NEW RELEASES 

The Undercurrents: A story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell              $37
The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories. The Undercurrents: is a mix of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin's Landwehr canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this apartment window offers a ringside seat onto the city's theatre of action. The building has stood on the banks of the Landwehr Canal in central Berlin since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. 
When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell — a British-American writer in her mid-forties, adrift — becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. She moved into this house in 2014 with her then-husband and two sons, but before her was Herr Zimmermann, the wood-dealer who built the house, and the Salas, a family of printers who took it over in 1908, and lived here through both world wars. Their adopted daughter Melitta Sala, a Kriegskind or 'child of the war', inherited the building and takes hold of her imagination. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it is Kirsty Bell's turn to look out of this apartment window. She looks to the lives of the house's various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city's familiar narratives.
"It is easy to be carried along by these submerged currents, by the momentum of the prose, the motion through a resisting city. As in other classics of urban discovery, the personal becomes universal, and the past that demands to live in the present is revealed like a shining new reef. As we return, time and again, to the solitary figure at the window." —Iain Sinclair
"With The Undercurrents, Kirsty Bell does for Berlin what Lucy Sante has done for New York and Rebecca Solnit for San Francisco; she tells the stories recorded in the city's stone and water, and in the hearts of its inhabitants. Her profound and idiosyncratic chronicle of Berlin is an act of hydromancy, divining a history of love and loss from the water that flows beneath and between the city's bricks." —Dan Fox
"I read this watery, engrossing book in the bath, following along as Kirsty Bell's reflective curiosity leads her onward along the Landwehr canal, in and out of the archives, novels, memoirs, and stories of her building and her neighbourhood. Evocative and fascinating, The Undercurrents is a liquid psychogeography of Berlin that had me mulling over the psychic charge of place not only where Bell lives, but where I live too." —Lauren Elkin
>>Against repression. 

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (translated by Mara Faye Lethem)            $33
When Domenec — mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer — dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war. But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life's struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain — human, animal and other — come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable book is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.
"When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving." —Max Porter
"This novel about, well, everything, is fine-tuned to a kind of astonished and astonishing connectivity that's an act of revolutionary revitalisation up against the odds of any despairing." —Ali Smith
>>The first crack in the eggshell.
>>Witches, mushrooms, collective voices. 

Te Ohaki Tapu: John Stuart Mill and Ngati Maniapoto by Maurice Ormsby             $40
Te Ohaki Tapu (the Formal Pact) was made between 1882 and 1885 by five tribes of the Rohe Potae (King Country) led by Ngati Maniapoto, with the colonial government which needed land for the main trunk railway line. The iwi sought access to the wider money economy, European agricultural technology and development finance. The influence of Utilitarianism — and of its proponent John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist — is evident in Te Ohaki Tapu, as it is in the 1835 Ngapuhi declaration of independence and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Unlike the Treaty, Te Ohaki Tapu took place in the context of an established New Zealand legal system and a parliamentary democracy. Although the government did not honour the Formal Pact, Ngati Maniapoto did, even to the point of going to war on behalf of its erstwhile enemies. The agreement has yet to be tested in court. The Utilitarian basis of our public policy is still apparent today. It explains the marked difference in approaches to lawmaking between New Zealand and countries such as Australia and the United States. Well researched and presented. 
Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell)         $40
A tender, acute, hilarious saga about fathers, sons and the many forms of family, from a writer internationally heralded as a voice of his generation. Gonzalo is a frustrated would-be poet in a city full of poets; poets lurk in every bookshop, prop up every bar, ready to debate the merits of Teillier and Millan (but never Neruda - beyond the pale). Then, nine years after their bewildering breakup, Gonzalo reunites with his teen sweetheart, Carla, who is now, to his surprise, the mother of a young son, Vicente. Soon they form a happy sort-of family - a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. In time, fate and ambition pull the lovers apart, but when it comes to love and poetry, what will be Gonzalo's legacy to his not-quite-stepson Vicente? Zambra chronicles with tenderness and insight the everyday moments - absurd, painful, sexy, sweet, profound - that constitute family life.
"His clever irony, his lighthearted yet powerful prose, his gift for capturing this life that passes through and yet still escapes us — everything Zambra has already put into practice in his novellas and short stories explodes with vitality in Chilean Poet. Contemporary, ingenious, magnificent." —Samanta Schweblin
>>Roberto Bolaño inspired him to write.
>>The book is apparently about Chile and poetry.
>>Read Thomas's review of Not To Read. 
>>Read Thomas's review of My Documents. 
>>Read Thomas's review of Multiple Choice.
The Naked Don't Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins               $33
In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year. Matthieu Aikins, a journalist living in Kabul, decides to follow his friend. In order to do so, he must leave his own passport and identity behind to go underground on the refugee trail with Omar. Their odyssey across land and sea from Afghanistan to Europe brings them face to face with the people at heart of the migration crisis: smugglers, cops, activists, and the men, women and children fleeing war in search of a better life. As setbacks and dangers mount for the two friends, Matthieu is also drawn into the escape plans of Omar's entire family, including Maryam, the matriarch who has fought ferociously for her children's survival.
"A riveting and heartrending look at the hidden world of refugees that challenged everything I thought I knew about the consequences of war and globalisation. It's the most important work on the global refugee crisis to date, and a crucial document of these tumultuous times. It will go down as one of the great works of nonfiction literature of our generation." —Anand Gopal
>>An act of love. 
The Instant by Amy Liptrot          $33
The new book from the author of The Outrun. Wishing to leave behind the quiet isolation of her Orkney island life, Amy Liptrot books a one-way flight to Berlin. Searching for new experiences, inspiration and love, she rents a loft bed in a shared flat and looks for work. She explores the streets, nightclubs and parks and seeks out the city's wildlife - goshawks, raccoons and hooded crows. She looks for love through the screen of her laptop. Over the course of a year Amy makes space hoping for the unexpected. And it comes with an erotic jolt, in the form of a love affair that obsesses her. The Instant is an unapologetic look at the addictive power of love and lust. It is also an exploration of the cycles of the moon, the flight paths of migratory birds, the mesmerising power of Neolithic stonework and the trails followed by a generation who exist online.
"Intoxicating, generous and refreshingly original. The way Liptrot weaves her inner life with the natural world and the digital world is utterly absorbing. This book is so alive and so wild." —Lucy Jones
The Wonders by Elena Medel (translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead)             $37
Maria and Alicia are a grandmother and granddaughter who have never met. Decades apart, both are drawn to Madrid in search of work and independence. Maria, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until her family was brought low by tragedy, now trapped in a low-paid job and a cycle of banal infidelities. Their lives are marked by precarity, and by the haunting sense of how things might have been different. Through a series of arresting vignettes, Elena Medel weaves together a broken family's story, stretching from the last years of Franco's dictatorship to the 2018 Spanish Women's Strike. Audacious, intimate and shot through with sharp-edged lyricism, The Wonders is a revelatory novel about the many ways that lives are shaped by class, history and feminism; about what has changed for working-class women, and what has remained stubbornly the same.
 "A mesmerizing read. I was completely engrossed in this story, in the shadow each generation casts on the one that comes after it, in the tension between caring for oneself and caring for others." —Avni Doshi
"Completely unsentimental and with a harshness that hides the most radiant and painful of scars, Elena Medel's The Wonders brings to life several generations of working women: it's a serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism, and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore." —Mariana Enriquez
Kingdom of Characters: A tale of language, obsession and genius in modern China by Jing Tsu         $50
China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language — a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike — accessible to a globalised, digital world. Kingdom of Characters follows the innovators who adapted the Chinese script — and the value-system it represents — to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences.
Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast           $40
A la recherche du temps perdu belongs in the tradition of the Initiation Story, the journey it describes combining elements drawn from the earlier narratives of great expectations and lost illusions, while recasting them in ways that are distinctively Proust's. The Proust scholar Christopher Prendergast traces that journey as it unfolds on an arc defined by the polarity of his title, living and dying. The book offers a chapter by chapter exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, woven by the pulse of desire, the hauntings of memory and an ever alert responsiveness to tastes, perfumes, sounds, and colours. It also traces the construction of a unique architecture of narrative time and a corresponding mode of story-telling, marked by all manner of loops, swerves, detours, regressions and returns, from the macro level of the novel's plot to the micro level of the famously elaborate Proustian sentence. The lives of his characters, both major and minor, are shown as criss-crossing and converging in ways that often take the reader by surprise, before descending the arc on an irreversible trajectory of decline, as the body starts to fail and the grave beckons.
"A work buzzing with appetite and curiosity — a real delight. No Proustian should be without it." —Andrew Marr
"Literate, lively, and leavened by wry and gentle humour, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is a feast."' —Lydia Davis
Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A new biography of the Old City by Matthew Teller          $40
In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. The Old City has never had 'four quarters' as its maps proclaim. And beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, many of its quarters are little known to visitors, its people ignored and their stories untold. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem lets the communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging from ancient past to political present, it evokes the city's depth and cultural diversity. Matthew Teller's highly original 'biography' features not just Jerusalem's Palestinian and Jewish communities, but its African and Indian voices, its Greek and Armenian and Syriac communities, its downtrodden Dom-gypsy families and its Sufi mystics. It discusses the sources of Jerusalem's holiness and the ideas — often startlingly secular — that have shaped lives within its walls. It is an evocation of place through story, led by the voices of Jerusalemites.
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte             $40
The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They - or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars, molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions.
Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin, illustrated by Ryuto Miyake          $50
From the Sociable Weaver Bird in Namibia which constructs huge, multi-nest 'apartment blocks' in the desert, to the Bar-headed Goose of China, one of the highest-flying migrants which crosses the Himalayas twice a year. Many birds come steeped in folklore and myth, some are national emblems and a few have inspired scientific revelation or daring conservation projects. Each has a story to tell that sheds a light on our relationship with the natural world and reveals just how deeply birds matter to us. Beautifully illustrated. 
Vegan at Home: Recipes for a modern plant-based lifestyle by Solla Eiríksdóttir               $60
Three sections cover: Basics (vegan staples such as nut milks and tofu); Everyday (breakfast through to dinner); and Celebrations, which spotlights a meal strategy for larger events. The 75 basic recipes for vegan staples such as nut milks and tofu provide the foundation for the 70 dishes that will take you from breakfast through to dinner. 
The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo (translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim)         $33
Hornclaw is a sixty-five-year-old female contract killer who is considering retirement. A fighter who has experienced loss and grief early on in life, she lives in a state of self-imposed isolation, with just her dog, Deadweight, for company. While on an assassination job for the 'disease control' company she works for, Hornclaw makes an uncharacteristic error, causing a sequence of events that brings her past well and truly into the present. Threatened with sabotage by a young male upstart and battling new desires and urges when she least expects them, Hornclaw steels her resolve.
"A gripping thriller as well as a deeply thoughtful book about out attitudes to ageing and grief. Wonderful stuff'." —Doug Johnstone
The Colony by Audrey Magee          $33
Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine - the authentic experience. Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place - one in his paintings, the other with his faithful rendition of its speech, the language he hopes to preserve. But the people who live here on this rock - three miles wide and half-a-mile long - have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Over the summer each of the women and men in the household this French and Englishman join is forced to question what they value and what they desire. At the end of the summer, as the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.
"Intelligent and provocative. The Colony contains multitudes - on families, on men and women, on rural communities - with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water." —The Times
"A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee's strong prose." —Sarah Moss
The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with Husserl's phenomenological school. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture on a cramped Berlin tram. Over the next decade, the lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine as each gains world-historical significance, between them remaking Western philosophy.
A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 billion years in 12 chapters by Henry Gee           $40
For billions of years, Earth was an inhospitably alien place - covered with churning seas, slowly crafting its landscape by way of incessant volcanic eruptions, the atmosphere in a constant state of chemical flux. And yet, despite facing literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter, life has been extinguished and picked itself up to evolve again. Life has learned and adapted and continued through the billions of years that followed. It has weathered fire and ice. Slimes begat sponges, who through billions of years of complex evolution and adaptation grew a backbone, braved the unknown of pitiless shores, and sought an existence beyond the sea. From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted. Life teems through Henry Gee's prose; supercontinents drift, collide, and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today. Creatures are introduced, from 'gregarious' bacteria populating the seas to duelling dinosaurs in the Triassic period to mammals with the future in their (newly evolved) grasp. Those long extinct, almost alien early life forms are resurrected in evocative detail. 
The Beginners by Anne Serre (translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson)        $37
Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. "How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that's not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross." Unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd.
"Genuinely original—and, often, very quietly so. Seriously weird and seriously excellent—call it the anglerfish of literature." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times 
The Passenger: Ireland         $33
On the centenary of the partition that split the island in two, The Passenger sets off to discover a land full of charm, and conflict, a country that in just a few decades has gone from being a poor, semi-theocratic society to a thriving economy free from the influence of the Catholic Church. With 1998's peace agreements, the conflict between nationalists and unionists seemed, if not resolved, at least dormant. But Brexit — with the ambiguous position it leaves Northern Ireland in — caused old tensions to resurface. The Passenger explores their ramifications in politics, society, culture, and sport. Meanwhile, south of the border, epochal transformation has seen a deeply patriarchal, conservative society give space to diversity, the only country in the world to enshrine gay marriage in law through a referendum. And there's a whole other Ireland abroad, an Irish diaspora that looks to the old country with new-found pride, but doesn't forget the ugliness it fled from. Memory and identity intertwine with the transformations — from globalisation to climate change — that are remodelling the Irish landscape, from the coastal communities under threat of disappearing together with the Irish language fishermen use to talk about the sea, while inland the peat bogs, until recently important sources of energy and jobs, are being abandoned. From Catherine Dunne to Colum McCann, Mark O'Connell and Sara Baume, Irish (but not only) writers and journalists tell of a country striving to stay a step ahead of time.
Really Big Questions for Daring Thinkers by Stephen Law and Nishant Choksi        $23
What is the meaning of life? Is time travel possible? Why should I be nice? These questions and more are discussed giving young readers a chance to think about the real problems of philosophy themselves. 
Wild Green Wonders: A life in nature by Patrick Barkham            $37
A selection of twenty years' worth of Patrick Barkham's writings for the Guardian, bearing witness to the many changes we have imposed upon the planet and the challenges lying ahead for the future of nature. From Norwegian wolves to protests against the HS2 railway, peregrine falcons nesting by the Thames to Britain's last lion tamer, Barkham paints an ever-changing portrait of contemporary wildlife. This collection also presents interviews with conservationists, scientists, activists and writers such as Rosamund Young, Ronald Blythe and other eco-luminaries, including Sir David Attenborough and Brian May.

