NEW RELEASES

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti               $46
Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart. In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home for school. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal--to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters the strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.
"Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold." 
Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell          $65
The art book that everyone has been waiting for! The story of contemporary Maori art from the 1950s to the present day, with more than 200 artworks by 110 Maori artists. Maori art is unique among all art movements, and to Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on centuries of indigenous knowledge and skill, it reflects a Maori world view, life in this land and the debates that continue to shape it. 
Harrow by Joy Williams             $33
Williams's powerful, dark and strangely enjoyable novel addresses the roots and impact of climate apocalypse in and on the workings of both human consciousness and the unconscious. Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl'. In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.
"A brilliant portrayal of collapsing reality. Williams peels back the visible and known, revealing death and chaos beneath. Part of what makes Williams’s work so destabilising is that agency has almost no significance. Navigating a world that makes no sense, her characters are lost and baffled, their actions and ideas stripped of meaning. Harrow reminds us that, as a consequence of climate collapse, trauma and grief are the condition of our collective existence. As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams – great virtuoso of the unreal – is one of them." —Guardian
>>"Joy Williams does not write for humanity."
The Doloriad by Missouri Williams              $35
In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a ruined city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over. Her children and the children they have with one another aren't so sure. Surrounded by the silent forest and the dead suburbs, they feel closer to the ruined world than to their parents. Nevertheless, they scavenge supplies, collect fuel, plant seeds, and attempt to cultivate the poisoned earth, brutalizing and caring for one another in equal measure. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show called Get Aquinas in Here, in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors, and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. When Dolores returns a few days later, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of Matriarch's fragile order and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken. As the children seize their chance to escape, the world of the television saint Aquinas and that of the family begin to melt together with terrible consequences. Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, at times striking with the power of physical force, Missouri* Williams's novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. 
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur)             $38
A genre-defying collection of short stories from this superb Korean author. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.
>>Long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize. 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan          $33
In 1985, in an Irish town, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
"Keegan creates luminous effects with spare material, so every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion." —Hilary Mantel
"Astonishing. Claire Keegan makes her moments real - and then she makes them matter." —Colm Toibin
"A true gift of a book. a sublime Chekhovian shock." —Andrew O'Hagan
"A haunting, hopeful masterpiece." —Sinead Gleeson
Phenotypes by Paulo Scott (translated by Daniel Hahn)          $36
A smart and stylish account of the bigotry lurking in hearts and institutions alike. In this complex tale, two very different brothers of mixed black and white heritage are divided by the colour of their skin, as racial tension rises in society and a guilty secret resurfaces from their shared past. Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething novel of rage and reconciliation.
The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life between the tides by Adam Nicolson             $40
Few places are as familiar as the shore – and few as full of mystery and surprise. How do sandhoppers inherit an inbuilt compass from their parents? How do crabs understand the tides? How can the death of one winkle guarantee the lives of its companions? What does a prawn know? Nicolson explores the natural wonders of the intertidal and our long human relationship with it. The physics of the seas, the biology of anemone and limpet, the long history of the earth, and the stories we tell of those who have lived here: all interconnect in this zone where the philosopher, scientist and poet can meet and find meaning. The intertidal has been the scene for all kinds of scientific discovery – from the process of evolution to the inner workings of biological networks. But its story is as much human as natural history: how far should our lives be understood within the vast landscape of ecology? What do our buried beliefs about the tidal sea reflect of our relationship to nature? And is it the shifting condition of the tidal world, its pervasive uncertainty, its fierce interfolding of opportunity and threat, that makes it one of the most revelatory and beguiling habitats on earth?
Sybil & Cyril: Cutting through time by Jenny Uglow             $45
In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four year old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts, streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight. Sybil & Cyril traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war. Uglow's enjoyable books always convey their subjects as both exemplars of their time and somehow standing in distinction from it. 
Fabric: The hidden history of the material world by Victoria Finlay            $55
Finlay investigates how and why people have made and used cloth. A century ago in Wales, women would sew their own funeral clothes over tea with friends. In Papua New Guinea, bark is stripped from trees and beaten into cloth. Harris Tweed has a particular smell, while Guatemalan weavers use dazzling colours. Uncovering the stories of the fabrics people wear and use from sacking to silk, Fabric combines science, history, tradition and art in a captivating exploration of how we live, work, craft and care.

