Olga is enamoured with Lara: she’s the only one who understands. As Sophie improves and her depression ebbs, Olga’s behaviour becomes more erratic and her jealousies simmer just under the edge of her reasonable veneer. Being in Olga’s head is never an easy place, but Fenster keeps us engaged in this discomfort, taking us to parts of Olga’s childhood that are almost out of bounds, that Olga attempts to repress; keeping the monologue tight, and striking an almost humorous note with Olga’s judgemental observations. This is a story of an unsettled mind, of tragedy and abandon, one which is riveting and thrilling, one which doesn’t shy from a building sense of alarm while also gently taking us along, allowing us glimpses into Olga’s past, her desires and sadness. The pace is pitch-perfect, the language, with its cleverly constructed conversations and staccato memory snippets, successfully reflects a troubled mind. As these images, Olga’s memories, some true; others constructed, coalesce on the page and build in the reader’s mind, it becomes increasingly likely that this woman’s obsession with Lara and her deep-seated delusions won't be repressed indefinitely. Olga’s betrayals that she carries deep in the pit of herself are screaming to be released. But what will be the trigger that unpicks the carefully constructed blanket? The new young female tenant who doesn’t know the ‘rules’? Sophie’s terribly selfish trashy friend? The new boyfriend? Or something or someone closer to home?  Fenster manages to bring a lightness and freshness to a fraught topic and Olga is completely convincing. A Good Winter was awarded the 2020 Gifkin Prize and is longlisted for this year's Acorn Prize. Highly accomplished, this is a sensational piece of writing about betrayal, the harm of a childhood misunderstood, a life desiring purpose and acknowledgement, and ultimately, the story of a woman undone.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan   {Reviewed by THOMAS} At what point does literature begin, he wondered, if there is such a thing as literature and if it does at some point begin. Is it not after all the case, he wondered, that we are assailed at all times and in all circumstances by an unbearable infinitude of details that we must somehow resist or ignore or numb ourselves to almost entirely if we are to bear them, we can only be aware of anything the smallest proportion of things and stay alive or stay sane or stay functioning, he thought, we must tell ourselves a very simple story indeed if we are to have any chance of functioning, we must shut out everything else, we must only notice what we look for, what our story lets us look for, he thought, the froth now frothing in his brain, or rather in his mind, our stories blot stuff out so that we can live, at least a little longer. We are so easily overwhelmed and in the end we are all overwhelmed, the details get us in the end, but until then we cling to our limitations, to the limitations that make the unbearable very slightly bearable, if we are lucky. All thought is deletion. The stories that we think with, he thought, are not possible without an ongoing act of swingeing exclusion, thought is an act of exclusion. What would we put in a diary? What would we put in an essay? What would we put in a novel? If we boil it all down how far can we boil it all down? We find ourselves alive, the details of our life assail us, eventually overwhelm us and destroy us. That’s our story. We die of one detail too many, but if it wasn’t that detail that finished us off it would be another, they are lining up, pressing in, abrading us. Can we resist what we understand, he wondered, to the extent that we even understand it? Is art just this form of resistance? At what point does literature begin, if there is such a thing as literature and if it does at some point begin? Is there something in our life that resists exclusion, something that when the boiling down is done is not boiled completely down? Can we move beyond simplification to a countersimplification, he wondered, and what could this even mean? If Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger’s diary at an auction and she read this diary so often that she felt she almost was its eighty-six-year-old author, if a diary’s keeper is an author, she too became the dairy’s keeper, certainly, at least in some sense, and then if she further edited this dead woman’s year, this dead woman’s words, though the woman was not yet dead, obviously, in the year that she kept the diary, when she was the diary’s keeper, not quite yet dead, whose work do we have in Aug 9—Fog, the boiled down boiled down again, this rendering, this literature, we could call it, rendered from life, here in a two-step rendering process? That is no place for a question mark, he thought. The story of the year is a story of death plucking at an old woman’s life, she loses her husband, her health, her spirits, so to call them, a strange term. The details of her life are the ways in which what she loves is torn away but also these details, often even the same details, are the ways in which this tearing away is resisted, he thought, these details are the ways in which what is loved may be clutched, in which what is loved is saved even while it is borne away. “Turning cooler in eve. We had smoked sausages, fried potatoes & onions. Dr. says it’s a general breaking up of his body. I am bringing in some flowers.” Every very ordinary life, and this is nothing but a very ordinary life, he thought, no life, after all, is anything but a very ordinary life, every very ordinary life is caught in the blast of details that will destroy it but or and these are the very details that enable a resistance to this blast, through literature perhaps, so to call it, resistance is poetry, he thought, an offence against time, a plot against unavoidable loss. We resist time and succeed only when we fail. “Every where glare of ice. We didn’t sleep too good. My pep has left me.”