How To Live. What To Do. How great novels help us change by Josh Cohen        $24
From the truths and lies we tell about ourselves to the resonant creations of fiction, stories give shape and meaning to all our lives. Both a practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of literature, Josh Cohen has long been taken with the mutual echoes between the life struggles of the consulting room and the dramas of the novel. So what might the most memorable characters in literature tell us about how to live meaningfully?
"By the end of this wonderful book, we have learned to read its title not as a prescription but as a set of questions. Neither novels nor psychoanalysis promise to finally answer those questions. Instead, they invite us to look and listen - and to live in a way that lets us keep asking." —Times Literary Supplement
>>We strongly recommend Losers. 


VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Our Book of the Week is Jennifer Egan's sharp and compelling new novel The Candy House. in which a new digital technology, Own Your Unconscious, gives users access to every memory and experience they've ever had, and to share access to those memories and experiences with others. Told in a wide array of styles, and by different characters and in different times, the novel takes us on a wide-eyed roller-coaster ride through the not-too-distant future—and through the age-old 'problems' of consciousness, memory and identity that we are now facing with new urgency as we consider the possibility of digital minds. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.

































 

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan   {Reviewed by STELLA}
Be careful what you wish for. A catch-cry of our present time is a desire to find meaningful connection, to be part of a community within which we are specific and individual. Yet in reality we are more likely to find ourselves awash in a social media sea. In Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, the desire for authenticity and connection is high and the clever Bix Bouton has the key. Bix is rich and successful. A fast-thinker graduate, his start-up, Mandala, took off, but now he’s out of ideas and craving something of the magic of his younger self. Infiltrating an academic discussion group where they are prying open the social anthropologist Miranda Kline’s theory Patterns of Affinity, kicks off the lightbulb for Bix. And the beautiful cube, Own Your Unconscious, is born. Get yourself a beautiful cube and download your memory — your every moment and feeling: either just for yourself so you can revisit childhood or recall a moment; or upload for the wider community — to The Collective Consciousness — so memories can be shared and information found (sound familiar?). Now Bix is richer, more successful, a celebrity who’s a regular at The White House and loved by many. Life is good. Yet at the edges there is doubt. And not everyone is a believer. There are eluders, those that wipe themselves to escape — pretty much losing their identity for freedom from the technological behemoth. There is Mondrian, an organisation that sees ethical problems within this set-up and offers a way out for those who feel trapped. This novel has connections to her Pultizer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. There are characters who exist in both, and actions that are revisited by the curious, in particular the next generation who live with the consequences. There’s the anonymity of the urban and the claustrophobia of suburban landscapes, alongside the openness of the desert and the endless possibilities of the sea. All these landscapes play their role in the interior landscapes (the minds) of the diverse array of characters. This is a novel that does not stay still. There is no straight line in The Candy House. Egan writes explosive short pieces, chapters which connect, disconnect and reconnect (sometimes) in surprising ways. Characters are related in familial and relationship lines, or by deed, or the outsourced memory of deeds. Some we meet once, others on several occasions — they are in turn in all their guises: adults, children, parents, siblings. This may sound disjointed, and at times the narrative may lead you astray, but the thematic pulse runs continuously through. As in her earlier Goon Squad, Egan plays with structure and different narrative styles. There is the 'Lulu the Spy' chapter told in bite-sized dispatch commands — a tensely addictive reading experience; there is a brilliantly cutting e-mail conversation chapter where the narcissistic desires of the correspondents will make you wince; and there is the mathematically genius 'i, Protaganist' in which a man tries to realise his crush through obsessive statistical analysis. Knitted seamlessly into this wonderland of ideas are the concrete desires, fears and concerns of various humans, all achingly searching for authenticity within an illusionary world. An energetically clever novelist, Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House gives you sweet treats, as well as a whirlwind of sugary highs and lows. Put down the cube and pick up The Candy House. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 

