A New Name (Septology VI—VII) by Jon Fosse (translated by Damian Searls)         $38
The third and final volume of the Norwegian writer's wonderful 'slow prose' project dealing with the life or lives of two aging painters, each called Asle but one lonely and alcoholic and the other comfortable and successful. Fosse's prose is subtle and hypnotic, and the books deal with existential questions of agency, morality and culpability. 

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood           $48
Essays written between 2004 and 2021, covering a vast range of important (and some less-important but still instructive) issues, with Atwood's characteristic incisiveness, depth of both knowledge and passion, agile wit, and exemplary phrasing. Climate change, authoritarianism, storytelling, zombies and ethics, literature, and granola are all part of Atwood's literary landscape.
The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman (translated by Leslie Camhi)         $48
Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, aka ‘Maman’, smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard and loves too extravagantly. During a joyful and chaotic childhood in Paris, her daughter Violaine wouldn’t have it any other way. But when Maman is hospitalised after a third divorce and breakdown, everything changes. As the story of Catherine’s own traumatic childhood and coming of age unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive.
Long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize. 
The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War mind by Martin Sixsmith             $55
More than any other conflict, the Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. And, nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its legacy still endures — not only in our politics and distressing current affairs, but in our own thoughts, and fears. Drawing on untapped archives and hitherto unseen sources, Martin Sixsmith recreates the tensions and paranoia of the Cold War, framing it for the first time from a psychological perspective. Revisiting towering personalities like Khrushchev, Kennedy and Nixon, as well as the lives of the unknown millions who were caught up in the conflict, this is a gripping account of fear itself — and in today's alarming and uncertain times, it is more resonant than ever.
Five Straight Lines: A history of music by Andrew Grant           $70
Ranging across time and space, this book takes us on a grand musical tour from music's origins in prehistory to the twenty-first century. Charting the leaps in technology, thought and practice that led to extraordinary revolutions of music in each age, the book takes us through medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy and Jazz era America to reveal the rich history of music we still listen to today. Gant brings to life the people who made the music, their techniques and instruments, as well as the places their music was played, from sombre churches to rowdy taverns, stately courts to our very own homes.

Wanderers: A history of women walking by Kerri Andrews         $28
A book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter—o desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury.
In Kiltumper: A year in an Irish garden by Niall Williams and Christine Breen           $43
Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams (author of This Is Happiness and History of the Rain) and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world.
Elephant Island by Leo Timmers               $30
A shipwrecked elephant makes his tiny island a home for the many friends who come to the rescue, building increasingly intricate constructions that turn Elephant Island into a fun park city.


The Language Lover's Puzzle Book: Lexical perplexities and cracking conundrums from across the globe by Alex Bellos         $28
Can you decipher the code of a long-lost civilisation? Or solve riddles in runes? Or will you get lost in translation? Crossing continents and borders, puzzle expert Alex Bellos has gathered more than one hundred of the world's best conundrums that celebrate the diversity of human language and culture, all while testing your deduction and intuition. Fun.



* (Pronounced "Misery")



VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

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Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima (translated by Ginny Takemori and Ian MacDonald)   {Reviewed by STELLA}
What is memory and how does it behave? Or, more accurately, how do we behave when confronted with memories? What we remember could be genuine or fabricated. What we forgot may be purposeful or accidental. Sometimes a happening is just outside our grasp; a thing familiar, hinted at, but not reachable; while at other times what we know has been plainly staring at us, but we have refused to see it. In Kyoko Nakajima’s collection of short stories, memory stands at the centre of her themes. Whether it is a widower getting to know his wife again through her notebooks —  stuffed with recipes, notes-to-self, complaints or pleasures; or a wife navigating her life with her increasingly forgetful husband as he succumbs to dementia; or a niece realising that her taciturn aunt had a secret and pleasurable life, Nakajima’s stories are taut, charming and tantalisingly deceptive, each laced with humour and subtle commentary on Japanese history and culture — societal and familial. What could be taken as quotidian events are surprisingly nuanced. Her concerns with the impact (and what she hints at as a forgetting or pulling away) of the second world war, particularly in the post-war period, are brought to light in several stories, most obviously in the title story, which follows the hardship and decisions made by family during these difficult times, through the eyes of two brothers, and how this has far-reaching consequences well into their future. In 'The Life Story of  Sewing Machine', we follow the glory and fall of an object, the hands which sew upon it and the homes it passes through, ruined, fixed and altered and eventually abandoned or, as it says, left in the dark, to see the light of day again finally at the top of a pile junk at the back of an antique shop. Like many of Nakajima’s stories, she uses a starting point in the present and without warning switches perspective and voice giving a liveliness to the writing as we travel back in time. In 'Kirara’s Paper Plane', a young girl, semi-abandoned as she waits for her mother who is in some sort of trouble, is visited by an older boy who takes her under his wing for a day. A day, because this is all he has. He’s a ghost, one who intermittently finds himself back in his old stomping ground where, after losing his parents in the war, he has struggled to survive on the streets. Ghosts appear in several of the stories, taking in a common element of traditional Japanese fiction, along with reimaginings of traditional folk tales, most markedly in 'The Pet Civet', which folds into its telling the tale of two lovers, one who may have been from the animal spirit realm, as two strangers recount their memories of an aunt. 'When My Wife Was a Shiitake' is charming and thought-provoking, gently touching on prescribed gender roles and fondness that grows through understanding. Kyoko Nakajima’s collection of ten stories, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten is a treat — deceptively sharp, laced with wit, capturing the joy and sadness of remembering and the sometimes necessary desire to forget.
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 



 



































 
Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Writing is a way not to remember but to forget,” suggests Kate Zembrano in this book concerning both her grieving for her mother and her struggle to be free of her mother, who in some ways became more dominating after her death than she was when alive. “Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind,” continues Zembrano. The past dominates the present, not so much in the way in which the present is disposed as in the disposition of our minds towards it: that which we are foolish enough to think of as ourself is dependent utterly upon memory, upon the power of what is not us in the past. This dominance by the lost and unreachable (we cannot assail its moment of power for it lies against the flow of time) is most oppressive when we are unaware of it. Paradoxically, we need to remember in order to escape the past and exist more freely (if existing freely is our predilection). But merely to open ourselves to the past through memory is insufficient to free ourselves of it. To gain control it is necessary to assume authorship, not to change what we cannot reach against time, but to create a simulacrum that is experienced in the place of the experience of the past, a replacement that alters the grammar of our servitude, simultaneously a remembering and a forgetting. “In order to liberate myself from the past I have to reconstruct it. I have been a prisoner of my memories and my aim is to get rid of them,” said Louise Bourgeois. Since her mother’s death, Zembrano’s thoughts have been increasingly focussed on her loving but dominating mother, to the extent that her mother is taking over her life (“Sometimes my mouth opens up and my mother’s laugh jumps out. A parlour trick”). Very possibly, this influence was operative when her mother was alive, but it was at least concentrated in a person who could be interacted with and reacted against. Now “she is everywhere by being unable to be located.” Zambreno’s perceptive book is a study, through self-scrutiny, of the ambivalences of grief and of memory, and also of a path beyond grief: “If writing is a way of hoarding memories - what does it also mean to write to disown?” Not that either remembering or forgetting does any favours to the departed. Without an actual person upon whom an identity, a history, a character may be postulated, and without the generation of new information, however minor, that is possible only by living, the definition of that person belongs to anyone and no-one. Identity becomes contested in the absence of the arbiter. What remains but the impress, somewhere in the past, the shape of which must henceforth suffice as a stand-in for the departed? For better or for worse the pull is to the past, towards the unalterable occurrences that have what could almost be considered as a will to persist through whatever has received their impress. And the struggle for authorship is complicated by the persistence of objects. Death instantaneously transforms the everyday into an archive. Zembrano’s visits to her parents’ house in the years after the death of her mother brings her into contact with objects that have lost their ordinariness, the possessions of her mother’s that her father wishes to enshrine, objects that have stultified, that have not been permitted to either lose or accrete meaning. Both comfort and trap, the archive preserves the dominance of the pastper se, preserves the fact of loss more than that which has been lost. Advances in medical science have meant that more of our lives, and more of the end period of our lives, has come to be defined by illness. Increasingly few of us reach our end without being overwritten by the story of its approach. Zembrano captures well her mother’s struggle with the disease that killed her, not so much over her survival or otherwise as over how she would be remembered, over whether the idea others had of her would be replaced by the story of a disease. All memory proceeds as a scuffle between selection and denial, between nostalgia and resentment, between freedom and attachment, between the conflicting needs of actuality and representation. Memory is the first requirement of forgetting. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

Our Book of the Week is the delightful Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä (translated by Thomas Teal). In 1963, Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä (with the help of Brunström, a local fisherman) built a cabin on Klovharun, a barren skerry in the Gulf of Finland. Here, for the next 26 summers, they found solitude, creative inspiration, and a closeness with nature. This beautiful book conveys their experience of the island, combining Jansson's memories, memorable observations and journal entries, intercut with Brunström's terse and lively diary entries and illustrated with 24 evocative copperplate etchings and wash drawings of the island by Pietilä. The whole book intimates something central to Jansson's world.
>>Stella reviews the book on the radio. 
>>Some notes.
>>Visit Klovharun.
>>Tove and Tooti in Europe (shot on Klovharun by Pietilä) 
>>Tove and Tuulikki.         
>>Tove Jansson falls in love. 
>>Much of Jansson's experience of Klovharun is captured in Moominpappa at Sea.
>>Tuulikki appears as Too-Ticky in Moominland Midwinter. 
>>Books by and about Tove Jansson. 
>>Your copy of Notes from an Island. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

NEW RELEASES
Just click on the books to have them delivered to your door. 

Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä (translated by Thomas Teal)       $35
In 1963, Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä (with the help of Brunström, a local fisherman) built a cabin on Klovharun, a barren skerry in the Gulf of Finland. Here, for the next 26 summers, they found solitude, creative inspiration, and a closeness with nature. This beautiful book conveys their experience of the island, evocatively combining Jansson's memories, observations and journal entries, intercut with Brunström's terse and lively diary entries and illustrated with 24 copperplate etchings and wash drawings of the island by Pietilä. The whole intimates something central to Jansson's world. 
>>Some notes.
>>Visit Klovharun. 
>>Tove and Tuulikki.          
Allegorizings by Jan Morris             $33
Feeling intimations of mortality, Jan Morris embarked on a series of high-minded letters to her late daughter, but these quickly transformed themselves into a potpourri of mini-essays and vibrant reminiscences, organised around experiences both majestic and mundane, from traveling the world with her lifelong partner, Elizabeth, to sneezing and kissing and simply growing old. Featuring essays largely written in the early twenty-first century, Allegorizings reflects, above all, Morris's steadfast conviction that nothing is only what it seems. In fact, she observes, everything is allegory. 

Free Love by Tessa Hadley             $38
"A woman turns her life upside down and feels the allure of swinging 1960s London in this poignant tale of mid-life desire. Hadley’s drawing together of a situation that’s ‘as fatally twisted as a Greek drama’ shows a writer with boundless compassion. She offers insightful and sensitive understanding of the quiet compromises people make to survive in a deeply compromised world. Almost every page struck me anew with some elegant phrasing, feline irony or shrewdly sympathetic insight." —Guardian
Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual trenches, rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy during the Second World War and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman.
Oppositions: Selected essays by Mary Gaitskill                $40
Gaitskill takes on a broad range of topics from Nabokov to horse-riding with her unique ability to tease out unexpected truths and cast aside received wisdom. Written with startling grace and linguistic flair, and delving into the complicated nature of love and the responsibility we owe to the people we encounter, the work collected here inspires the reader to think beyond their first responses to life and art. 
Confronting Leviathan: A history of ideas by David Runciman             $45
While explaining the most important and often-cited ideas of thinkers such as Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon and Fukuyama, David Runciman shows how crises — revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics — generated these new ways of political thinking. What new ideas, practices and social forms will arise from the crises facing us today? 
Frantumaglia: A writer's journey by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)          $33
Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, this volume is a unique depiction of the author whose 'true' identity is unknown. In these pages, Ferrante answers many of her readers' questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that that story isn't good enough. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse for memories, impressions, and fantasies.
In the Margins: Essays on reading and writing by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)                $28
"Four essays illuminate the mind of Ferrante in this dazzling new collection. The collection's strength comes from Ferrante's beautiful prose, as well as the fascinating look at where she finds inspiration. The author's legions of fans are in for a treat." —Publishers Weekly
 
Song of Less by Joan Fleming               $25
"The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark. Deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into the ground. From somewhere offstage, a misery of voices begins to murmur in the scrounge. What starts up is a grief work."
A dystopian verse novel from a New Zealand poet, exploring ritual and the limits of language in the ruins of ecological collapse.
Beats of the Pa'u by Maria Samuela           $30
The pa‘u is the pulse of the Cook Islands, a rhythm carrying narratives of a culture to its people. But beyond the reach of its sound, on another shore, a community is working over the course of decades to build a new life. Kura lands in the footsteps of his father, whose twenty-year estrangement has come to a head. Katerina starts planning for a future, but must bend to the whim of another. Ana is received into a sacred sisterhood. And an Island Mama sets out the rules for love. Beats of the Pa‘u is a collection of stories about first- and second-generation Cook Islands New Zealanders living in 1950s to modern-day New Zealand. 
Bauhaus Postcards (Invitations to the first exhibition, Weimar, 1923)          $45
In 1923, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius commissioned 20 postcards from artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky to use as promotional flyers for the school's first exhibition. Issued here for the first time in their original format, these postcards perfectly express the spirit of the early Bauhaus. The box contains 60 cards (3 of each of the 20).
Looking for Trouble by Virginia Cowles           $40
Madrid in the Spanish Civil War Prague during the Munich crisis, Berlin the day Germany invaded Poland, Helsinki as the Russians attacked Moscow betrayed by the Nazis, Paris as it fell to the Germans, London on the first day of the Blitz— Virginia Cowles saw it all. As a pioneering female correspondent, she reported from Europe from the 1930s into the Second World War, watching 'the lights in the death-chamber go out one by one' from the frontline.


An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec (translated by Marc Lowenthal)           $30
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the 'infraordinary': the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday—"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin. 
Everyday Play: A campaign against boredom edited by Julian Rothenstein           $48
Are you bored by daily routine? Learn how to restore play to the everyday, with games and life tips from artists, writers and thinkers from Louise Bourgeois and Hunter S. Thompson to Lydia Davis and Karl Lagerfeld. "Life must be lived as play," said Plato, and this book will help you rediscover the wonder in the weekly grind, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. Learn how to be someone else for a day; explore how to draw a poem, paint a book and reorient your library; enjoy writers using constraints or languages they don't understand; play the Edible Book Game or become a living sculpture; become a writer and play word games to find new ways of saying what you mean. Everyday Play is the essential compendium of artists' games, philosophers' inquiries and manifestos against the banal. They will challenge our perceptions of work, rest and play, with contributions from, among others, Joan Acocella, Luis Buñuel, Lewis Carroll, Robert Creeley, Adam Dant, Lydia Davis, Jeremy Deller, Dashiell Hammett, Will Hobson, Nina Katchadourian, Andrei Monastyrski, Francis Ponge, Erik Satie and Marc Wahlberg.
The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the battle for the North Sea empire by Tore Skeie (translated by Alison McCullough)               $55
In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea were all hungry for power. To get power they needed soldiers, to get soldiers they needed silver, and to get silver there was no better way than war and plunder. This vicious cycle drew all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that shattered kingdoms and forged an empire. The Wolf Age takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.
From Manchester with Love: The life and opinions of Tony Wilson (a.k.a. Anthony H. Wilson) by Paul Morley           $45
To write about Tony Wilson, a.k.a. Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities, a clique of unreliable narrators, constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and The Hacienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy Division, THe Durutti Column and OMD  into the world as he pursued myriad other creative endeavours, appointing himself a custodian of Manchester's legacy of innovation and change. To Paul Morley he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, shrewd mentor, insatiable publicity seeker. 
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet)            $28
Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town's alternately drab and absurd existence. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.
"Baron Wenkcheim's Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai's tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists." —Paris Review
The Greeks: A global history by Roderick Beaton           $55
The way we think, the way we learn; the forms of entertainment we seek and the systems by which we allow ourselves to be ruled - all of this finds its roots in a small group of people who first emerged in Mycenae over 3,000 years ago. The story of the Greeks is a story that covers the entire globe and four millennia, from the mythical 'Age of the Heroes' to the complex European state of today. For all the fame of the Greek Byzantine Empire and the glorifications of the ancient culture during the Renaissance, this is not a simple, victorious history of a single enduring culture. It is littered with peril and disasters, with oppression and near obliteration.
Granta 157: Should we have styed at home? edited by William Atkins          $28
In 1984, Granta published its first issue devoted to travel writing. Nearly forty years after that genre-defining volume, a new generation of writers from around the globe offers a new vision of what travel writing can be. From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is 'locked-down'). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger — to acknowledge that one person's frontier is another's home. In this issue: Jason Allen-Paisant remembers the trees of his childhood Jamaica from his home in Leeds; Carlos Manuel Alvarez navigates Cuba's customs system, translated by Frank Wynne; Eliane Brum travels from her home in the Brazilian Amazon to Antarctica in the era of climate crisis, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty; Francisco Cantu and Javier Zamora: a former border guard travels to the US-Mexico border with a former undocumented migrant who crossed the border as a child; Jennifer Croft's richly illustrated essay on postcards and graffiti, inspired by Los Angeles; Bathsheba Demuth visits a whale-hunting station on the Bering Strait, Russia; Sinead Gleeson visits Brazil with Clarice Lispector; Kate Harris with the Tinglit people of the Taku River basin, Alaska; Artist Roni Horn on Iceland; Emmanuel Iduma returns to Lagos in his late father's footsteps, Nigeria; Kapka Kassabova among the gatherers of the ancient Mesta River, Bulgaria; Taran Khan with Afghan migrants in Germany and Kabul; Jessica J. Lee in the alleyways of Taipei, Taiwan, in search of her mother's home; Ben Mauk among the volcanoes of Duterte's Philippines; Pascale Petit tracks tigers in Paris and India; Photographer James Tylor on the legacy of whaling in Indigenous South Australia, introduced by Dominic Guerrera.
A Bad Business, Essential stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Nicolas Slater Pasternak and Maya Slater)             $28
The stories in this collection range from impossible fantasy to scorching satire. A civil servant finds a new passion for his work when he's swallowed alive by a crocodile. A struggling writer stumbles on a cemetery where the dead still talk to each other. An arrogant but well-intentioned gentleman provokes an uproar at an aide's wedding, and in the marital bed. And a young boy finds unexpected salvation on a cold and desolate Christmas Eve.
Each of the 150 cheeses on Palmer's cheeseboard is accompanied by a morsel of history or a dash of folklore, a description of its flavours, and an illustration.

I Would Prefer Not To, Essential stories by Herman Melville          $28
A lawyer hires a new copyist, only to be met with stubborn, confounding resistance. A cynical lightning rod salesman plies his trade by exploiting fears in stormy weather. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, an American trader's cheerful outlook is repeatedly shadowed by paralyzing unease.
"Some of the most brilliant stories of his or any other century. From proto-existentialist Bartleby-whose dry, ironic voice of resistance chimes with our own times-to the dark ocean gothic of Benito Cereno, he surpasses any expectation'." —Philip Hoare




VOLUME BooksNew releases

There's a Ghost in this House. Can you see it? In our very enjoyable Book of the Week by Oliver Jeffers, a young girl looks everywhere in a haunted house but cannot find the ghosts that are supposed to live here. The tracing paper overlays show the reader just where they are hiding (and playing), however! A large amount of lightly spooky fun. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Looking for ghosts. 
>>An eternity of looking for keys. 
>>Humour, with a little darkness. 
>>Do you believe in ghosts? 
>>We can send a copy to anyone!

 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


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There's a Ghost in this House by Oliver Jeffers    {Reviewed by STELLA}
From the wrap-around translucent tracing paper dust-jacket to the hand-lettered font, to the wonderfully apt dimensions and quality of the paper, There’s a Ghost in this House will immediately draw you in. And this is even before you get to the best bits. This delightful ghostly tale of a girl determined to discover the ghost in her house is another standout from illustrator and author Oliver Jeffers. I loved the muted tones in this picture book, and how Jeffers has integrated his drawings and characters in a collage style with black-and-white images of furniture and interiors gleaned from old books and catalogues — predominately photographic. Add to this the clever use of tracing paper to expose the ghosts who are hiding in plain sight, small detail drawings, and the simple evocative text, and the appeal of this picture book is complete. The young girl who lives in the supposedly haunted house spends her days wandering the large old house looking in all the usual places where ghosts might be: in the attic, in the cupboard under the stairs, in the hall — where she may have heard them rattling their chains, under the bed, and up the chimney, and of course, in the rooms where the lights are off. Alas, to no avail. She wonders what they look like. She’s heard “some say they are white with holes for eyes”. The joy of this picture book lies in the ‘appearance’ of the ghosts as you turn the tracing paper pages. At first, they are quiet and hardly noticeable, but after a while, they become bolder and the relationship between the reader and ghosts, who are still invisible to the young girl, becomes a shared secret. There's plenty of quirky fun here, and Jeffers’s humour comes to the fore: the baby ghost, complete with a dummy, peeping over the edge of the cot. The ghosts under the table — one looking directly out of the page to the reader with a 'shh' finger raised to its lips. Ghosts that swing from chandeliers, ghosts that stop for a cup of tea and a chat, ghosts reading in the library and jumping on the bed. The ghosts are watching our brightly coloured girl and following her every move as she tours the house in her never-ending search, sure that someone is watching her. But where is the ghost?  And the more you look, the more you see! Irresistible.
VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella

 


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

 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
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. 

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.
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
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
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. 






VOLUME BooksNew releases

 


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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.
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> 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.”
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


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. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 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
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. 


VOLUME BooksNew releases
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.




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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.
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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. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas