| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä {Reviewed by STELLA} Every summer Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä escaped to Klovharun, their island. In Notes From an Island, Jansson gathers memories, notes, snippets of writing about the place and their antics on this barren remote skerry, and Pietilä’s atmospheric illustrations contrast with the seaman Brunström’s no-nonsense diary entries. This is a lovely book, from its attractive cover which features a delightfully drawn map by Jansson’s mother, to the paper stock and layout. It’s enticing in all its tactile qualities as well as its content. Jansson had been heading to the Finnish archipelago most of her life with her family. They would year-on-year visit a small island with charming beaches and a small wood, but each year the number of guests increased as they invited more friends and family to share in this summer pleasure. In her late 40s, Tove craved an island of her own. Somewhere she and Tuulikki could be alone to focus on their creative work, away from interruption and the pressures of life back on the mainland. Klovharun was rocky and inhospitable — just right for being away from it all, and for the two women an invigorating environment with the sea in all directions. Arriving on Klovharun they pitched a tent and, shortly after, met Brunström — a taciturn seaman — who would help them build the cabin. The initial step — finding a suitable flat space. A flat space that needed to be carved out by dynamiting a massive boulder. A dynamic action for a dynamic landscape. Yet Tove and Tuulikki liked their yellow tent so much that they continued to sleep in it and reserved the cabin for work and for guests. How do you claim an island in the Finnish Gulf? You place a notice on the door of a shop at the nearest local settlement stating your intention to lease the land and hope that most people will place a tick in the Yes column rather than the No. And hence a quarter-century relationship with the island began. In Jansson’s writing you get a sense of refuge, but not idle respite. Living on the island between April and October required stamina and industry — fishing, maintenance of the cabin and boat, keeping the various machines ticking over, collecting driftwood from the sea as well as the surrounding islands and rolling rocks. These were productive times — the women would work on their respective art and writing projects, and sometimes collaborate on a project. Pietilä recorded their experiences in this natural wilderness on Super8 film which was later made into a documentary. This book provides a thoughtful exploration of their island life and their relationship with nature. Tove Jansson’s writing is both philosophical and straightforward (it is never lyrical or florid). giving the land, the sea and the weather their primacy. Pietilä's 24 illustrations — some etchings, others watercolour washes — are muted in their ochre monotones, but hold the power of the sky and water in them as though at any moment these elements might cast away the moment and shrug off these human interventions. |
>>The hidden world of rockpools.
>>Of molluscs and men.
NEW RELEASES
Guadalupe Nettel’s novel, explores one of life’s most consequential decisions – whether or not to have children – with her signature charm and intelligence. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When complications arise in Alina’s pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.
"In Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood, which this novel explores and deepens." —Annie Ernaux
"Guadalupe Nettel reminds us that there is nothing stranger than our existence lived in containers of meat, blood and madness." —Mariana Enríquez
>>Divination (extract).
>>Divination (extract).
After Sarah Jane Barnett had a hysterectomy in her forties, a comment by her doctor that she wouldn't be 'less of a woman' prompted her to investigate what the concept of womanhood meant to her. Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, part coming-of-middle-age story, Notes on Womanhood is the result. Here, Barnett examines the devastation she inflicted on herself as a young woman, the invisibility she feels as her youth fades, the power of female friendship, the stories women learn about midlife and menopause, and how being the daughter of a transgender woman changed her ideas of womanhood.
"I loved this book. It’s the kind of book you don’t know you need until you read it. Then you realise you really, really do – and, also, that many of your friends will too." –Ingrid Horrocks
In 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the 'Zürau aphorisms', after the Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among the most mysterious of Kafka's writings, they explore philosophical questions about truth, good and evil, and the spiritual and sensory world. This is the first annotated, bilingual volume of these extraordinary writings, which provide great insight into Kafka's mind. Edited, introduced, and with commentaries by preeminent Kafka biographer and authority Reiner Stach, and newly translated by Shelley Frisch, this volume presents each aphorism on its own page in English and the original German, with full and useful notes on facing pages.
