NEW RELEASES
The Undercurrents: A story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell $37
The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories. The Undercurrents: is a mix of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin's
Landwehr canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this apartment window offers a ringside seat onto the city's theatre of action. The building has stood on the banks of the Landwehr Canal in central Berlin since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.
When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell — a British-American writer in her mid-forties, adrift — becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. She moved into this house in 2014 with her then-husband and two sons, but before her was Herr Zimmermann, the wood-dealer who built the house, and the Salas, a family of printers who took it over in 1908, and lived here through both world wars. Their adopted daughter Melitta Sala, a Kriegskind or 'child of the war', inherited the building and takes hold of her imagination. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it is Kirsty Bell's turn to look out of this apartment window. She looks to the lives of the house's various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city's familiar narratives.
"It is easy to be carried along by these submerged currents, by the momentum of the prose, the motion through a resisting city. As in other classics of urban discovery, the personal becomes universal, and the past that demands to live in the present is revealed like a shining new reef. As we return, time and again, to the solitary figure at the window." —Iain Sinclair
"With The Undercurrents, Kirsty Bell does for Berlin what Lucy Sante has done for New York and Rebecca Solnit for San Francisco; she tells the stories recorded in the city's stone and water, and in the hearts of its inhabitants. Her profound and idiosyncratic chronicle of Berlin is an act of hydromancy, divining a history of love and loss from the water that flows beneath and between the city's bricks." —Dan Fox
"I read this watery, engrossing book in the bath, following along as Kirsty Bell's reflective curiosity leads her onward along the Landwehr canal, in and out of the archives, novels, memoirs, and stories of her building and her neighbourhood. Evocative and fascinating,
The Undercurrents is a liquid psychogeography of Berlin that had me mulling over the psychic charge of place not only where Bell lives, but where I live too." —Lauren Elkin
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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.
by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell) $40
A tender, acute, hilarious saga about fathers, sons and the many forms of family, from a writer internationally heralded as a voice of his generation. Gonzalo is a frustrated would-be poet in a city full of poets; poets lurk in every bookshop, prop up every bar, ready to debate the merits of Teillier and Millan (but never Neruda - beyond the pale). Then, nine years after their bewildering breakup, Gonzalo reunites with his teen sweetheart, Carla, who is now, to his surprise, the mother of a young son, Vicente. Soon they form a happy sort-of family - a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. In time, fate and ambition pull the lovers apart, but when it comes to love and poetry, what will be Gonzalo's legacy to his not-quite-stepson Vicente? Zambra chronicles with tenderness and insight the everyday moments - absurd, painful, sexy, sweet, profound - that constitute family life.
"His clever irony, his lighthearted yet powerful prose, his gift for capturing this life that passes through and yet still escapes us — everything Zambra has already put into practice in his novellas and short stories explodes with vitality in
Chilean Poet. Contemporary, ingenious, magnificent." —Samanta Schweblin
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Roberto Bolaño inspired him to write.
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The book is apparently about Chile and poetry.
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Read Thomas's review of Not To Read.
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Read Thomas's review of My Documents.
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Read Thomas's review of Multiple Choice.
The Naked Don't Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins $33
In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year. Matthieu Aikins, a journalist living in Kabul, decides to follow his friend. In order to do so, he must leave his own passport and identity behind to go underground on the refugee trail with Omar. Their odyssey across land and sea from Afghanistan to Europe brings them face to face with the people at heart of the migration crisis: smugglers, cops, activists, and the men, women and children fleeing war in search of a better life. As setbacks and dangers mount for the two friends, Matthieu is also drawn into the escape plans of Omar's entire family, including Maryam, the matriarch who has fought ferociously for her children's survival.
"A riveting and heartrending look at the hidden world of refugees that challenged everything I thought I knew about the consequences of war and globalisation. It's the most important work on the global refugee crisis to date, and a crucial document of these tumultuous times. It will go down as one of the great works of nonfiction literature of our generation." —Anand Gopal
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An act of love.
by Amy Liptrot $33
The new book from the author of
The Outrun. Wishing to leave behind the quiet isolation of her Orkney island life, Amy Liptrot books a one-way flight to Berlin. Searching for new experiences, inspiration and love, she rents a loft bed in a shared flat and looks for work. She explores the streets, nightclubs and parks and seeks out the city's wildlife - goshawks, raccoons and hooded crows. She looks for love through the screen of her laptop. Over the course of a year Amy makes space hoping for the unexpected. And it comes with an erotic jolt, in the form of a love affair that obsesses her.
The Instant is an unapologetic look at the addictive power of love and lust. It is also an exploration of the cycles of the moon, the flight paths of migratory birds, the mesmerising power of Neolithic stonework and the trails followed by a generation who exist online.
"Intoxicating, generous and refreshingly original. The way Liptrot weaves her inner life with the natural world and the digital world is utterly absorbing. This book is so alive and so wild." —Lucy Jones
The Wonders by Elena Medel (translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead) $37
Maria and Alicia are a grandmother and granddaughter who have never met. Decades apart, both are drawn to Madrid in search of work and independence. Maria, scraping together a living as a cleaner and carer, sending money back home for the daughter she hardly knows; Alicia, raised in prosperity until her family was brought low by tragedy, now trapped in a low-paid job and a cycle of banal infidelities. Their lives are marked by precarity, and by the haunting sense of how things might have been different. Through a series of arresting vignettes, Elena Medel weaves together a broken family's story, stretching from the last years of Franco's dictatorship to the 2018 Spanish Women's Strike. Audacious, intimate and shot through with sharp-edged lyricism, The Wonders is a revelatory novel about the many ways that lives are shaped by class, history and feminism; about what has changed for working-class women, and what has remained stubbornly the same.
"A mesmerizing read. I was completely engrossed in this story, in the shadow each generation casts on the one that comes after it, in the tension between caring for oneself and caring for others." —Avni Doshi
"Completely unsentimental and with a harshness that hides the most radiant and painful of scars, Elena Medel's The Wonders brings to life several generations of working women: it's a serene and impious novel that puts class, feminism, and the eternal complexity of family ties at the fore." —Mariana Enriquez
Kingdom of Characters: A tale of language, obsession and genius in modern China by Jing Tsu $50
China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language — a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike — accessible to a globalised, digital world. Kingdom of Characters follows the innovators who adapted the Chinese script — and the value-system it represents — to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences.
by Christopher Prendergast $40
A la recherche du temps perdu belongs in the tradition of the Initiation Story, the journey it describes combining elements drawn from the earlier narratives of great expectations and lost illusions, while recasting them in ways that are distinctively Proust's. The Proust scholar Christopher Prendergast traces that journey as it unfolds on an arc defined by the polarity of his title, living and dying. The book offers a chapter by chapter exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, woven by the pulse of desire, the hauntings of memory and an ever alert responsiveness to tastes, perfumes, sounds, and colours. It also traces the construction of a unique architecture of narrative time and a corresponding mode of story-telling, marked by all manner of loops, swerves, detours, regressions and returns, from the macro level of the novel's plot to the micro level of the famously elaborate Proustian sentence. The lives of his characters, both major and minor, are shown as criss-crossing and converging in ways that often take the reader by surprise, before descending the arc on an irreversible trajectory of decline, as the body starts to fail and the grave beckons.
"A work buzzing with appetite and curiosity — a real delight. No Proustian should be without it." —Andrew Marr
"Literate, lively, and leavened by wry and gentle humour, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is a feast."' —Lydia Davis
by Matthew Teller $40
In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. The Old City has never had 'four quarters' as its maps proclaim. And beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, many of its quarters are little known to visitors, its people ignored and their stories untold. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem lets the communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging from ancient past to political present, it evokes the city's depth and cultural diversity. Matthew Teller's highly original 'biography' features not just Jerusalem's Palestinian and Jewish communities, but its African and Indian voices, its Greek and Armenian and Syriac communities, its downtrodden Dom-gypsy families and its Sufi mystics. It discusses the sources of Jerusalem's holiness and the ideas — often startlingly secular — that have shaped lives within its walls. It is an evocation of place through story, led by the voices of Jerusalemites.
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte $40
The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They - or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars, molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions.
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
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
by Audrey Magee $33
Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine - the authentic experience. Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place - one in his paintings, the other with his faithful rendition of its speech, the language he hopes to preserve. But the people who live here on this rock - three miles wide and half-a-mile long - have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Over the summer each of the women and men in the household this French and Englishman join is forced to question what they value and what they desire. At the end of the summer, as the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.
"Intelligent and provocative. The Colony contains multitudes - on families, on men and women, on rural communities - with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water." —The Times
"A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee's strong prose." —Sarah Moss
The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with Husserl's phenomenological school. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture on a cramped Berlin tram. Over the next decade, the lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine as each gains world-historical significance, between them remaking Western philosophy.
A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 billion years in 12 chapters by Henry Gee $40
For billions of years, Earth was an inhospitably alien place - covered with churning seas, slowly crafting its landscape by way of incessant volcanic eruptions, the atmosphere in a constant state of chemical flux. And yet, despite facing literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter, life has been extinguished and picked itself up to evolve again. Life has learned and adapted and continued through the billions of years that followed. It has weathered fire and ice. Slimes begat sponges, who through billions of years of complex evolution and adaptation grew a backbone, braved the unknown of pitiless shores, and sought an existence beyond the sea. From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted. Life teems through Henry Gee's prose; supercontinents drift, collide, and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today. Creatures are introduced, from 'gregarious' bacteria populating the seas to duelling dinosaurs in the Triassic period to mammals with the future in their (newly evolved) grasp. Those long extinct, almost alien early life forms are resurrected in evocative detail.
by Anne Serre (translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson) $37
Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. "How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that's not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross." Unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd.
"Genuinely original—and, often, very quietly so. Seriously weird and seriously excellent—call it the anglerfish of literature." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
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.
How To Live. What To Do. How great novels help us change by Josh Cohen $24
From the truths and lies we tell about ourselves to the resonant creations of fiction, stories give shape and meaning to all our lives. Both a practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of literature, Josh Cohen has long been taken with the mutual echoes between the life struggles of the consulting room and the dramas of the novel. So what might the most memorable characters in literature tell us about how to live meaningfully?
"By the end of this wonderful book, we have learned to read its title not as a prescription but as a set of questions. Neither novels nor psychoanalysis promise to finally answer those questions. Instead, they invite us to look and listen - and to live in a way that lets us keep asking." —Times Literary Supplement
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We strongly recommend Losers.
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