 


300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” states Manguso in one of the 300 aphorisms and ‘arguments’ (as in ‘the argument of the story’ rather than a disputation) that comprise this enjoyable little book. Indeed the whole does feel as if it bears some relation to another considerably longer but nonexistent text, either as a reader’s quotings or marginalia, or as a writer’s folder of sentences-to-use-sometime or jottings towards a novel she has not yet written (“To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say that it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer”). Many of the aphorisms are pithy and self-contained, often dealing with awkwardness and degrees of experiential dysphoria (so to call it), and other passages, none of which are more than a few sentences long, are distillates or subsubsections of stories that are not further recorded but which can be felt to pivot on these few sentences. Some of the ‘arguments’ reveal unexpected aspects of universal experiences (“When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief” or “Hating is an act of respect” or “Vocation and ambition are different but ambition doesn’t know the difference”) and others are lighter, more particular (and, it must be said, a few could belong on calendars on the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms). Some of the arguments are just singular observations: “The boy realises that if he can feed a toy dog a cracker, he can just as easily feed a toy train a cracker” or “Many bird names are onomatopoeic — they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.” To read the whole book is to feel the spaces and stories that form the invisible backdrop for these scattered points of light, and the reader is left with a residue similar to that with which you are left having read a whole novel.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

NEW RELEASES

Here Be Icebergs by Katya Adaui (translated by Rosalind Harvey)          $34
The mysteries of kinship (families born into and families made) take disconcerting and familiar shapes in these refreshingly frank short stories. A family is haunted by a beast that splatters fruit against its walls every night, another undergoes a near-collision with a bus on the way home from the beach. Mothers are cold, fathers are absent—we know these moments in the abstract, but Adaui makes each as uncanny as our own lives: close but not yet understood.
"With this book Katya Adaui consolidates her position as one of the most subtle and original Peruvian writers in recent years." —El País
Absence by Lucie Paye (translated by Natasha Lehrer)            $36
A painter obsessively attempts to depict a mysterious female figure who keeps on appearing under his brush. An anonymous woman addresses letters to an absent loved one. Through a sequence of affecting images, Absence dramatises the role of the unconscious in artistic creation and the power of unconditional love.
"Enigmatic and magnetic. An elusive novel, its heartbeat muffled and secretive. Its oscillations are at first intriguing, then captivating, and finally mesmerising. The book’s pulse goes to the reader’s head like a strong liquor sipped slowly." – Le Matricule des Anges
"In her first novel Lucie Paye sets words to the page with a fine brush. Nothing is overworked, least of all pain. Paye appreciates the half-lights, and her delicate style favours these nuanced feelings. Within these pages is a melancholy and disquiet in the ‘Pessoan’ sense of the word, but they are never overcast. ‘Painters, like writers, are thieves. They transfer and transport landscapes, in their dreams and in their worlds,’ wrote painter Kees van Dongen. Rarely have these words seemed so true as when reading this novel, at the confluence of the two art forms. Paye’s novel explores the link between the artist and their work, through the unconscious and the creative process. It also examines the relation of the viewer of a work, projecting emotions and desires onto it – and seeing in it what we want to see. Our personal perspective can distance us from the artist’s own intentions. It doesn’t matter, the main thing is to have felt something, to have been given access to the things of which, without art, we could never have dreamed." –Le Figaro Littéraire
Much attention has been paid to so-called late style — but what about last style? When does last begin? How early is late? When does the end set in? Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who've mattered to him throughout his life. He examines Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, J.M.W. Turner's paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane's cosmic melodies, Jean Rhys's return from the dead (while still alive) and Beethoven's final quartets — and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Oh, and there's some mention of Roger Federer and tennis too.
“A masterful, beautiful, reluctantly moving book — that is, moving despite its subject being naturally moving, courting no pathos, shrewd and frank — and Dyer’s best in some time. Indeed, one of his best, period.” —Los Angeles Times
Stretto by David Wheatley                $35
Stretto is both a novel of travel and of migration, moving between Ireland, England and Scotland over a twenty-year period, and an exploration of the nature of self and reality, reconnecting with the modernist energies of Joyce and Beckett.
"David Wheatley has composed a text so intricately figured, made out of the tones and notes and embellishments of family life and of work and the many-faceted elements of the imagination, that it reflects precisely the impetus and forward motion of the musical movement its title describes. Each section is a bar of poetry both fitted within and overlaying the prose that describes it; each page and a half is measured to sing out exactly in the key and time signature to which it has been set. Wondrous." —Kirsty Gunn

Otherlands: A world in the making by Thomas Halliday          $40
An exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description—whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air—is grounded in the fossil record. Otherlands is an imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life—yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
>>Also available as a nice hardback, $54.

Worn: A people's history of clothing by Sofi Thanhauser             $55
Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool. Through the stories of these five fabrics, Sofi Thanhauser illuminates the world we inhabit in a startling new way, travelling from China to Cumbria to reveal the craft, labour and industry that create the clothes we wear. From the women who transformed stalks of flax into linen to clothe their families in 19th century New England to those who earn their dowries in the cotton spinning factories of South India today, this book traces the origins of garment making through time and around the world. Exploring the social, economic and environmental impact of our most personal possessions, Worn looks beyond care labels to show how clothes reveal the truth about what we really care about.
The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate, culture, catastrophe by Mark Bould           $33
Today’s movies, television, and novels are pregnant with catastrophe, with extreme weather and rising waters, with environmental wildness and climate weirdness, but this book is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change — that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature, this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations.
The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund                $35
Countries go wrong sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country—a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong. In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: a member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic, hoping for a decent tip and a five-star rating. He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to man up if he wants to impress N., the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English. Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever have a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway?
When a chief’s son is taken by the taniwha, Te Hiakai, the people devise many plans to trap and kill the taniwha, but each time Te Hiakai outwits them. In the end, Pōhutukawa, a chief’s daughter, speaks to the taniwha. Through her words a spell is broken, and the taniwha transforms into a young warrior, Te Haeata, who had been cursed by a tohunga long ago. Pōhutukawa and Te Haeata fall in love and live out their lives together. But Te Haeata never quite shakes off the spell, and in old age, he transforms into an eel and becomes a guardian in the Rangitāiki river.
Available in either te Reo or English. 
Control: The dark history and troubling present of eugenics by Adam Rutherford           $45
Throughout history, people have sought to improve society by reducing suffering, eliminating disease or enhancing desirable qualities in their children. But this wish goes hand in hand with the desire to impose control over who can marry, who can procreate and who is permitted to live. In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's ideas about evolution, a new full-blooded attempt to impose control over our unruly biology began to grow in the clubs, salons and offices of the powerful. It was enshrined in a political movement that bastardised science, and for sixty years enjoyed bipartisan and huge popular support. Eugenics was vigorously embraced in dozens of countries. It was also a cornerstone of Nazi ideology, and forged a path that led directly to the gates of Auschwitz. But the underlying ideas are not merely historical. The legacy of eugenics persists in our language and literature, from the words 'moron' and 'imbecile' to the themes of some of our greatest works of culture. Today, with new gene editing techniques, very real conversations are happening - including in the heart of British government - about tinkering with the DNA of our unborn children, to make them smarter, fitter, stronger. Control tells the story of attempts by the powerful throughout history to dictate reproduction and regulate the interface of breeding and society. It is an urgently needed examination that unpicks one of the defining and most destructive ideas of the twentieth century. To know this history is to inoculate ourselves against its being repeated.
Unlocking the World: Port cities and globalisation in the Age of Steam, 1830—1930 by John Darwin          $26
Steam power transformed our world, initiating the complex, resource-devouring industrial system the consequences of which we live with today. It revolutionised work and production, but also the ease and cost of movement over land and water. The result was to throw open vast areas of the world to the rampaging expansion of Europeans and Americans on a scale previously unimaginable. 
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo            $33
A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animal denizens lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals - along with a new leader. A charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled and kept on ruling. For forty years he ruled, with the help of his elite band of Chosen Ones, a scandalously violent pack of Defenders and, as he aged, his beloved and ambitious young donkey wife, Marvellous. But even the sticks and stones know there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn. And so it did for the Old Horse, one day as he sat down to his Earl Grey tea and favorite radio programme. A new regime, a new leader. Or apparently so. And once again, the animals were full of hope... An energetic novel exploring the fall of Robert Mugabe. 
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley           $33
Kiara Johnson does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a rehab facility and an older brother who devotes his time and money to a recording studio, she fends for herself - and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother is prone to disappearing for days at a time. As the landlord of their apartment block threatens to raise their rent, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her. Then one night Kiara is picked up by two police officers, and the gruesome deal she is offered in exchange for her freedom lands her at the centre of a media storm. If she agrees to testify in a grand jury trial, she could help expose the sickening corruption of a police department. But honesty comes at a price - one that could leave her family vulnerable to their retaliation, and endanger everyone she loves.
"Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won't easily get out of your head. When asked how to write in a world dominated by a white culture, Toni Morrison once responded: 'By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress or confine it. Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.' At a time when structural imbalances of capital, heath, gender, and race deepen divides, the young American Leila Mottley's debut novel is a searing testament to the liberated spirit and explosive ingenuity of such storytelling." —The Guardian
"A truly beautiful and powerful book." —Ruth Ozeki
How To Be a Refugee: One family's story of exile and belonging by Simon May          $25
The most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler's Germany is either emigration or deportation to concentration camps. But there was another, much rarer, side to Jewish life at that time: denial of your origin to the point where you manage to erase almost all consciousness of it. You refuse to believe that you are Jewish. How to Be a Refugee is Simon May's account of how three sisters - his mother and his two aunts - grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing 'Aryan' status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler's regime, and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi. Even after his mother fled to London from Nazi Germany and Hitler had been defeated, her instinct for self-concealment didn't abate. Following the early death of his father, also a German Jewish refugee, May was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. In the face of these banned inheritances, May embarks on a quest to uncover the lives of the three sisters as well as the secrets of a grandfather he never knew.
The Silent Stars Go By by Sally Nicholls              $22
Seventeen-year-old Margot Allan was a respectable vicar's daughter and madly in love with her fiancé Harry. But when Harry was reported Missing in Action from the Western Front, and Margot realised she was expecting his child, there was only one solution she and her family could think of in order to keep that respectability. She gave up James, her baby son, to be adopted by her parents and brought up as her younger brother.Now two years later the whole family is gathering at the Vicarage for Christmas. It's heartbreaking for Margot being so close to James but unable to tell him who he really is. But on top of that, Harry is also back in the village. Released from captivity in Germany and recuperated from illness, he's come home and wants answers. Why has Margot seemingly broken off their engagement and not replied to his letters? Margot knows she owes him an explanation. But can she really tell him the truth about James?
 "Nuanced and evocative, this is bittersweet perfection." —Guardian
"Sally Nicholls conjures another era with a miraculous lightness of touch that fills me with joy and envy. Her characters don't just leap off the page, they grab you by the collar, demand your sympathy and surprise you at every turn."—Frances Hardinge
The Hospital: Life, death and dollars in a small American town by Brian Alexander           $40
By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes readers into the world of the American medical industry in a way no book has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America's health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed. Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans' struggle for health against a powerful system that's stacked against them, but yet so fragile it blows apart when the pandemic hits.
"America is broken, but sometimes it takes looking at the smallest shattered pieces to realize how broken. That is the sad lesson at the core of Alexander's The Hospital." —Rolling Stone
Poems, 1962—2020 by Louise Glück             $65
A career-spanning collection of the Nobel Prize-winning poet's work. For fifty years, Louise Gluck has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form — the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date. 







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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell)  {Reviewed by STELLA}
Let the title of this short story collection be a warning. In the second of Mariana Enriquez's collections to be translated into English, the macabre and disorderly rise to the surface. There are ghosts in these pages, phantoms and hauntings. Some reside just under the surface in superstition, some make their presence known by their unsettled, revenge-seeking wanderings, while others are phantoms that walk in broad daylight, bold and violent. Enriquez’s tales resist the easy condition of horror or the gothic, creeping under our skin — making us uneasy yet fascinated. We can not turn away, as our curiosity gets the better of us. The stories meld the mundane, the daily chores, and the familiar with unresolved crimes, passions and jealousies, and the uneasy moments when you know that the truth lies in a shallow grave just under a veneer of lies. As the characters, predominantly women, navigate their way through the stories, Enriquez spins a web of deceit, dark magic and fantastical scenarios to point a finger at the horror of a place imbued with violence, hypocrisy, fear and grief. Her themes do not rest easy, but the tales and the worlds she builds through metaphor and fantasy are hypnotic, taking us in, sometimes gently, often not. Teenage jealousy in 'Our Lady of The Quarry' conjures up a pack of raving dogs. In 'The Well', a young girl unwittingly becomes the vehicle, body and soul, for her mother, aunt and siblings fear of a malign spirit. So imbued with this malign force, madness is the only solution. 'The Lookout' sends a shiver down your spine — trapped in her frightening form, The Lady Upstairs is looking for a victim — someone to set her free. Each story draws you into a situation that has no easy answers, where friends are bonded by shared crises and sanity is a breath away from collapse. Yet Enriquez’s writing is succinct, beguiling and fizzes with energy — with a force that points a finger at death, at violence and corruption, and says I am not afraid. 
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Bordering on Miraculous by Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
How does a word reveal its meaning at the same moment as it becomes strange to us, he wondered. Or should that be the other way round, how does a word become strange to us at the same moment as it reveals its meaning. Same difference, though he was a little surprised. No closer to an answer in any case. Words, experiences, thoughts, the same principle seems to apply, he thought, or certainly its inverse, or complement, or opposite, or whatever. Familiarity suppresses meaning, he thought, the most familiar is that for which meaning is the least accessible, for which meaning has been obscured by wear until a point of comprehensibility has been attained, a point of dullness and comfort, a point of functional usefulness, if that is not a tautology, a point of habituation sufficient for carrying on with whatever there is to which we are inclined to carry on, if there is any such thing to which we are so inclined. Perhaps ‘meaning’ is not the right word. Or ‘strange’. Or the others. I should maybe start again and use other words, or other thoughts, or both, he thought. All philosophical problems can be solved by changing the meanings of the words used to express them, he had somewhere read, or written, or, more dangerously, both. All that is not the same or not exactly the same as to say that the simplest thing carries the most meaning but is too difficult to think about so we complicate it until we can grasp it in our thoughts, at the moment that its meaning is lost, the moment of comprehension, he thought. Again this strange use of the word ‘meaning’, whatever he meant by that, he was no longer sure. The everyday is that to which we are most habituated, that of which we are the most unaware, or the least aware, if this is not the same thing, to help us to survive the stimulation, he thought, a functional repression of our compulsion to be aware, but this comes at the cost of existing less, of being less aware, of becoming blind to those things that are either the simplest or the most important to us or both. Our dullness stops us being overwhelmed, awareness being after all not so much rapture as terror, not that there was ever much difference. Life denuminised, that is not the word, flat. How then to regain the terrible paradise of the instant, awareness, without risking lives or sanity? How to produce the new and be produced by it? These are not the same question but each applies. They are possibly related. Perhaps now, he thought, I should mention this book, Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration between poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek, as there appear to be some answers here or, if not answers, related effects that you could be forgiven for mistaking for answers even though there are no such things as answers. Near enough. Poetry seems sometimes capable, as often here, of briefly reinstating awareness, as does the discipline of painting, as does the presence of a baby as it simultaneously wipes your mind. And alters time. What a relief, at least temporarily, to lose what made you you, he thought, or remembered, or imagined that he remembered. What a relief to be only aware of that which is right now pressing itself upon you, or aware only, though only aware is the more precise choice. “Which is more miracle: the things / moving through the sky or the eyes that move / to watch them” asks the poet, looking at a baby looking, he assumes. Such simplicities, the early noticings of babies, infant concepts, are the bases of all consciousness, he ventured, all our complexities are built on these. The first act of comprehension, he thought, is to divide something from that which it is not. “A border is / as a border does.” This book, the poems and the paintings in this book, continually address this primal impulse to give entities edges or to bring forth entities through their edges. All knowledge is built from this ‘bordering’, he thought, but it is always fragile, arbitrary, subject to the possibility of revision, more functional than actual. The second act of comprehension is to associate something with something that it is not (“One cannot help but make associations,” the poet writes), but it is never clear to what extent such associations are inherent in the world or to what extent they are mental only, the result of the impulse to associate, he thought. Not that this matters. Everything is simultaneously both separating and connecting, it is too much for us to sustain, we would be overwhelmed, we reach for a word, for an image, for relief. We pacify it with a noun. To some extent. To hold it all at bay. But also perhaps to invite the onslaught, he wondered, perhaps, he thought, the words release what the words hold back, perhaps these words can reconnect while simultaneously holding that experience at bay. Not that that makes any sense, or much. “One / cannot help but make / nouns,” the poet writes, but there is always this tension, he thinks, between accomplishment and insufficiency in language, never resolved, the world plucking at the words and vice-versa: “Something is there that doesn’t love a page.” “It is this kind of ordinary straining / that makes the margins restless.” The most meaningful is that which reaches closest to the meaninglessness that it most closely resembles. He has thought all this but his thoughts have not been clear, he has lost perhaps the capacity to think, not that he ever had such a capacity other than the capacity to think he had it. He feels perhaps he has not been clear but this beautiful book by Edmeades and Leek is clear, these poems and these paintings address the simplest and most difficult things, the simplest are the most difficult, and vice-versa, this conversation, so to call it, between a poet and a painter, reaches down to the bases of their arts, he thought, to the primalities of consciousness, have I made that word up, a gift to us from babies, perhaps the babies we once were. It is not as if we ever escape the impulses we had as babies. A baby comes, the world is changed. “Goodbye to a future / without this / big head / in it.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
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Mister N by Najwa Bakarat (translated by Luke Leafgren)          $35
Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel—he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: there is desperate poverty, the ever-present threat of violence, and masses of Syrian refugees planning to reach Europe via a dangerous sea passage. How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his 'real life' of a character from one of his early novels—a vicious militiaman and torturer. What is real? Just what kind of help does Mister N. Need? 
Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria (translated by Charlotte Whittle)             $35
Nine-year old Marina may swear like a sailor and think like a novelist, but even the most exceptional child can get lost on the road to adulthood. While her mother is in the hospital with a grave but unnamed illness, Marina spends the summer with her grandmother, waiting to hear whether she’ll get to go home or be bundled off, newly orphaned, to a convent school. There are no rules at Grandma’s, but that also means there are no easy ways to fend off the visions of sex and violence that torment and titillate the girl. Presenting a unique and vivid take on the coming-of-age novel, Oldladyvoice reimagines childhood through the eyes of its one-of-a-kind, hilarious, perceptive and endearing narrator.
"More than anything, Oldladyvoice is hugely good fun. Victoria’s prose is effervescent, her jokes never miss their marks, and the observations of her young narrator feel as tender as they do authentic. I loved this wise, warped little jewel of a novel." —A.K. Blakemore, Guardian
Little by Edward Carey        $25
There is a space between life and death: it's called waxworks. Born in Alsace in 1761, the unsightly, diminutive Marie Grosholtz is quickly nicknamed "Little." Orphaned at the age of six, she finds employment in the household of reclusive anatomist, Dr Curtius. Her role soon surpasses that of mere servant as the eccentric doctor takes an interest in his newfound companion and begins to instruct her in the fine art of wax modelling. From the gutters of pre-revolutionary France to the luxury of the Palace of Versailles, from clutching the still-warm heads of Robespierre's Terror to finding something very like love, Little traces the improbable fortunes of a, almost-nobody who eventually became known as Madam Tussaud. 
"Don't miss this eccentric charmer." —Margaret Atwood
"Marie's story is fascinating in itself, but Carey's talent makes her journey a thing of wonder." —The New York Times
"Compulsively readable: so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Atwood? Judge for yourself." —Gregory Maguire
Keeping the House by Tice Cin              $35
There’s a stash of heroin waiting to be imported, and no one seems sure what to do with it. But Ayla’s a gardener, and she has a plan. Offering a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London heroin trade, Keeping the House lifts the lid on a covert world thriving just beneath notice: not only in McDonald’s queues and men’s clubs, but in spotless living rooms and whispering kitchens. Spanning three generations, this is the story of the Turkish Cypriot immigrant women who keep their family – and their family business – afloat, juggling everything from police surveillance to trickier questions of community, belonging and love.
"Crackling with energy. An exhilaratingly idiosyncratic first novel, Keeping the House has 'cult classic' written all over it." —Guardian
The Silences of Hammerstein by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (translated from German by Martin Chalmers)           $35
A blend of a documentary, collage, narration, and fictional interviews exploring the experiences of real-life German General Kurt von Hammerstein and his wife and children. A member of an old military family, a brilliant staff officer, and the last commander of the German army before Hitler seized power, Hammerstein, who died in 1943 before Hitler's defeat, was nevertheless an idiosyncratic character. Too old to be a resister, he retained an independence of mind that was shared by his children: three of his daughters joined the Communist Party, and two of his sons risked their lives in the July 1944 Plot against Hitler and were subsequently on the run till the end of the war. Hammerstein never criticised his children for their activities, and he maintained contacts with the Communists himself and foresaw the disastrous end of Hitler's dictatorship. In The Silences of Hammerstein, Hans Magnus Enzensberger offers a brilliant and unorthodox account of the military milieu whose acquiescence to Nazism consolidated Hitler's power and of the heroic few who refused to share in the spoils.
The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris      $33
The four remarkable novels, The Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, and The Secret Ladder, comprise a dizzying, myth-inflected epic literary experience unlike much else. Guyana is an ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest. It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. 
"One of the great originals, Visionary. Dazzlingly illuminating." —Guardian
"Harris is the Guyanese William Blake." —Angela Carter
The Third Unconscious: The psychosphere in the viral age by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi               $35
The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it does not always remain the same. Different political and economic conditions transform the way in which the Unconscious emerges within the psychosphere of society. In the early 20th century, Freud characterized the Unconscious as the dark side of the well-order framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force ceaselessly bringing to the fore new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly portraits the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy.
The Great Adaptation tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to the consequences of climate change, rather than combating its causes. From the 1970s neoliberal economists and ideologues have used climate change as an argument for creating more 'flexibility' in society, that is for promoting more market-based solutions to environmental and social questions. The book unveils the political economy of this potent movement, whereby some powerful actors are thriving in the face of dangerous climate change and may even make a profit out of it. A perfect riposte to the idea that the market can address climate change or social issues. 
Three Apples Fell From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan        $23
High in the Armenian mountains, villagers in the close-knit community of Maran bicker, gossip and laugh. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate. As they go about their daily lives - harvesting crops, making baklava, tidying houses - the villagers sustain one another through good times and bad. But sometimes a spark of romance is enough to turn life on its head, and a plot to bring two of Maran's most stubbornly single residents together soon gives the village something new to gossip about.

Stolen Science: Thirteen untold stories of scientists and inventors almost written out of history by Ella Schwartz and Gaby D'Alessandro        $35
Over the centuries, women, people from underrepresented communities, and immigrants overcame prejudices and social obstacles to make remarkable discoveries in science—but they weren't the ones to receive credit in history books. People with more power, money, and prestige were remembered as the inventor of the telephone, the scientists who decoded the structure of DNA, and the doctor who discovered the cause of yellow fever. This book aims to set the record straight and celebrate the nearly forgotten inventors and scientists who shaped our world today. Nicely illustrated.
Kua Whetūrangitia a Koro and How My Koro Became a Star by Brianne Te Paa          each $22
A young boy learns about the customs around celebrating Matariki from his grandfather. They watch the stars from the top of a mountain, prepare their offering of food for the gods, and the boy learns about Te Waka o Rangi and the tradition of calling out the names of loved ones who have passed away so that they can become stars. Just before Matariki the following year, the boy’s Koro suddenly dies. He gathers and prepares the food offering and asks each family member to come with him up the mountain when Matariki is due to rise, but they all make excuses, and he is disheartened. But when he tells them what Koro taught him, they all climb the mountain before sunrise, follow the rituals Koro carried out and call out Koro’s name so that he can become a star.
The Lost Ryū by Emi Watanabe Cohen              $19
Kohei Fujiwara has never seen a giant dragon in real life. The big ryu all disappeared from Japan after World War II, and twenty years later, they've become the stuff of legend. Their smaller cousins, who can fit in your palm, are all that remain. And Kohei loves his ryu, Yuharu, but Kohei has a memory of the big ryu. He knows that's impossible, but still, it's there, in his mind. In it, he can see his grandpa - Ojiisan - gazing up at the big ryu with what looks to Kohei like total and absolute wonder. When Kohei was little, he dreamed he'd go on a grand quest to bring the big ryu back, to get Ojiisan to smile again. But now, Ojiisan is really, really sick. And Kohei is running out of time. Kohei needs to find the big ryu now, before it's too late. With the help of Isolde, his new half-Jewish, half-Japanese neighbour; and Isolde's Yiddish-speaking dragon, Cheshire; he thinks he can do it. Maybe. He doesn't have a choice.
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Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee           $33
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Václav Havel. Having long described himself as a bounced Czech, Stoppard only learned late in life of his mother's Jewish family and of the relatives he lost to the Holocaust. A paperback edition of this outstanding biography. 
By Ash, Oak, and Thorn by Melissa Harrison            $20
Three tiny, ancient beings - Moss, Burnet and Cumulus, once revered as Guardians of the Wild World - wake from winter hibernation in their beloved ash tree home. When it is destroyed, they set off on an adventure to find more of their kind, a journey which takes them first into the deep countryside and then the heart of a city. Helped along the way by birds and animals, the trio search for a way to survive and thrive in a precious yet disappearing world.
"Each page brims with the wonder of our natural world, so much to learn but all a sheer delight." —Piers Torday
Followed by: By Rowan and Yew. 
The Blizzard Party by Jack Livings             $35
On February 6, 1978, a catastrophic nor'easter struck the city of New York. On that night, in a penthouse in the Upper West Side's stately Apelles apartment building, a crowd gathered for a wild party. And on that night, Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell—a partner emeritus at Swank, Brady & Plescher; Harvard class of '26; father of three; widower; atheist; and fiscal conservative--hatched a plan to fake a medical emergency and toss himself into the Hudson River, where he would drown. In the eye of this storm: Hazel Saltwater, age six. The strange events of that night irrevocably altered many lives, but none more than hers. The Blizzard Party is Hazel's reconstruction of the facts, an exploration of love, language, conspiracy, auditory time travel, and life after death. Cinematic, with a vast cast of characters and a historical scope that spans World War II Poland, the lives of rich and powerful Manhattanites in the late 1970s, and the enduring effects of 9/11.
Ko wai kei te papa tākaro? by Te Ataakura Pewhairangi      $23
A very relatable board book in simple te reo Māori, about playing in the playground.
The Searchers: The quest for the lost of the First World War by Robert Sackville-West            $53
By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. Robert Sackville-West brings together the accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave; E.M. Forster's conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war's aftermath, to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to locate, recover and identify these people.
What a Shell Can Tell by Helen Scales and Sonia Pulido         $35
A lavishly illustrated and information-packed introduction to the wonder of shells through the art of observation. Using a friendly question-and-answer format, the book explores, through a richly sensory experience, the incredible diversity of shells around the world and showcases the environments molluscs inhabit. 
A Dictionary of Naval Slang by Gerald O'Driscoll           $23
Trapped aboard leaky ships and creaking vessels for months, sometimes years, on end, the crews developed a peculiar language all of their own. The Royal Navy's heyday is long past and much of the sailor's vocabulary has vanished with it. But before it disappeared once and for all, veteran sailor Gerald O'Driscoll preserved its unique language in this sometimes hilarious but always fascinating compendium of nautical language.
Elephant's part: The part of the spectator. One who elects to watch others working and does not make any attempt to lend a hand is said to be doing the elephant's part.