In Sedaris's first new collection of essays since Calypso, he looks back over the recent past and the world and his own personal life became very different from the world and the personal life to which he was accustomed. Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper and wearing a mask — or not — was a decision mostly made on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy Go Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits and like so many others he's stuck in lockdown, contemplating how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine. As the world gradually settles into a 'new reality', Sedaris too finds himself changed. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, to no longer to be someone's son.
"So often Sedaris's phrasing is beautiful in its piquancy and minimalism. His life is extraordinary in so many ways, but one of the more unlikely achievements here is in making it all seem quite ordinary. Ultimately, his masterstroke is in acting as a bystander in his own story." —Guardian
The winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not a historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specialising in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow (including his notorious-future-politician son), Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies and whose approaches to almost everything contrast with his own sense of Jewishness. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics. New edition.
"The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is." —Colm Tóibín
Lisette and her friend Bobbi the lizard have never told a lie. But they are eager to try—it might be fun! They tell Popof they are going for a trip to the mountains. When Popof decides to come too, they realise they'll have to improvise like mad. They end up having a wonderful day together—but will anyone believe them?
In a broken-down Middle American town, the disintegration of a struggling family is laid bare through the cold eyes of its only son. While studying at the local community college to finish his degree, he works what his divorced parents deem to be menial jobs and tries to stay out of their way, keeping his pitiless observations about their lives to himself. He says nothing about his semi-estranged father's doomed attempts to find meaning in the world. He says nothing about his mother's willingness to subjugate herself to men he deems unworthy. He says nothing about the anonymity and emptiness to which their social classes and places of birth seem to have condemned everyone he knows, robbing them of even the vocabulary to express their grievances. He says nothing about his own pity, disgust, compassion, disdain, tenderness, and love for them. But when another in a long line of his father's boozy relationships falls apart, something changes. He wants to have a chat with his boy. The son fully expects to be talking his dad out of committing suicide, but no: the old man has other plans for his carcass. He has, in fact, entered a bodybuilding competition, and wants his son's help to get fit. If the alternative is despair, how can the son refuse? Grimly hilarious, My Father's Diet is equal parts Kierkegaard and Pumping Iron: an autopsy of our antiquated notions of manhood, and the perfect, bite-sized novel for a world always keen to mistake narcissism for introspection.
"My Father's Diet is slim, sad, comic and sharply observed. West's achievement, in this subtle and delightful book, is to have rendered failure in strikingly handsome terms." —Christopher Shrimpton, The Guardian
"Adrian Nathan West is one of our best novelists. He gives such solemn care to such mundane American pap and crap even while denying any redemptive power to the effort and it's that denial — sorrowful, but without anger, without delusion — that constitutes his brilliance. My Father's Diet is among the most ruthlessly true chronicles of the culture — of the patrimony — that we, all of us, have ruined." —Joshua Cohen
>>Pumping Iron (1977).
The perfect book for paranoid times, "I" introduces us to W, a mere hanger-on in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie look-alike Major Feuerbach. But are political secrets all that W is seeking in the underground labyrinth of Berlin? In fact, what W really desires are his own lost memories, the self undone by surveillance: his "I." First published in Germany in 1993 and hailed as an instant classic, "I" is a black comedy about state power and the seductions of surveillance. Its vision seems especially relevant today in a world of corporate or state surveillance.
"Hilbig writes as Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Hilbig writes as Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany." —Los Angeles Review of Books
Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers. Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English.
The 66th issue is an elegant paperback festooned with coded illustrations by Jacques Kleynhans (see how many versions of the number 66 you can spot). Featuring “Willie the Weirdo,” a brand-new story by legendary horror writer Stephen King; plus stories by Taisia Kitaiskaia, Hernan Diaz, and T.C. Boyle; poems by Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova newly translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky; a surreal full-color comic by Teddy Goldenberg; letters from Samantha Hunt and Kate Folk; and more.
Two children do everything together and share special experiences. When one of them suddenly abandons the other for a new friend, the feelings of rejection are very painful. This beautifully illustrated book reassures us that new possibilities are always up ahead.