Book of the Week. Opium? Caffeine? Mescaline? Michael Pollan explores the ways in which humans use the psychoactive potentials of plants — and these plants' historically formative effect on human culture — in This Is Your Mind on Plants. 
>>Changing the way we see the world. 
>>The intoxicating garden. 
>>Psychedelics and mental issues. 
>>Ego, death and plants.

>>How to unwind with a novel. 
>>Lots of good interviews. 
>>Your copy. 

 NEW RELEASES

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josphine Giles             $28

At last: a science fiction novel written in Orkney dialect verse! (there are translations at the foot of the pages but you soon won't need them). 

Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind. The first full-length book published in the Orkney language for half a century.

The Tale of the Tiny Man by Barbro Lindgren and Eva Eriksson            $30

There was once a tiny man. One day, at the first sign of spring, he decided to pin a note to a tree that said FRIEND WANTED. Then he sat down on the step to wait. After ten days, he woke to find a cold nose in his hand. Beside him was a big dog with a beautiful curve in its tail. The tiny man had made a friend at last. They play and walk and laugh every day. But then the girl in the polka dot dress comes to the step. The little man watches as the dog put his soft muzzle into the girl's hand and worries that he has lost his only friend. The Tale of the Tiny Man is a touching picture book about loneliness that has a very happy ending. It is possible after all to have more than one friend!

The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood            $33

A novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. Smallwood's novel inhabits the abyss between what we think about and what we actually do.

"Christine Smallwood’s novel inhabits the abyss between what we think about and what we actually do. Smallwood’s casually agonized and abundantly satisfying novel, provides the exact sort of thrill that can be found only through obsessive overthinking. Why live in the moment when you can dissect it like this?" —The New Yorker

"Smallwood’s novel reminds us is that the body is the only thing tethering us to the world," —Bookforum

>>"I'll show you the life of the mind!"

The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser         $25

Almontaser's asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser sneaks artefacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the Western imagination; instead, they invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilising any means necessary to form a semblance of home.

>>The author's website. 

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall               $33

In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.

"Finely wrought, intellecutally brave and emotionally honest." —The Scotsman

"Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn. One of the finest writers at work today." —Damon Galgut

"I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers. With Burntcoat she has solidified her status as the literary shining light we lesser souls aspire to." —Benjamin Myers

Things I Didn't Throw Out by Marcin Wicca           $25

Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic — and often idiosyncratic — value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things. The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep — and, arguably, hoard — tells the story of contemporary Poland.

Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the course of human history by Kyle Harper               $58

Harper explains why humanity's uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity's escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilises the environment and fosters new diseases.

Slime: A natural history by Susanne Wedlich           $45

Slime is an ambiguous thing. It exists somewhere between a solid and liquid. It inspires revulsion even while it compels our fascination. It is a both a vehicle for pathogens and the strongest weapon in our immune system. Most of us know little about it and yet it is the substance on which our world turns. Slime exists at the interfaces of all things: between the different organs and layers in our bodies, and between the earth, water, and air in the environment. It is often produced in the fatal encounter between predator and prey, and it is a vital presence in the reproductive embrace between female and male. Wedlich leads us on a scientific journey through the 3 billion year history of slime, from the part it played in the evolution of life on this planet to the way it might feature in the post-human future. She also explores the cultural and emotional significance of slime, from its starring role in the horror genre to its subtle influence on Art Nouveau. Slime is what connects Patricia Highsmith's fondness for snails, John Steinbeck's aversion to hagfish, and Emperor Hirohito's passion for jellyfish, as well as the curious mating practices of underwater gastropods and the miraculous functioning of the human gut.

The Dead Girls' Class Trip by Anna Seghers             $35

Best known for her anti-fascist novels such as The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers also wrote short stoies throughout her life, portraying her social and mythic vision, and these constitute an important and fascinating element of her work. This selection of Seghers's stories, written between 1925 and 1965, reflects the range of her creativity. 