VOLUME BooksNew releases

 


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A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam    {Reviewed by STELLA}
Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel takes us back to the civil war in Sri Lanka. It is a reflective, philosophical view through the eyes of Krishan — a young Tamil man recently returned to Colombo and confronting his country’s violence, as well as contemplating his relationships with his family and the woman he thinks he still loves. On a long train trip to attend a funeral, he has time to think and Arudpragsam uses this tool of the journey to take us across the northern landscape scarred by war and destruction, as well as the internal landscape of Krishan’s thoughts: both lively memories and contemplative existentialism. Here, on the page, we travel between the present and the past, rich in descriptive language and cultural references. Away studying in India when the worst atrocities occurred in Sri Lanka, Krishan is riven with guilt and obsesses about certain activists, documentaries and news items, as well as others’ personal experiences. His guilt is also balanced by his interest in Tamil literature and cultural practices, making his response in the post-war years less stifling than it could have been. Arudpragasam, while never flinching from the devastation wrought, physically and mentally, by war, gives us room to breathe. It is quietly affecting rather than aggressive in its intent. Many of the scenes — and it does feel like a series of windows and doors opening into the different worlds of Krishan (the train heading north, his days with his lover Anjum, his relationship with his grandmother) — are domestic and relatable. Told gracefully, walking the streets in the early evening, remembering a confrontation on a train, lighting a cigarette, these observances are precise, detailed and nuanced, providing more than their supposed simplicity of action. The watchful eye of Krishan tells us much about the impact of a violent past and the ongoing endeavour to come to terms with the emotional chaos that rises from this past, from whichever place you stand. Either directly affected, as in the case of Rani (the woman who has recently died), tormented by the death of two sons and her own subsequent mental anguish, or indirectly, like Krishan, knowing and witnessing second-hand but unsure how to assimilate this history. It is also a novel about connections, and how human relationships change us, as well as challenge our preconceptions.  A Passage North, intelligent and meditative, is quietly confronting. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Finnegans Wake by James Joyce     {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Occasionally, usually when suffering from a fever, my mind takes words and phrases and pulls them apart and recombines them and distorts them and relates them to other words and phrases and hybridises them and separates them from their sense and plays around with their pronunciation. This is distressing. I used to think that this was caused by the neurotoxic side-effect of a pathogen or the delirium of fever, but soon came to believe that this is the nature of language: without our constant yet relatively feeble and fleeting attempts to coagulate it into meaning, language is a heaving sea of chaotic association and permutation, endlessly fertile but ultimately not compatible with sanity. We expend a lot of effort resisting language’s inherent tendency towards chaos, generally with good reason: we seek clarity and sanity. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce pulls down all the dykes and lets the sea wash over the land. Herein lie all the linguistic symptoms it usually takes illness to induce. Joyce spent seventeen years compulsively holding the idea of the novel underwater, holding it in that moment of uncertainty when drowning and developing gills seem about equally likely. Having prescription for roxithromycin filled before reading this book is probably a good idea.


(Aside: my own copy of Finnegans Wake is of an edition that has 28 pages of ‘Corrections of Misprints’, which make enjoyable Joycean reading in themselves (too bad the misprints were corrected in later editions and this addendum not reproduced)).

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

Our Book of the Week is Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A survival guide by Geoffrey Palmer and Gwen Palmer Steeds. This important and accessible book outlines the principles and mechanisms of our democracy and its institutions, and shows how it can be made to function optimally through the participation of ordinary people. How can democracy address the problems of the future, such as climate change, decolonisation, diversity, and misinformation? Much of it written as a series of exchanges between Geoffrey Palmer (a former Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, Attorney-General, and an expert on constitutional law), and his granddaughter Gwen Palmer Steeds (a student of political communication and political science and a youth political activist), the book is both urgent and engaging. Read it — and use it — to ensure democracy's survival. 
>>The authors, 2009 and 2022. 
>>Democracy on the defensive. 
>>A fragile form of government.
>>The case for a constitution. 
>>Not enough reform. 
>>What can we do about future injustices?
>>Towards Democratic Renewal. 
>>Your copy of Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