"The devoted friendship of two children ends without warning. This all-too-common childhood experience is dramatised with an emotional honesty that, refreshingly, skirts sentimentality." —Kirkus
One woman, one chainsaw, one modest plan for a very small building... Humans have always used their hands to create the world around them. But now most of us have gone from being practitioners to theorists, from being producers to consumers. What happens to our society when we are so divorced from the act of making? What happens to us as individuals when we limit the uses to which we put our hands? These are questions that preoccupy Siri Helle when she inherits a cabin of 25 square metres, without electricity, inlet water, or a toilet, and decides to build an outhouse herself. Without any previous experience of building anything, she has to learn on the job and what she learns is not just about how to lay a floor and construct walls, but about what she is capable of and about craft and about the satisfactions to be found in making things by hand.
A graphic guide to the frontiers of neuroscience. Professors and husband-and-wife team Uta and Chris Frith have pioneered major studies of brain disorders throughout their nearly fifty-year career. In Two Heads, their distinguished careers serve as a prism through which they share the compelling story of the birth of neuroscience and their paradigm-shifting discoveries across areas as wide-ranging as autism and schizophrenia research, and new frontiers of social cognition including diversity, prejudice, confidence, collaboration and empathy. Working with their son Alex Frith and artist Daniel Locke, they examine the way that neuroscientific research is now focused on the fact we are a social species, whose brains have evolved to work cooperatively. What happens when people gather in groups? How do people behave when they're in pairs either pitted against each other or working together? Is it better to surround yourself with people who are similar to yourself, or different? And, are two heads really better than one?
In the eighteenth century, as surges of smallpox swept Europe, the first rumours emerged of an effective treatment: a mysterious method called inoculation. But a key problem remained: convincing people to accept the preventative remedy, the forerunner of vaccination. Arguments raged over risks and benefits, and public resistance ran high. As smallpox ravaged her empire and threatened her court, Catherine the Great took the momentous decision to summon the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale to St Petersburg to carry out a secret mission that would transform both their lives. Lucy Ward expertly unveils the extraordinary story of Enlightenment ideals, female leadership and the fight to promote science over superstition.
In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our "digital age" is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.
>>Too Far Gone.
Understanding the human mind and how it relates to the world of experience has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries. How do we even begin to think about ‘minds’ that are not human? Philip Ball argues that in order to understand our own minds and imagine those of others, we need to move on from considering the human mind as a standard against which all others should be measured. Science has begun to have something to say about the properties of mind; the more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the more we can begin to see our own, and the more we can understand the diversity of the human mind, in the widest of contexts.
Nietzsche in Turin: The end of the future by Lesley Chamberlain $28
You Made a Fool Out of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi $33
Leilong's Too Long by Julia Liu and Bei Lynn $30
A Short History of Russia: How to understand the world's most complex nation by Mark Galeotti $30
Antkind by Charlie Kaufman $25
Seasonal Work, And other killer stories by Laura Lippman $37
Find Tom in Time: Michelangelo's Italy by Fatti Burke $33
Pride and Pudding: The history of British puddings, savoury and sweet by Regula Ysewijn $60
In 1888, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche moved to Turin. This would be the year in which he wrote three of his greatest works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo; it would also be his last year of writing. He suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown in the first days of the following year. In this probing, elegant biography of that pivotal year, Lesley Chamberlain undoes popular clichés and misconceptions about Nietzsche by offering a deeply complex approach to his character and work. Focusing as much on Nietzsche's daily habits, anxieties and insecurities as on the development of his philosophy, Nietzsche in Turin offers a uniquely lively portrait of the great thinker, and of the furiously productive days that preceded his decline.
The Diplomat by Chris Womersley $38
"A major intellectual event." —John Banville
1991. Fresh out of detox and five years after his involvement in the theft of Picasso's masterpiece 'The Weeping Woman' from the NGV, Edward Degraves — art forger and drug addict — returns to Melbourne for a new start. All he needs to do is make one last visit to The Diplomat, a seedy motel renowned for its drug dealers and eccentrics. But Edward's new-found sobriety is both a torment and a gift. As he revisits old haunts, he is confronted by reminders of the past: ruined relationships, a stalled career as an artist and — looming over everything — the death of his beloved wife Gertrude. How fine is the line between self-destruction and redemption?
"This is a gem of a novel, full of all the good stuff — love, art, failure, heartbreak — told in a clear, strong voice brimming with loss and longing. A novel of propulsive storytelling and moving depth." —Emily Bitto
"Edward is so heartbreakingly lost in the everyday, so doomed, that he could have risen from Dostoyevsky. Dark, touching and deeply authentic." —Jock Serong
Feyi Adekola wants to learn how to be alive again. It’s been five years since the accident that killed the love of her life and she’s almost a new person now—an artist with her own studio, and sharing a brownstone apartment with her ride-or-die best friend, Joy, who insists it’s time for Feyi to ease back into the dating scene. Feyi isn’t ready for anything serious, but a steamy encounter at a rooftop party cascades into a whirlwind summer she could have never imagined: a luxury trip to a tropical island, decadent meals in the glamorous home of a celebrity chef, and a major curator who wants to launch her art career. She’s even started dating the perfect guy, but their new relationship might be sabotaged before it has a chance by the dangerous thrill Feyi feels every time she locks eyes with the one person in the house who is most definitely off-limits. This new life she asked for just got a lot more complicated, and Feyi must begin her search for real answers. Who is she ready to become? Can she release her past and honor her grief while still embracing her future? And, of course, there’s the biggest question of all—how far is she willing to go for a second chance at love?
“An unabashed ode to living with, and despite, pain and mortality.” —The New York Times Book Review
"Akwaeke is a Next Generation Leader and they will blow your mind with the beauty and brilliance of this sizzling, glamorous love story, which I would basically like to live in." —Louisa Joyner
Leilong the brontosaurus has had a wonderful time being the children's school bus, but some people think she's too big to do the job. Poor Leilong! What is she going to do?
>>Have you read Leilong the Library Bus?
Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone's 'other'. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war and peace, poets and revolutionaries. Updated edition, including events leading up the invasion of Ukraine.
"An amazing achievement." —Peter Frankopan
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete. Convinced that the film will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core, that it might possibly be the greatest movie ever made, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: the film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that's left is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the work of art that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of 'likes' and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d'être. Kaufman is best known for his films, such as Being John Malkovich, Adaption, &c
"Riotously funny." —New York Times
Laura Lippman's sharp and acerbic stories explore the contemporary world and the female experience through the prism of classic crime, where the stakes are always deadly.
Tom's not only lost in time, he's lost his cat, too! Can you find Tom and his naughty cat, Digby, across the pages? Packed with detailed artwork, fascinating renaissance Florence facts and over 100 other things to find - from an apprentice working on a sculpture to a juggler at a carnival ball - lose yourself in Michelangelo's Italy with this interactive book!
Captivated by British culinary history — from its ancient savoury dishes such as the Scottish haggis to traditional sweet and savoury pies, pastries, jellies and ices, flummeries, junkets and jam roly-poly — Ysewijn documents the history of the British pudding as far back as the fourteenth century, rediscovering long-forgotten flavours and food fashions along the way. With stunning photography, illustrations and fascinating facts, Pride and Pudding recreates more than 80 recipes for the twenty-first century palate. A new edition of this excellent and beautiful book.
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>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Look inside!
>>Out of the blue and exciting.
>>Smitten.
>>A remarkable process of expansion.
>>The match-maker.
>>The other books in the 'Kōrero Series': High Wire by Lloyd Jones & Euan Macleod; Shining Land by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima; The Lobster's Tale by Chris Price and Bruce Foster.
>>The match-maker.
>>The other books in the 'Kōrero Series': High Wire by Lloyd Jones & Euan Macleod; Shining Land by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima; The Lobster's Tale by Chris Price and Bruce Foster.
>>Listening In.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens {Reviewed by STELLA} It’s Wellington — Upland Road to be precise. It’s the civil service with all its quirks, and it’s a magnifying glass on a millennial couple. Yes, this will make you squirm, especially if you are on the cusp of forty, a public servant with a teen at Wellington High, feeling a bit like a cog in the wheel, looking for a little excitement but not too much drama. The geographic parameters may be set, but the relationship map is all over the place in Murdoch Stephens’s satire about a millennial couple, Jacqui and Scott, with a teenage son. Said teenage son, Axle, has recently transferred from Wellington Boys to High after a miserable couple of years and is hoping for a kinder reception. Happily, he strikes up a friendship with Pete which gets him a foot in the door of that much-wanted teen accessory — a group. And the group’s okay — the kids are fine — some drinking, a science experiment with low-alcohol beer (hilariously supplied by Dad, Scott), budding relationships (wonderfully innocent), a scrap, and a general shrugging off of their various parents and adult authority — especially the heart-to-hearts and the morality tales. So far, so normal. But watch out for his ever-so-liberal parents. They are having a spell of relationship dullness, and when Jacqui’s friend gifts her a ‘hot’ young Brazilian, Joāo, it’s all on for a try at an 'open relationship'. Scott is keen — he’s got a slight wandering eye and tends to the obsessive in his infatuations. There’s a colleague at work who he’s keen on. His instrument is blunt though, and it is with a cringing inevitability that his attempt at striking up a relationship with this young woman will be a disaster and a tad creepy. Stephens handles this harassment with the right balance — such an awkward encounter at the bar, it's blackly funny — yet Scott’s not off the hook with his inappropriate behaviour. HR has something to say about it, and it’s not what you might expect. The satire keeps rolling and the new guy on the scene is keeping Scott occupied. He’s not the only one being bedded. Jacqui’s quite pleased with her Brazilian lover, although you get the impression that there’s not too much else that interests her. Asking no questions of the lovely Joāo will deliver her no lies. And why is she looking at Rothman, her boss, in that way? As things heat up in the bedroom and at work, both Jacqui and Scott find themselves in various pickles — some of their own making. Axle takes the various visits from his parents’ love interests in his stride — he’s got better things to fixate on. Down from Upland is excellent satire, it clips along at a fine pace. You will like the teens, but you might find the adults a little empty-headed. Uncomfortably microscopic and very funny. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Even on a blue day you could tell this sky had a knack for breaking into storms,” she writes, she someone, she the pharmacist-to-be, as she arrives in the Alpine town, a town anyway that seems like an Alpine town, high up, reached only by funicular railway, there’s a certain steepness involved, the town is depopulating, certainly you have the feeling that the only people living there are those you are aware of at any given time and that soon they too may be gone. When the narrator arrives she remembers visiting the town as a child in the company of her uncle and her mother at a time when her mother was ill but her uncle did not yet know that she was ill. From what has she run away to come here this time, or what has she otherwise left if it is not the case that she has run away? She takes a job as a pharmacist at the pharmacy owned by a Mr Malone, it seems she was a pharmacy student before she came here, though the main tasks of a pharmacist, at least in Mr Malone’s pharmacy, are not the main tasks of a pharmacist as we know them although certainly allied to those tasks. Mr Malone “believed that a pharmacist’s role was to enhance the locals’ potential by listening carefully,” to allow others to tell their stories, to reduce one’s presence to that of a listener only, to abnegate oneself, “the more absent I seemed, the more they talked,” she says, having a natural talent for the work of disappearing, a natural talent for undoing what we ordinarily think of as existing. “It occurred to me,” she says, “that there was something reassuring about the obviously dangerous Mr Malone to someone like me who worried all the time.” He is corrosive to her idea of herself; she wants to be corroded. Mr Malone eventually leaves the pharmacy to her and stands for mayor, though he hardly leaves, she supports his campaign, there hardly seems to be another candidate, Mr Malone becomes mayor, still he is the centre of his coterie of occupationally defined men, he is the centre of some void sucking at her always. Was there really a wolf-beast once in the town that ate little girls? Somehow it’s a fable but not exactly a fable, more a dream, everything is described with the same degree of portentious detail and the same lack of overall shape as an account of a dream, a dream in this case from which the dreamer, the young pharmacist, cannot awaken, from which waking will never be possible. Within this dream that the dreamer does not realise is a dream, the dreamer struggles to differentiate the actual from her reveries, the stories get away from her, “I was easy to derail,” she says. “I derailed myself on my own. Unless I was busy I was distracted by daydreams,” though she and we struggle and fail to tell what is actually the case and what is dreamed, the same residue remains in either case, the same damage done. “After I articulated this sort of reverie I felt a sense of revulsion,” she says. “I had started to feel as though I wouldn’t wake up, was scared I would disappear.” All stories are told stories, but the compounding of detail here erodes knowledge rather than constructs it, all detail is a subtraction, a relinquishment, written and rid of, the shape of things is lost, the self annulled. “I experimented with how little I could let pass over my face,” she says. All memory and identity are stripped away by iteration, vacancy expands, pushing everything out of sight and into non-existence, if there is such a place to be pushed. Even the descriptions eventually become descriptions primarily of absence: “The room had no decoration, nothing personal, no photographs of strict-looking characters standing in front of wrought-iron gates,” the narrator nothing more than a mirror: “I also was a reflective surface,” no longer sure even how to present herself before the customers of the pharmacy, “walking around in a long pause, an ellipsis,” her escape from herself complete, she has become the phantom she has unconsciously always sought to become. “All feelings would pass if I didn’t engage with them,” she says. “I have a weak spot, I had taken to telling people, a magic phrase that I used to trick my way out of an emotional hole,” out of existing, now ready to leave even this, the town of her attenuation. When her uncle comes to collect her he remembers nothing, he is a stranger to the town, he too has lost his history, he too has become nothing more than a label on an absence. And we are left with nothing, nothing that is except an oddly-shaped void, mountain air, sublime sentences, surprising details, words, phrases, oddness coming at us like something beautiful, sharp and cold. On the iterative level, Elven’s book has something of the disconcerting clarity of the work of Fleur Jaeggy, but more as if a work of brilliance had been translated a little awkwardly and inaccurately and somehow enhanced by the process no matter what was lost, though if this is a translated work, and perhaps all works are translated works in the way in which this work is a translated work, it is not a work translated between languages but between minds if there are such things as minds. Elven describes a new employee at the pharmacy as “perching his opinions at the end of pointed lips,” and how, during a storm, the storm promised perhaps by blue skies mentioned earlier, “we saw slanted people walking along the grass, trees gesticulating like conjurors, the wind throwing water off the river.” We may forget the sentences but we are left with the strange effect upon us of these sentences, just as we may forget a dream but still be left strangely affected. |
NEW RELEASES
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.
>>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 (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.
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.
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.
>>An act of love.
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.
The Wonders by Elena Medel (translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead) $37
Kingdom of Characters: A tale of language, obsession and genius in modern China by Jing Tsu $50
Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast $40
"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
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
>>Límónubökur.
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
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
The Beginners by Anne Serre (translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson) $37
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.
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.
Really Big Questions for Daring Thinkers by Stephen Law and Nishant Choksi $23
Wild Green Wonders: A life in nature by Patrick Barkham $37
How To Live. What To Do. How great novels help us change by Josh Cohen $24
>>We strongly recommend Losers.
"Genuinely original—and, often, very quietly so. Seriously weird and seriously excellent—call it the anglerfish of literature." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
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.
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.
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.
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
>>Read Stella's review.
| >> 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. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
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NEW RELEASES
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
Ko Te Hiakai Tangata: Te Taniwha o Tuarā-Rangaia and Te Hiakai Tangata: The Taniwha of Tuarā-Rangaia by Hirini Moko Mead $25 / $25
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | 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. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
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>>Read Stella's review.
>>His first time travelling north by train.
>>What the judges thought when short-listing the book for the 2021 Booker Prize.
>>What the judges thought when short-listing the book for the 2021 Booker Prize.
NEW RELEASES
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?
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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee $33
"An extraordinary book filled with dragons big and small." —Carole Wilkinson, author of the 'Dragonkeeper' series
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.
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.
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.
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.