The Concept of the Social: Scepticism, idleness and utopia by Malcolm Bull           $40

What does political agency mean for those who don't know what to do or can't be bothered to do it? This book develops a novel account of collective emancipation in which freedom is achieved not through knowledge and action but via doubt and inertia. In essays that range from ancient Greece to the end of the Anthropocene, Bull addresses questions central to contemporary political theory in novel readings of texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, and Arendt, and shows how classic philosophical problems have a bearing on issues like political protest and climate change. The result is an original account of political agency for the twenty-first century in which uncertainty and idleness are limned with utopian promise.

God: An anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou      $40

Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a minor storm deity, known as Yahweh. Yahweh had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals. He gorged on food and wine, wrote books, and took walks and naps. But he would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions. But as Stavrakopoulou reveals, God’s cultural DNA stretches back centuries before the Bible was written, and persists in the tics and twitches of our own society, whether we are believers or not. The Bible has shaped our ideas about God and religion, but also our cultural preferences about human existence and experience; our concept of life and death; our attitude to sex and gender; our habits of eating and drinking; our understanding of history. Examining God’s body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, she shows how the Western idea of God developed. She explores the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world. And in doing so she analyses not only the origins of our oldest monotheistic religions, but also the origins of Western culture.

Aesop's Animals: The science behind the fables by Jo Wimpenny            $37

Despite originating over than two-and-a-half thousand years ago, Aesop's Fables are still passed on from parent to child, and are embedded in our collective consciousness. The morals we have learned from these tales continue to inform our judgements, but have the stories also informed how we regard their animal protagonists? If so, is there any truth behind the stereotypes? Are wolves deceptive villains? Are crows insightful geniuses? And could a tortoise really beat a hare in a race?In Aesop's Animals, zoologist Jo Wimpenny turns a critical eye to the fables to discover whether there is any scientific truth to Aesop's portrayal of animals.

Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek (translated by Leri Price)             $33

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she's crazy, but she is no fool—the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta—where, between bombings, she writes her story.

The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes            $38

"A brilliantly original novel of literary SF from the acclaimed author of XX, The Black Locomotive weaves steam trains, the history and architecture of London, and a mysterious alien artefact below the city into a work of stunning inventiveness and originality." —Telegraph

Chewing the Fat: Tasting notes from a greedy life by Jay Raynor              $17

Why are gravy stains on your shirt at the dinner table to be admired? Does bacon improve everything? Is gin really the devil's work?

Burning Boy: The life and work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster            $45

This lively reassessment of the American writer, whom Auster posits as the first of the Moderns, is also a vivid picture of fin-de-siecle cultural life in the United States.

The Passenger: Paris               $33

The glare of the city lights can be blinding, as the Paris celebrated in books and films clashes with reality. And all the time the shadows are growing: the Bataclan terror attack, the violent protests of the gilet jaunes, rioting in the banlieues, Notre Dame in flames, record heatwaves, and the pandemic. Not just a series of unfortunate events, they are phenomena which all of the world's metropolis will have to face. But in Paris today there is also an air of renewal: from planning and environmental revolution to a generation of chefs rebelling against the classist traditions of haute cuisine; from second generation immigrants reclaiming their rights to women's rejection of the stereotypes high fashion created for them.

"Half-magazine, half-book, 'The Passenger' series began last year: think of it as an erudite and literary travel equivalent to National Geographic, with stunning photography and illustration and fascinating writing about place." —Independent
>>Other books in the series. 

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Lauren van der Berg            $40

A collection of short stories of of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely.

Eight Improbable Possibilities: The mystery of the Moon, and other implausible scientific truths by John Gribbin              $25

Echoing Sherlock Holmes' famous dictum, John Gribbin tells us: 'Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is certainly possible, in the light of present scientific knowledge.' With that in mind, in his sequel to the hugely popular Six Impossible Things and Seven Pillars of Science, Gribbin turns his attention to some of the mind-bendingly improbable truths of science. For example: We know that the Universe had a beginning, and when it was — and also that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. We can detect ripples in space that are one ten-thousandth the width of a proton, made by colliding black holes billions of light years from Earth. And, most importantly from our perspective, all complex life on Earth today is descended from a single cell - but without the stabilising influence of the Moon, life forms like us could never have evolved.

Wolf Girl by Jo Loring-Fisher        $17

Sophy doesn't know how to fit in. She tries to talk at school but the words get stuck in her throat and everyone laughs and whispers behind her back. Upset and alone, Sophy hides away in her room. But then an extraordinary thing happens... Sophy is whisked away to a magical snowy land where she meets a wolf and her cub. The unlikely trio roll, run and howl together, playing happily in the snow. Sophy has found friends and nothing can ruin her day... until a big, angry bear appears. But Sophy finally finds her voice and finds the courage she's been looking for all along.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #265 (4.2.22)

Read our latest newsletter!

Book of the Week. Bodies of water both separate and connect us, and when we enter them we have a different relationship to the world from the one we have on dry land. The essays in Nina Mingya Powles's Small Bodies of Water are connected by her experiences of the bodies of water that have been meaningful to her, from learning to swim in Borneo, to the New Zealand coast, to a pond in northwest London. 
>>"I float, I strain, I swim."
>>The Safe Zone. 
>>Braver in water than on land. 
>>Periods, nature writing and colonialism. 
>>A pond of likenesses. 
>>NMP on RNZ.

>>The book has a playlist!
>>The author's website. 
>>A few essays. 
>>Magnolia 木蘭 was short-listed for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 
>>Eat your way through Tiny Moons. 
>>Your Small Bodies. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall   {Reviewed by STELLA} Open the covers of Kirsten McDougall’s novel, She’s a Killer, and soak in a shabby Wellington of the near future. Infrastructure is failing, food prices have sky-rocketed, and water is an expensive scarce commodity. Meet Alice, stuck in the same job at enrolments at the university for twenty or so years after giving up on pursuing her psychology studies, badly behaved and bored. Bored because she’s one point off ‘genius’ and her life is crashing in on her. She’s living downstairs from her Antiques Roadshow-obsessed mother who she communicates with by morse code (nice touch), her flat is depressing — there’s a plant growing out of the rotting kitchen bench, her spare room is filled with boxes of unwanted ex-boyfriend stuff, and her view is a rundown running track with rubbish piles at its centre. And, her internal friend ‘Simp’ is back niggling at her with ‘home truths’. The Alice/Simp conversations are fraught and surprisingly entertaining — there’s a constant tussle with this internal monologue, a monologue that sometimes bursts out, verbally, into the rest of the world, turning heads and creating awkward situations for Alice — although, she, Alice, doesn’t seem too bothered by her instability and rather revels in it. When she meets Pablo at the enrolment office — he’s putting in a request for a Russian Literature course — he charms her into a date. Alice is keen on a good dinner, and wouldn’t mind some sex either, with a good looking and intelligent wealthugee. (McDougall may have just coined a new term — a wealthy climate refugee who can buy their way into an accommodating country.) And then comes the twist (this is an eco-thriller): Pablo, surprise, surprise, isn’t who he seems to be, and he has a fifteen-year-old daughter, Erika — a daughter who Alice suddenly finds herself saddled with (but not without excellent financial recompense) for a few days when Pablo has to abruptly leave the country on urgent business. Erika is a point or two smarter than Alice — her IQ is 162 (Alice 159), and an unusual relationship begins to build between the two women. Erika manages to get the flat looking better, arranges installation of rainwater gathering tanks and gets Alice’s mother downstairs for an evening meal. But why? What does Erika really want and what is she up to? Here the plot picks up pace, and the action kicks in. The side stories about Alice, her co-workers, her childhood (and the daughter/mother relationship), her best friend Amy (wife of successful architect and mother to three gifted children), her hedonistic past and her emotional incapacities draw together and gravitate towards the eye of a storm — a storm facilitated by Erika. At times, it seems unbelievable that Alice would venture, and take those closest to her, into a dangerous situation that has no obvious personal advantage. It’s a situation over which she seems to have no or little control, but there is something beguiling about Erika and her cause, especially for a smart, bored woman who sees the inequities but doesn’t necessarily know how to care. Alice may be intellectually gifted, but she's often lacking in emotional intel. Is it Erika’s disdain for the privileged and her ability to act on her beliefs that keeps Alice curious? This eco-thriller set in a not-so-distant and quite believable future Aotearoa, is a cracker of a page-turner, with funny observations of human tropes and snarky behaviour from a not wholly likeable main character. Longlisted for the 2022 Acorn Fiction Prize.