NEW RELEASES

Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith (translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell)            $38
A double-stranded novel about weaving, programming, and the treatment of women by history. A tapestry-weaver in her thirties embarks on her first big commission: a digitally woven tapestry for a public building. As she works, devoting all her waking hours to the commission, she draws engrossing connections between the stuff that life is made from – DNA, plant tissue, algorithms, text, and textile – and that which disrupts it – radiation, pests, entropy, and doubt. In the novel’s second strand, we meet Ada Lovelace, the 1830s mathematician and pioneer of computer programming, and mythical figures such as Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, who wove and unpicked a shroud to put off her 108 suitors. Contemplative yet clear-sighted, and reviving women’s histories, Amalie Smith’s bracing hybrid of a novel bares the aching interwovenness of art and life.
"A dreamy, spacious book which threads together many exquisite components: the languages of data, irradiated gardens, computer bugs, sensate plants, the experience of longing. It tells stories of what it's like to live now, in our hybrid bodies, and it gives the oldest technologies new life." –Daisy Hildyard
"Made of interconnected texts that summon stories from the recent past, personal memory and obscure historical periods, Thread Ripper is an absorbing and compulsive read. Moments in bended time are summoned or recalled by a single mind, and woven together, electrified like a neural network. Amalie Smith’s book reflects how it feels to be inside a generative mind and a body, and celebrates the desire to ask provocative questions without the need for definitive answers." –Alice Hattrick
"A mesmerizing choreography of textile and technology, archive and memory. With cellular precision, Amalie Smith weaves connective tissue between selfhood and history through vital, tactile accumulations of affect and imagery. Innovative, intricate and achingly bodily, Thread Ripper is a rare treasure." –Elinor Cleghorn
>>On translating the novel.
>>Flora digitalica. 
How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid (a.k.a. Jessica Hansell)           $28
A hugely energetic, genre-bending, cinematic work of autobiographical fiction. From one of Aotearoa's fiercest and most versatile artists comes a day in the life of three friends beefing with their own city. There is the gorgeous Q (Tongan, Fijian "with a dash of Indian and Solomon"); a sensitive poet-in-denial with a shitty bakery day-job, "her long hair always to one side, which friends dub 'the ramen sweep'". Meet Rosina (Hawaiian, Rarotongan, Samoan, Irish), a hungry artist on the rise with an unfortunate weakness for privileged white boys. "The words 'what's that supposed to mean?' should be tattooed on her neck (among the others)." Then there's Te Hoia (Maori and Filipino). A cranky political science student and our narrator, "she identifies with the toffee waves being churned in the (constantly-broken) ice-cream machine." Together, they navigate the stuffy busses, streets and markets of Tamaki Makaurau at the height of summer. With gentrification closing in around them and racial tensions sweltering, the three must cling to their friendship like a life raft. Coming of age while struggling with family, identity and attraction, the trio are determined not to let their neighbourhood drift out to sea.
"Imbued with fierce intelligence and cosmic warmth. " —Rose Matafeo
"One of the most exciting books I've ever read." —Pip Adam
>>ABC.
Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A survival guide by Geoffrey Palmer and Gwen Palmer Steeds          $40
An important and accessible book outlining the principles and mechanisms of our democracy and showing how it can be made to function optimally. The book unravels the mysteries of our political system and show how ordinary people can navigate the political world and influence decisions made by our government. Its forty chapters include a brief history of government in Aotearoa New Zealand; introductions to our principal institutions; interviews with the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, Governor-General, Speaker, and Chief Justice; advice on how to campaign, complain and obtain information; and consideration of future challenges of climate change, decolonisation, and engaging rangatahi in the political process. Much of it written as a series of exchanges between Geoffrey Palmer (a former Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, Attorney-General, and an expert on constitutional law), and his granddaughter Gwen Palmer Steeds (a student of political communication and political science at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and a youth political activist), the book is both urgent and engaging. Read it and use it to ensure democracy's survival. 
Iro: The essence of colour in Japanese design by Rossella Menegazzo         $110
The traditional colours of Japan have been in use since the seventh century, originally to indicate rank and social hierarchy but, over time, their significance has broadened to include all manner of designed objects. This landmark volume celebrates a curated selection of 200 colours (iro in Japanese), with each traditional shade illustrated by one or more items — ranging from 16th-century kimonos to contemporary chairs, humble kitchen utensils to precious ceramics — providing a unique route to a deeper appreciation of Japanese design. Beautifully bound in the Japanese traditional manner, this volume makes a good companion to Wa: The essence of Japanese design. 
>>Some sample pages. 
The Shiatsung Project by Brigitte Archambault             $40
An outstanding graphic novel. A woman lives alone in a small house situated in a tidy yard surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable wall. She spends her days reading, swimming, and watching TV. She eats regular meals and keeps her house clean. But the simplicity is deceiving, because the woman has no idea how she came to live in her house, and—most importantly—what exists beyond the wall. Her only source of information is a talking TV monitor in her living room called Shiatsung. The entity controlling the monitor is committed to keeping the woman hydrated and educated, but it refuses to answer any of her existential questions and keeps her under constant surveillance. Lonely and frustrated, the woman begins to search for answers of her own. The Shiatsung Project explores surveillance culture and authoritarian control, and how they disrupt our very human need for connection, intimacy, and a meaningful life. 
>>Meet Brigitte. 
Lāuga: Understanding Samoan oratory by Sadat Muaiava         $40
Lāuga or Samoan oratory is a premier cultural practice in the faasāmoa (Samoan culture), a sacred ritual that embodies all that faasāmoa represents, such as identity, inheritance, respect, service, gifting, reciprocity and knowledge. Delivered as either lāuga faamatai (chiefly speeches) or lāuga faalelotu (sermons), lāuga is captivating and endowed with knowledge, praxis and skill. Lāuga is enjoyed by many, but today many Samoan people, especially in the Samoan diaspora, also remain disconnected from it and lack proficiency in its rhetorical inventory. It is critical that the knowledge and skills that underpin lāuga are retained. This accessible book explains the intricacies of lāuga and its key stages and is an ideal companion for those who may be called upon to speak at significant occasions, those wanting to improve their knowledge and skills, and all those interested in faasāmoa. 
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky)     $38
"Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of 'the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies of everyday life' and richly evokes the fatalistic humour of her marginalised characters, one of whom observes, 'If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.'" —The New Yorker
Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, cardplayers, a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; another sits down on International Women’s Day and can no longer stand up. With a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound irony reminiscent of Gogol, Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with twenty-three photographs that form a narrative in lyrical and historical counterpoint.
"Belorusets is interested in the histories of the defeated, of the unseen and unheard, and above all in the experiences of eastern Ukrainian women in wartime. Her willingness to exist between document and fiction is daring, even provocative. This is a moment when facts are both utterly compromised and vastly overvalued—asked to do all the work of politics, to justify whole worldviews with single data points. Belorusets, by contrast, is for plurality, subjectivity, a kind of narrative democracy. She wants us to remember that even documentary photographs and factual narratives are determined, and sometimes distorted, by the worldview that shaped them.” —The Baffler
>>Belorusets's diary of the current Russian invasion. 
FARCE by Murray Edmond            $25
"Dead hobbits, A4-isms, eradication plans for feral poets in Titirangi, capers and encomiums, blue bottle blues, swirled together in the bottom of the glass. In questionable taste and all the better for it, in turns rude, sardonic, reflective, witty and mercurial, FARCE shows an unfashionable disregard for contemporary pieties. Murray Edmond is back on the night shift, striding across the arsehole of the world in his squeaky crocs." —Victor Billot

Pesticides and Health: How New Zealand fails in environmental protection by Neil Pearce           $15
New Zealand has been one of the world's heaviest users of pesticides, including some contaminated with dioxin, a notorious toxic chemical. A leading epidemiologist uses the example of dioxin to illustrate how badly New Zealand handles problems of environmental pollutants, and why we can do better. Concern with public health has been recast by the Covid-19 pandemic. Neil Pearce's eye-opening account of our country's ongoing failures in environmental protection shows there is much more work to be done.

I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart           $44
In November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych's failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians. I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is an Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael's Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife's death; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, who climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano. As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr's lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
"As thoughtful as it is explosive." —Buzzfeed
"Intensely moving." —Washington Post
White Tears / Brown Scars: How white feminism betrays women of colour by Ruby Hamad           $35
Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep 'ownership' of their slaves, through centuries of colonialism, when women offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, in which tears serve as a defense to counter accusations of bias and micro-aggressions, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women's active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long-overdue validation of the experiences of women of colour and an urgent call-to-arms in the need for true intersectionality. Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialised within, a reality that we must all apprehend in order to fight for true equality.
Every Good Boy Does Fine: A love story, in music lessons by Jeremy Denk               $40
Pianist Jeremy Denk explores what he learned from his teachers about classical music: its forms, its power, its meaning - and what it can teach us about ourselves. In this enjoyable memoir, Denk explores both the joys and miseries of artistic practice, hours of daily repetition, mystifying early advice, pressure from parents and teachers who drove him on in an ongoing battle of talent against two enemies: boredom and insecurity. Denk also explores how classical music is relevant to 'real life,' despite its distance in time. He dives into pieces and composers that have shaped him - Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, among others - and gives unusual lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. Why and how do these fundamental elements have such a visceral effect on us? 
My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee         $35
Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.
"An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements. My Year Abroad is a a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia." —Vogue
GROW: Wāhine finding connection through food by Sophie Merkens       $60
Merkens takes us on a journey across Aotearoa meeting 37 inspiring women who find meaning and connection through food. From mothers, gardeners, hunters, chefs and hobbyists, their conversations dive deep into how food influences their lives. Meet women who know which mushrooms to pick, how to preserve the olives growing along public land, how to make rosewater from blooms, and how to make 'coffee' from roasted dandelion roots.

The Lost Manuscript by Cathy Bonidan             $30
When Anne-Lise Briard books a room at the Beau Rivage Hotel for her holday on the Brittany coast, she has no idea this trip will start her on the path to unearthing a mystery. In search of something to read, she opens up her bedside table drawer in her hotel room, and inside she finds an abandoned manuscript. Halfway through the pages, an address is written. She sends pages to the address, in hopes of hearing a response from the unknown author. But not before she reads the story and falls in love with it. The response, which she receives a few days later, astonishes her. Not only does the author write back, but he confesses that he lost the manuscript thirty years earlier. And then he reveals that he was not the author of the second half of the book. Anne-Lise can't rest until she discovers who this second mystery author is, and in doing so tracks down every person who has held this manuscript in their hands. Through the letters exchanged by the people whose lives the manuscript has touched, she discovers long-lost love stories and intimate secrets. Romances blossom and new friends are made. And finally, with a plot twist you don't see coming, she uncovers the astonishing identity of the author who finished the story. Charming. 
The Tip Shop by James Brown          $25
Oblivion’s final sieve meets your lucky day. Found poems jostle with autobiographical poems, essayistic with epigrammatic, formally expert with some of his very best freeform sprawls.  
"How gifted Brown is at the craft of poetry, the game of word and sounds on the page that are tidy and tight and clever and cool. And also how he lifts aside that cleverness to show us the tender inner self, the moist soft core of James Brown and his world." —Anna Livesey, Academy of New Zealand Literature
Everyone Is Everyone Except You by Jordan Hamel            $25
Jordan Hamel is falling in and out of love with his own mediocrity. Caught between the instinct to build a franchise of rock hard abs, and succumb to death among the kitchen appliances of Briscoes, Jordan is the star of his own demise. He’s on the brink of  becoming the world’s worst life coach, or the plot twist to a bygone reality show. But absurd delusions of grandeur reveal a more unsettling feeling—the pointlessness of being alive. In the face of existential dread, what is the purpose of a life if not for entertainment value? The result: this poetry collection. 

The Hospital: The inside story by Christle Nwora and Ginnie Hsu         $20
It's another busy day at the hospital! Meet doctors and nurses, ride in an ambulance, and discover the magic of medicine. This book is perfect for any child who is nervous about a trip to the hospital. Dr Christle Nwora takes readers behind the scenes to meet the people who keep you healthy, from surgeons to mental health therapists. Dr Nwora also explains the science behind how things work, from X-rays to operating theatres. As you turn the pages of this book, marvel at the way hospital staff work together for the good of us all.

The Astromancer: The rising of Matariki by Witi Ihimaera            $25
The Astromancer is looking for four new apprentices to learn about Matariki and the Maramataka calendar. She chooses three boys and an orphan girl, Aria, who will come only if she can bring her smelly dog. Aria, though, is bored by the lessons, and she doesn't want to be told what to do. But these are dangerous times, and Ruatapu the Ravenous is about to threaten the safety of the whole tribe. Will Aria step up to save them?

Ko Whetū Toa rāua ko te Tangata Tūmatarau nā Steph Matuku, nā Kararaina Uatuku i whakamāori        $25
This is the Māori language edition of Whetū Toa and the Magician. When Whetu’s mother takes a job at a magician’s house and farm, Whetū becomes the animal keeper, looking after some unusual animals and the magician’s stage assistant – a troublesome white rabbit called Errant. Errant’s been playing around with magic and done something he can’t undo. Rather than face the magician, Errant disappears, and Whetū becomes the magician’s new assistant, just in time for the royal performance. It all seems to be going well until Errant reappears, and Whetū must save the day.
Solo: Backcountry adventuring in Aotearoa New Zealand by Hazel Phillips           $40
One afternoon, journalist Hazel Phillips decided to close her laptop and head for the hills. She then spent the next three years living in mountain huts and tramping alone for days at a time, all the while holding down a full-time job. As she ranged from Arthur's Pass and the Kaimanawa Forest Park to the Ruahine Range and Fiordland, she had her share of danger and loneliness, but she also grew in confidence and backcountry knowledge. 


Skandar and the Unicorn Thief by A.F. Steadman           $23
Unicorns don’t belong in fairy tales; they belong in nightmares. So begins Skandar and the Unicorn Thief. Soar into a world where unicorns are real – and they’re deadly. They can only be tamed by the rider who hatches them. Thirteen-year-old Skandar Smith has only ever wanted to be a unicorn rider, and the time has finally come for him to take his Hatchery Exam, which will determine whether he is destined to hatch a unicorn egg. But when Skandar is stopped from taking the exam, and the mysterious and frightening Weaver steals the most powerful unicorn in the world, becoming a rider proves a lot more dangerous than he could ever have imagined. And what if Skandar was always destined to be the villain rather than the hero?
He Wkeke Wai Mamangu Au by Stephanie Thatcher and Pania Pāpā       $20
He Wheke Wai Mamangu Au presents educational facts about the wheke (octopus) in a fun and colourful way for early readers – where it lives, and what makes it unique in its realm. The story and illustrations  will appeal to children’s imaginations, and are elevated by the translator’s use of te reo Māori. Lots of fun. 




VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Unfortunately, our Book of the Week is urgently relevant in many parts of the world at the moment, and increasingly relevant elsewhere. Timothy Snyder's ON TYRANNY: Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century alerts us to the tell-tale signs of a society shifting away from democracy and towards authoritarianism, and gives us some simple but effective ideas on combatting this. This graphic edition of this important book is given even greater depth and resonance by the illustrations by Nora Krug. Beware!
>>How the illustrations were made. 
>>"If we don't observe carefully we don't know how to intervene."
>>The dangers of passive allegiance. 
>>Some pages. 
>>"It turns out that people really like democracy."
>>Other excellent books by Timothy Snyder. 
>>Also by Nora Krug. 
>>Your copy of On Tyranny. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.





























 

Metronome by Tom Watson   {Reviewed by STELLA}
It’s the near future and a couple are near the end of a twelve-year exile. The Warden is due to uplift them from their remote island prison where they have lived a subsistence existence reliant on yearly supply drops, what they scavenge from shipwrecks, and pills deposited at eight-hour intervals. The yearly supply drops have become non-existent. The Warden hasn’t shown up the last three years. Whitney sees this as a test — of their loyalty to the regime and their contrition. Aina is more doubtful —  increasingly suspicious of not only the Warden and the regime but also her husband. 'No one is coming' is the refrain that ebbs at the edges of her mind. The shipwrecks, which had become more frequent, have dwindled as they see fewer signs of any human behaviour. Yet when a yacht is pitched up on the Needles — a sharp range of rocks just off the coast — it is surprisingly rich with treasures and unsettlingly obvious that human inhabitants have been living on board recently. But where are they? Whitney is sure they have come on land. Aina is more puzzled by their lack of access to pills. How could they survive without them? And that brings us to the Pill Clock. Every eight hours, via identification by thumbprint technology, a pill is dispensed — one for Whitney and one for Aina. Without the medication, they will die, poisoned by the atmosphere. This is a climate hell — low on resources, crappy weather (a massive flood triggers chaos as well as a personal catastrophe), and bad air. The pill dispenser keeps them tethered to the croft and the patch on land they live on. They are controlled, even at a distance, by the schedule of the clock — by the prison sentence. As the day of their freedom comes and passes, the couple respond in opposing manners. Whitney’s concept of 'the test' is reinforced, while Aina is determined to unpick the doubts she harbours and the questions that bother her about the island. Is it really an island? If yes, where did the lone sheep come from and why is Whitney determined to keep her from exploring beyond a craggy range? This schism, in conjunction with an unexpected encounter, undermines their relationship and pulls them both back to an unbearable past. A past where breaking the rules — having a child without permission — resulted in their banishment, and Maxime, their son, taken by the state. It was an oppressive regime, where citizens toed the line, dobbing in others, hoping to remain unnoticed or to be socially rewarded. Yet saving your own skin in this conservative regime didn’t, you realise as the story unfolds, keep the wolf from the door — resources became scarce and the environment harsher. Whitney and Aina, completely isolated, know little, and as Aina makes a decision to leave, determined to find Maxime, it is unclear whether this will be her redemption or destruction. Tom Watson’s debut focuses on the tense relationship between the couple, their diverging perspectives, lack of trust in each other, and disintegrating grip on reality. Metronome is tightly drawn with the clockwork precision and logic of survival, balancing the emotional turmoil of love and betrayal in this remote atmospheric landscape. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 

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Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon (translated by Cole Swensen)   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Whose is this voice, addressing the artist Louise Bourgeois as ‘you’? It is the voice of Louise Bourgeois as written by Jean Frémon, a gallerist and writer who knew her and has written this insightful, beautifully written little book, which could be classified as a 'second-person autobiographical fiction'. Bourgeois is here, as in her art, both ‘I’ and ‘you’, both present and cast through time, both active and passive, both spectator and actor, both mathematician and instrument of the id, both innocent and knowing, at once both highly connected and aware and utterly separate, both ancient and young; gendered, ungendered, double- and multi-gendered; highly personal and rigorously particular, yet also universal. Bourgeois inhabits a zone that is at once “too complicated and too clear. No need to shed too much light on it,” a zone of vagueness in which the body is the territory of metaphors, though never of signs, the zone from which the formless coalesces into form. Bourgeois’s dreams are as real — and as inscrutable — as actuality: “Let them decipher my dreams — me, I’m fine with the mystery. No need to interpret them. Obscurity has its virtues.” Frémon-Bourgeois captures perfectly the singular intensity and fluidity of awareness that both enables and accesses art like that of Bourgeois, a mode of approach in which the distinction between initiative and surrender is erased. The book explores the key experiences of Bourgeois’s life without converting them into fact — they remain experiences, with all the ambivalences of experiences (though I here list them as facts): her childhood in France, where she would make the representations of leaves and branches with which her mother would replace the genitals cut from old tapestries in her family’s tapestry refurbishment business; her father’s philandering and double standards; her obsessiveness; her sensitivity to trauma, especially childhood trauma; her mother’s death, which prompted Louise to abandon mathematics for art; her departure for New York (“That’s what exile’s like. Apart from here and part from there, apart from everything. … Take an electric adaptor along with you.”); her long obscurity as an artist; her long loneliness following the death of her partner; her immense productivity; her ‘discovery’ in old age; her continued immense productivity; her very old age; her death. Bourgeois strives to understand what Frémon-Bourgeois calls “the survival of the unfit”, the evolutionary counter to the survival of the fittest. Art, perhaps, is a method of survival, as it is for Cyclose and Uloborus spiders, who “sculpt doubles of themselves, and then they place them on the web where they can be easily seen so that predators will attack this bait instead of them.” For Bourgeois only the gauche is beautiful: “Aim for beauty, and you get the vapid, aim for something else — encyclopedic knowledge, systematic inventory, structural analysis, personal obsession, or just a mental itch that responds to scratching — and you end up with beauty. Beauty is only a by-product, unsought, yet available to amateurs and impenitent believers.” And all the time, there is the artist who is indistinguishable from her art yet inaccessible through it (because her art is primarily a point of access to ourselves): “I am what I make and nothing else. I make, I unmake, I remake.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas