Book of the Week. Alan Garner's TREACLE WALKER is a spare and moving story of a lonely boy who strikes up a friendship with a wandering rag-and-bone man who opens his eyes to new depths of experience. Melding myth, folklore and quantum physics, Treacle Walker is a novel about the acquisition of human depth, and an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of our understanding of time (“time is ignorance.” —Carlo Rovelli).
"Treacle Walker crams into its 150-odd pages more ideas and imagination than most authors manage in their whole careers." —Alex Preston, The Guardian
>>Where did all the children go?
>>Blackden and beyond. 
>>Myth meets modern science. 
>>Knowing your place. 
>>"You don't want to have a brilliant idea for a novel at the age of 87." 
>>"Age, in itself, is irrelevant."
>>Read an extract. 
>>Short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize. 


 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.
 



























 

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel  {Reviewed by STELLA}
Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is a book to be lost in. It’s a book about time, living and loving. Superbly constructed, it stretches from 1912 to 2401; from the wildness of Vancouver to a moon colony of the future. A remittance man, Edwin St.John St.Andrew, is sent abroad. He’s completely at sea in this new world — he has no appetite for work nor connection — and makes a haphazard journey to a remote settlement on a whim. Here, he has an odd experience which leaves him shaken. He will return to England only to find himself derailed in the trenches of the First World War and later struck down by the flu pandemic. It’s 2020 and Mirella (some readers will remember her from The Glass Hotel) is searching for her friend Vincent (who has disappeared). She attends a concert by Vincent’s brother Paul and afterwards waits for him to appear, along with two music fans at the backstage door. It’s here, on the eve of our current pandemic, that she discovers that Vincent has drowned at sea. Yet it is an art video that Vincent had recorded and been used in Paul’s performance which is at the centre of the conversation for one of the music fans. The film is odd — recounting an unworldly experience in the Vancouver forest. A short clip — erratic and strangely out of place, out of time. It’s 2203 and Olive Llewellyn, author, is on a book tour of Earth. She lives on Moon Colony Two and is feeling bereft — missing her husband and daughter. It’s a gruelling schedule of talks, interviews and same-same hotel rooms; and, if this wasn’t enough, there’s a new virus on the loose. Her bestselling book, Marienbad is about a pandemic. Within its pages is a description of a strange occurrence which takes place in a railway station. When an interviewer questions her about this passage, she’s happy to talk about it, as long it is off the record. It’s 2401, and detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts from the Night City has been hired to investigate an anomaly in time. Drawing on his experiences and the book, Marienbad, and finding connections between the aforementioned times and people, will lead him to a place where he will make a decision that may have disruptive consequences. A decision which will cause upheaval. Emily St.John Mandel is deft in her writing, keeping the threads of time and the story moving across and around themselves without losing the reader, and making the knots — the connections — at just the right time to engage and delight intellect and curiosity. Moving through time and into the future makes this novel an unlikely contender to be a book of our time, but in so many ways it is. Clever, fascinating, reflective and unsettling, it’s a tender shout-out to humanity. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 



































 












 


The Years by Annie Ernaux   {Reviewed by THOMAS}

“She will go within herself only to retrieve the world,” writes Annie Ernaux in this astounding work of what she terms “impersonal autobiography”. Conspicuously not a memoir, unless it is a memoir of time itself, the book takes the form of a ‘flat’, rigorous and unsentimental serial accumulation of moments that would otherwise be lost from human experience, moments shorn of interpretation or context, impressions that the author has resisted the expectation to turn into a narrative. Thus preserved in the nearest possible state to experience, the memories retain the power of memories without being condensed into fact, they retain the power to resonate in the reader in the way in which the reader's own memories resonate. Although the memories are often very personal and specific, covering every detail of Ernaux’s life from childhood to old age, Ernaux never presents them as belonging to an ‘I’, always to a ‘she’ or a ‘we’. She does not presume a continuity of self other than the self that exists in the moment of experience, a moment that will continue until that memory is extinguished. The distancing of the memory from the ‘I’, the clipping free of the experience from its subject, the creation of a text that is at once impersonal and personal, becomes a machine for the conversion of the particular into the universal, or, rather, for erasing the distinction between the two. “By retrieving the collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.” At the moment that Ernaux severs her attachment from the memories that she records, she saves them from plausible extinction, she makes them the memories of others. When such responses are awakened in the reader, the reader becomes the rememberer (the rememberer in this case of living in France between 1941 and 2006). Any emotional response comes from the reader’s experience, not the author’s, or, rather, from the collective human experience that includes both reader and author. There are separate narratives, or separate modes, for what one remembers and what one knows to have happened. What is the relationship between these two kinds of memory? “Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots,” she writes. As Ernaux reaches old age, witnessing a series of “burials that foreshadow her own,” she casts back from an imperative somewhere beyond her death, recording the rush of memory towards its ultimate forgetting. “All the images will disappear. They will vanish all at the same time, like the images that lay hidden behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Thousands of words will suddenly be deleted the ones that were used to name things, faces, acts and feelings, to put the world in order. Everything will be erased in a second, the dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated.” But it is not only death that can extinguish memory: “The future is replaced by a sense of urgency that torments her. She is afraid that her memory will become cloudy and silent. Maybe one day all things and their names will slip out of alignment and she’ll no longer be able to put names to reality. All that will remain is the reality that cannot be spoken. Now’s the time to give form to her future absence through writing.” Her book is an attempt to “save something from the time where we will never be again.” By her method of conjuring and recording the raw material of her life, Ernaux “finds something that the image from her personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself.” The passage of time is made tangible, subjects are dissolved in their experiences, the intimate is revealed as the universal, moments are, in the act of writing, both held and relinquished.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner           $25
"When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day – a wanderer, a healer – an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined. Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore, an exploration of the fluidity of time, a mysterious, beautifully written and affecting glimpse into the deep work of being human. Treacle Walker confronts the issues that anyone who ever lived has had to confront. The transition out of childhood. The transition into old age. The gaining and loss of personal agency. What we can expect to know about the world – and our life in it – and what we can’t; and how we face up to that. One of the central themes of the book is how – and from whom – we get our knowledge: that would seem to be a very important question, given the information environment in which people now live. Alan Garner’s novel draws you relentlessly into its echoing metaphysical and emotional space." —judges' citation
Short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize. 
"Treacle Walker crams into its 150-odd pages more ideas and imagination than most authors manage in their whole careers." —Alex Preston, The Guardian

Lessons by Ian McEwan          $37
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. As an adult, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
"Lessons marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career — and may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age." —New Statesman
"The author has woven multiple versions of himself into his 500-page masterpiece." —The Times
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer)          $38
Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Celebrated for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. 
"Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months." —Sheila Heti
"Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from hers long after I’ve finished reading." —Catherine Lacey
>>Read Thomas's reviews of The Years and Exteriors. 
Stone Blind: Medusa's story by Natalie Haynes        $40
Medusa is the only mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her sisters, she quickly realizes that she is the only one who gets older, experiences change, feels weakness. Her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know. When the sea god, Poseidon, commits an unforgivable act in her sacred temple the goddess, Athene, takes her revenge on an innocent — and Medusa's life is changed forever. Appalled by her own reflection: snakes have replaced her hair and she realises that her gaze can now turn any living creature to stone. Medusa can no longer look upon anyone she loves without destroying them, and so condemns herself to a life lived in shadow and solitude to limit her murderous rage. That is, until Perseus embarks upon a fateful quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon. From the author of A Thousand Ships.
"Brilliant and compellingly readable." —Guardian
All the Broken Places by John Boyne        $37
1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a violent argument between Henry's mother and his domineering father, one that threatens Gretel's hard-won, self-contained existence. Gretel is faced with a chance to expiate her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy — for the second time in her life. But to do so, she will be forced to reveal her true identity to the world. Will she make a different choice this time, whatever the cost to herself? Boyne's insightful new novel follows the life of Gretel from The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, and shows how the experiences of childhood are very difficult to escape in adulthood. 
"Compulsively readable." —Irish Independent
Tripticks by Ann Quin                                      $33
First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and final novel was a radical break from the introspective style she had developed in Three and Passages : a declaration of independence from all expectations. Brashly experimental, ribald, and hilarious, Tripticks maps new territories for the novel. Splattering its pages with the story of a man being chased across a nightmarish America by his 'first X-wife', and her 'schoolboy gigolo', Tripticks was ground zero for the collision of punk energy with high style.
"Quin's spare prose line—delphic, obscure and hauntingly suggestive-—creates a comparably vertiginous kind of enchantment. To submit to this unique book's spell is to experience, in language, a 'fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms'." —Sam Sack, Wall Street Journal
"Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools. Every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship." —New York Times
"I suspect that Ann Quin will eventually be viewed, alongside B. S. Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter." —Tom McCarthy
"Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention--rarer still one that proceeds to do seemingly everything it can to avoid following the path its intention has laid." —Danielle Dutton
>>Read Thomas's review of Three. 
Super-Infinite: The transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell          $40
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP — and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father's consent; struggled to feed a family of ten children; and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
"To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness." —Guardian
Homesick by Jennifer Croft            $36
Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results. The renowned translator's first novel is based on her own life. 
“Jennifer Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity that ensures this exceptional Bildungsroman will stay etched in the reader’s mind for a very long time to come.”  —Olga Tokarczuk
"Stunning and surprising." —New York Times
"A tribute to the deep bond of sisterhood: how, over years navigating life, it stretches apart and snaps back." —The Scotsman
Malarkoi by Alex Pheby             $45
The jaw-dropping sequel to the remarkable fantasy Mordew. Nathan Treeves is dead, murdered by the Master of Mordew, his remains used to create the powerful occult weapon known as the Tinderbox. His companions are scattered, making for Malarkoi, the city of the Mistress, the Master's enemy. They are hoping to find welcome there, or at least safety. They find neither — and instead become embroiled in a life and death struggle against assassins, demi-gods, and the cunning plans of the Mistress. Only Sirius, Nathan's faithful magical dog, has not forgotten the boy, and, bent on revenge, he returns to the shattered remains of Mordew, newly deformed into an impossible mountain, swarming with monsters. He senses something in the Manse at its pinnacle — the Master is there, grieving the loss of his manservant, Bellows — and in the ruins of the slums he finds a power capable of destroying his foe, if only he has the strength to use it. 
Orlam by P.J. Harvey            $45
Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of Underwhelem. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira's sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb's eyeball who is Ira-Abel's guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children's songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. P.J. Harvey's poem sequence is the first book published in the Dorset dialect for several decades. 
High: A journey across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China by Erika Fatland          $40
The Himalayas meander through five very different countries, where the world religions of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are mixed with ancient shamanic religions. Countless languages and vastly different cultures live in the secluded mountain valleys. Modernity and tradition collide, while the great powers fight for influence. We have read about mountain climbers on their way up Mount Everest and about travellers on the spiritual quest for Buddhist monasteries. But how much do we know about the people living in the Himalaya? Fatland invites us into close encounters with the many peoples of the region, and at the same time takes us on a dizzying journey at altitude through incredible landscapes and dramatic, unknown world histories - all the way to the most volatile human conflicts of our times.
Michael Rosen's Sticky McStickstick: The friend who helped me walk again by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Tony Ross           $19
After almost dying and spending over a month in an induced coma after being admitted to hospital with coronavirus, Michael Rosen had to learn to walk again. With the support of doctors and nurses and a walking stick he named 'Sticky McStickstick', he managed to embark on the slow steps to recovery. A moving picture book about the importance of persistence, support, and caring about and for others.
The Light in the Darkness: Black holes, the universe and us by Heino Falcke and Jorg Romer        $28
10th April 2019: a global sensation. Heino Falcke, a person "working at the boundaries of his discipline and therefore at the limits of the universe" had used a network of telescopes spanning the entire planet to take the first picture of a black hole. Light in the Darkness examines how mankind has always looked to the skies, mapping the journey from millennia ago when we turned our gaze to the heavens, to modern astrophysics. Falcke and Romer chart the breakthrough research of the team, an unprecedented global community of international colleagues developing a telescope complex enough to look directly into a black hole — a hole where light vanishes, and time stops.
What If? 2: Additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions by Randall Munroe          $35
WHAT IF... one person decided to answer all the unanswerable questions, using science? Randall Munroe is here to provide the best answers yet to the important questions you probably never thought to ask. The  people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer doors at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-storey building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Read Munroe's advice before you try these things yourself.
Planta Sapiens: Unmasking plant intelligence by Paco Calvo and Natalie Lawrence          $40
What is it like to be a plant? It's not a question we might think to contemplate, even though many of us live surrounded by plants. Science has long explored the wonderful ways in which plants communicate, behave and shape their environments: from chemical warfare to turning their predators to cannibalism. But they're nevertheless often just the backdrop to our frenetic animal lives. While plants may not have brains or move around as we do, cutting-edge science is revealing that they have astonishing inner worlds of an alternate kind to ours. They can plan ahead, learn, recognise their relatives, assess risks and make decisions. They can even be put to sleep. Innovative new tools might allow us to actually see them do these things — from electrophysiological recordings to MRI and PET scans. Calvo challenges us to make an imaginative leap into a world that is so close and yet so alien. It is one that will expand our understanding of our own minds.
The Bullet that Missed ('Thursday Murder Club' #3) by Richard Osman           $37
It is an ordinary Thursday and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club is concerned. A decade-old cold case leads them to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers. Then, a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill . . . or be killed. As the cold case turns white hot, Elizabeth wrestles with her conscience (and a gun), while Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim chase down clues with help from old friends and new. But can the gang solve the mystery and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?

African Europeans: An untold history by Olivette Otele          $30
Otele uncovers the untold history of Europeans of African descent, from Saint Maurice who became the leader of a Roman legion and Renaissance scholar Juan Latino, to abolitionist Mary Prince and the activist, scholars and grime artists of the present day. Tracing African European heritage through the complex, and often brutal experiences of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary, she sheds new light not only on the past but also on questions very much alive today — about racism, identity, citizenship, power and resilience. African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come.
"This is a book I have been waiting for my whole life. It goes beyond the numerous individual black people in Europe over millennia, to show us the history of the very ideas of blackness, community and identity on the continent that has forgotten its own past. A necessary and exciting read." —Afua Hirsch
Thomas Bernhard by Gitta Honegger           $57
Bernhard's writings and indeed his own biography reflect Austria's fraught efforts to define itself as a nation following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the trauma of World War II. His novels, plays, and public statements exposed the convoluted ways Austrians were attempting to come to terms with their Nazi past—or defiantly avoiding doing so. While Bernhard was the scourge of his native culture, Honegger explains, he was also a product of that same culture. 
>>Read Thomas's reviews of some of Bernhard's novels. 



VOLUME BooksNew releases


The 2022 BOOKER PRIZE
Short List

What do the judges think of the books? 

Order your reading now and tell us what you think.
The winner will be announced on 17 October.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka          $40
"Colombo, 1990: Maali Almeida is dead, and he’s as confused about how and why as you are. A Sri Lankan whodunnit and a race against time, Seven Moons is full of ghosts, gags and a deep humanity. The voice of the novel – a first-person narrative rendered, with an astonishingly light touch, in the second person – is unforgettable: beguiling, unsentimental, by turns tender and angry and always unsparingly droll. This is Sri Lankan history as whodunnit, thriller, and existential fable teeming with the bolshiest of spirits. ‘You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.’ This is a deeply humane novel about how to live in intolerable circumstances, about whether change is possible, and how to set about coping if it’s not."

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner           $25
"When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day – a wanderer, a healer – an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined. Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore, an exploration of the fluidity of time, a mysterious, beautifully written and affecting glimpse into the deep work of being human. Treacle Walker confronts the issues that anyone who ever lived has had to confront. The transition out of childhood. The transition into old age. The gaining and loss of personal agency. What we can expect to know about the world – and our life in it – and what we can’t; and how we face up to that. One of the central themes of the book is how – and from whom – we get our knowledge: that would seem to be a very important question, given the information environment in which people now live. Alan Garner’s novel draws you relentlessly into its echoing metaphysical and emotional space."
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan         $29
"Keegan is measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the Church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers – and the cost of one man’s moral courage. It is the tale, simply told, of one ordinary middle-aged man – Bill Furlong – who in December 1985, in a small Irish town, slowly grasps the enormity of the local convent’s heartless treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies (one instance of what will soon be exposed as the scandal of the Magdalene laundries). We accompany Furlong, and we feel – and fear – for him as he realises what is happening, decides how he must in conscience act, and accepts what that action, in a small church-dominated town, will cost him, his wife and his children. The book is not so much about the nature of evil as the circumstances that allow it. More than Furlong’s quiet heroism, it explores the silent, self-interested complicity of a whole community, which makes it possible for such cruelty to persist. It forces every reader to ask what they are doing about the injustices that we choose not to think about too closely."
The Trees by Percival Everett        $34
"Part southern noir, part something else entirely, The Trees is a dance of death with jokes – horrifying and howlingly funny – that asks questions about history and justice and allows not a single easy answer. The Trees is a mash-up of genres – murder mystery, southern noir, horror, slapstick comedy – handled with such skill that it becomes a medieval morality play spun through 20th-century pop culture to say something profound and urgent about the present moment. It’s an irresistible page-turner, hurtling headlong with swagger, humour, relish and rage. Everything about The Trees is relevant to today’s world. Everett looks at race in America with an unblinking eye, asking what it is to be haunted by history, and what it could or should mean to rise up in search of justice. Everything between the horror of the first murder scene and the last sentence is an adrenaline rush."
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout         $24
"Oh William! is one of those quietly radiant books that finds the deepest mysteries in the simplest things. Strout’s gentle reflections on marriage, family, love and loneliness are utterly piercing. Has there ever been a character quite like Lucy Barton? Unassuming and yet profound, entirely ordinary and yet deeply moving. A woman in her later life, full of doubt and regret, Lucy’s reflections illuminate the reader, too. Strout’s writing is steeped in compassion for human beings, damaged and disappointed, full of follies and frailties, but capable, too, of deep understanding. Lucy Barton is an older woman, divorced, with grown-up children, and yet still coming to terms with her own childhood and learning how little she has understood the people closest to her. Strout writes her with a capacious empathy and probing insight."
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo            $37
"A magical crossing of the African continent with its political excesses and its wacky characters. Here, the fable is never far from the reality. NoViolet Bulawayo describes her characters will make you think that there are no boundaries between our world and the world of animals. Destiny has returned to Jidada from a long exile. She witnesses the tumult, the revolution in the country and how the women are fighting against the regime. She is the symbol of the young African women in the continent. The Old Horse — it inevitable to see behind him the despotic president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe — has a strange cabinet: a Minister of the Revolution, a Minister of Things, a Minister of Nothing, and so on. This political satire goes beyond Zimbabwe and could relate to nations with despotic regimes around the world. It is also a book about feminism and power sharing."


VOLUME BooksBook lists

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.






























 

Looking, Writing, Reading, Looking edited by Georgi Gospodinov    {Reviewed by STELLA}
The place where words and art intersect is always interesting. In this collection, writers take on contemporary works at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the results are various and wonderfully unexpected. These are not theory-heavy nor filled with art speak. They are critiques of a literary nature — personal responses through the observant eyes of each writer: the looking (and the looking again); and the thoughts, memories or ideas which spring from these observations. Here you will find writers you have read, others you have heard of (but maybe not encountered their writings) and some that haven’t crossed your radar yet. There are memoir pieces, poems, more direct descriptions and interpretations, fictional interviews or reportage, and creative short stories. The writing sometimes takes us further into the particular artwork. Other pieces edge us towards a deeper understanding of elements springing from the work, with cascading ideas that will lead you to future interpretations. Others reveal more about the writer, taking the reader into a more internal world with an experience revealed. Experiences that sit alongside their chosen artwork tell us something about them as well as the power of art to spark this exploration. What draws us to a particular artwork? Why does one painting or sculpture capture us — ask us to stop, to look, to read — while another will hardly leave an imprint: we will see, but merely glide by? Writers are keen observers and this writer/art project at the gallery is refreshing as it does not require us to ‘know’ or have some insider information about the objects, which are interacted with rather than described. Each artwork is photographed and sits alongside the written text, and each author has a portrait taken, in the same place, by the water’s edge, revealing something quite special about each. All 26 writers had been attendees at the museum’s writers’ festival. In this collection, Anne Carson cleverly pulls together an unofficial transcript (with notes) of contemporary philosophers on Ragnar Kjartansson’s 'Me and My Mother'. Colm Toibin explores 'La Double Face' of Asger Jorn with his assured and thoughtful considerations of all that can be held in a face — vulnerability, ambiguity and energy. Domenico Starnone introduces us to 'Museo del Prado 5' by photographer Thomas Struth, expounding on the meta meta nature of this painting/photography/writing exposure. Yoko Tawada quietly, in her storytelling style, asks us to contemplate the role of our lives while viewing Nobuo Sekine’s 'Phases of Nothingness'. Guadalupe Nettel reveals how the 'On Stone Sculptures' by Henry Heerup call to her with a delightful short essay that perfectly embraces the artist’s relationship with stone. And Delphine de Vigan, as she reencounters Louise Bourgeois’s 'Spider Couple', reminds us that our relationship with artworks change, our interpretations are sometimes unintentionally faulty (driven by a desire for an artwork to speak to us of our own experience), and the artist’s intention is not necessarily at the forefront of our understanding — and that is all fine! All the contributions have something to recommend them and there are sharp as well as emotional responses. An interesting collection (handsomely produced), worth having on your shelf for the writing and the selected artworks.
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 

 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 




































 












 


99 Interruptions by Charles Boyle   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
1.   I sit down to write a review of Charles Boyle’s 99 Interruptions, but I no sooner put finger to keyboard than I urgently need the right word to describe the book’s appealing smallness. Is it a duodecimo or a sextodecimo, I wonder. I count the leaves, check the binding, trawl the internet. This is an out-of-date question, I realise eventually, and not really an interesting question anyway.
2.   To any given task the potential interruptions are infinite, but they do seem to fall into two categories: interruptions with an external source (family members, a cat fight in the back garden, a caller from Porlock) and interruptions with an internal source (useless questions about book format, random alerts from some malfunctioning mental appointments calendar, concerns about the underlying cause of various pains, the endless rephrasing of an imperfect conversation). Not that I really think there is a distinction between an internal and an external, I don’t believe in either after all, but it helps to halve infinity sometimes. 
3.   I will just interrupt the practical demands of my life to read this book, I thought, but the practical demands of my life, so to call them and so to call it, repeatedly interrupt my reading, even though the book is short. Two sets of interruptions grapple with each other over my attention. There are perhaps only interruptions (and interruptions to the interruptions).
4.   Sometimes the interruptions come even before whatever it is that they interrupt, in which case they are perhaps not interruptions to that activity but interruptions to the preconditions of that activity, to the preparations that are I suppose themselves some sort of activity but not identifiable as any activity in particular. Is most of my life these days lived in this state of velleity? 
5.   The first time I sat down to read read this book, 99 Interruptions, I was interrupted by finding a surprising quotation on the first page I came to, and then by finding that I had to check the source and context of that quotation.
6.   Without interruptions there is no story, Boyle shows. The interruptions are the story. An interruption disrupts the natural tendency to oversimplification (which is indistinguishable from nonexistence). 
7.   An interruption is the assertion of the particular against the pull of the general and the abstract. It is the prime quality of fiction. 
8.   An interruption breaks a continuum and causes two realities to mingle. I frequently find this irritating but at least my irritation is real irritation.  
9.   Is the fragment the only authentic contemporary literary form?
10.   Boyle remarks that, although most fiction is written in the past tense, a reader or critic invariably relates the narrative as happening in the present, “as if everything … is still happening and there’s no end in sight.” I hadn’t thought about this before, and thinking about it now is interrupting my progress through the book. 
11.   Fiction interrupts time by the introduction of a completely other thread of time, allowing the reader to jump between the two as inclination or interruption dictates. Before it is anything else, fiction is a sin against time, an interruption or eruption.
12.   In most situations I tend to feel that my presence is an interruption of whatever would otherwise be the case. This is probably not a very healthy way to think, but I cannot find a way in which it is not true. 
13.   I am actually writing a review, if you can call it that, but I am interrupted by that little repeated stifled sound coming from the headphones that S is wearing so that I am not interrupted by the music she is listening to. I won’t interrupt what she is busy doing over there on account of this; it is about time I accepted that the membrane between writing and real life (so to call it) is always entirely permeable. No wonder I never get anything done. 
14.   Would it be possible to welcome every interruption into the work itself? To create a work entirely of interruptions? (Like Boyle’s!)
15.   Be that as it may (does this construction even make sense?), the work is ultimately interrupted by its deadline. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


You can't go past our Book of the Week, Annual 3: A miscellany from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Susan Paris and Kate DeGoldi         
If you know of any children who are curious, discerning, up for anything, and ready for some stimulating stories, intriguing illustrations and very amusing amusements (or if you are yourself any or all of these things), you won't be able to do better than give them (or yourself) a copy of this wonderful book. Alongside familiar names (Paul Beavis, Giselle Clarkson, Ant Sang, Gavin Bishop, Kimberly Andrews, Tim Denee, Johanna Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Josh Morgan), you’ll find welcome surprises: a new song from Troy Kingi, gothic fiction by Airini Beautrais, a te reo Māori crossword from Ben Brown, an adaptation of Maurice Gee’s 'The Champion' presented in comic format, and work from emerging talents J. Wiremu Kane and Austin Milne. Annual 3 is playful and smart and packed with content — a book for the whole family. Where else would you find a poem about not kissing in church, a pattern for a knitted brain, a kākāpō in a kimono for colouring, an essay about Harry Potter, and a comic about head lice? Not to mention the board game Camp Kūkū and 'The Traditional Big Spread of Aotearoa NZ'.
>>See some sample pages on our website. 
>>Everybody wants a copy of the Annual!
>>Browse our selection of other excellent children's books.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Children's books

 NEW RELEASES

Annual 3: A miscellany from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Susan Paris and Kate DeGoldi            $45
If you know of any children who are curious, discerning, up for anything, and ready for some stimulating stories, intriguing illustrations and very amusing amusements (or if you are yourself any or all of these things), you won't be able to do better than give them (or yourself) a copy of this wonderful book. Alongside familiar names (Paul Beavis, Giselle Clarkson, Ant Sang, Gavin Bishop, Kimberly Andrews, Tim Denee, Johanna Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Josh Morgan), you’ll find welcome surprises: a new song from Troy Kingi, gothic fiction by Airini Beautrais, a te reo Māori crossword from Ben Brown, an adaptation of Maurice Gee’s 'The Champion' presented in comic format, and work from emerging talents J. Wiremu Kane and Austin Milne. Annual 3 is playful and smart and packed with content – a book for the whole family. Where else would you fnd a poem about not kissing in church, a pattern for a knitted brain, a kākāpō in a kimono for colouring, an essay about Harry Potter, and a comic about head lice? Not to mention the board game Camp Kūkū and 'The Traditional Big Spread of Aotearoa NZ'.
>>See some sample pages on our website. 
Girl Online: A user manual by Joanna Walsh         $23
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain - a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with 'accounts' of personal 'experience'.  This arresting personal narrative disguises the truth of a woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona. Written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, Girl Online takes in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism. It is an (anti) user manifesto, exploding the terms and conditions of appearing online under the sign of 'girl'. A philosophical investigation into the online experience of women as everyday users, it asks, is the personal internet a trap, or can it also be an opportunity for survival, and resistance?
"This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualisation." —Anne Boyer
"A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn't miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is "good to think" with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era." —Lauren Elkin
"Walsh skilfully captures the fragmentary nature of online existence, the slippery nature of our online selves and their endless interpretations, and both the connections and the alienation that come with it. This is a deep and yet beautifully light meditation on what the internet is doing to our brains." —Juliet Jacques
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yolo Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)        $33
Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'. Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight.
"Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things." —Sara Baume
Peninsula by Sharron Came           $30
Loosely centred on three generations of the Carlton family and told with restrained lyricism, Peninsula is a set of ten interwoven stories about the lives of an ordinary rural Northland farming community over decades of change. It's a community populated with stoic, fierce characters who brim with feeling, embroiled in rich and complex relationships with the land, and with one another. 
"This stunning book casts an unusual spell. At first blush it all seems as New Zealandy as sheep dogs, septic tanks and muting the TV when visitors arrive. Then you notice the creeping poetry of lives coping with change and how this vividly imagined world of tramping huts, bush runs and squash clubs contains other worlds. Sharron Came is writing from deep intimacy with the rural community she summons on the page. Her terse, funny and hugely poignant stories restore a sense of possibility to the future without turning away from its terrors." —Damien Wilkins 
"This superbly crafted collection reaches deep into the heart of family, community and place. It is a measure of Sharron Came's skill that the rural Northland landscape and the complex, deeply human characters co-exist in perfect equilibrium. I loved this book." —Laurence Fearnley
Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig             $38
A complex, urgent, and fascinatings novel about walking, memory, and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney, Australia cafe to return a manuscript by a recently deceased writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbors, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations, and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance, and her struggle with religion and anorexia. A remarkable evocation of the processes of thought intersected with those of literature.  Photographs by Bettina Kaiser. 
>>Haze. 
Against Disappearance: Essays on memory edited by Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez            $35
How do we write or hold our former selves, our ancestries? How does where we come from connect to where we are headed?  How do we tell the stories of those who have been diminished or ignored in the writing of history? How do we do justice to the lives they lived, or to the people they were? From the intricacies of trans becoming, to violences inflicted on stateless peoples, to complex inheritances and the intertwining of tradition, politics and place, this prescient collection challenges singular narratives about the past, offering testimony and prophecy alike. Essays by Andre Dao, Barry Corr, Brandon K. Liew, Elizabeth Flux, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, grace ugamay dulawan, Hannah Wu, Hasib Hourani, Hassan Abul, Jon Tjhia, Kasumi Bocrzyk, Lucia Tu'ng Vy Nguy'n, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Lur Alghurabi, Mykaela Saunders, Ouyang Yu, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Ryan Gustafsson, Suneeta Peres da Costa and Veronica Gorrie.
"Not written for white readers or to industry specifications, uncompromising, non-pandering, filled with love, awash with talent, this collection of sovereign essays sets blisteringly high standards of integrity and originality." —Maria Tumarkin
Rilke: The last inward nan by Lesley Chamberlain         $45
When Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, as too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry. Weaving together insights on Rilke's life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke's inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality.

The Story of Art (Without Men) by Katy Hessel         $65
Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. Well illustrated and wide ranging. 
"In this astounding, generous book, Katy Hessel has given us such a gift. Her research is profound, scholarly and wide-ranging, her writing authoritative yet accessible. I found so much to surprise and delight in these pages, so many works of art pulsating with life and intelligence, beauty and power. This book is a long-overdue corrective, and Hessel has executed it to perfection, echoing the passion and skill of the very artists she writes about. An astonishing achievement." —Jessie Burton
You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The biography of Nico by Jennifer Otter-Bickerdike            $45
Over the course of her life, Nico was an ever-evolving myth, an enigma that escaped definition. Though she is remembered for contributions to The Velvet Underground & Nico, her artistry and influence are often overlooked, whilst Lou Reed and John Cale are hailed as icons. Defying the sexist casting of Nico's life as the tragedy of a beautiful woman losing her looks, youth and fame, You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone cements her legacy as one of the most vital artists of her time, inspiring a generation of luminaries including Henry Rollins, Bjork, Morrissey and Iggy Pop.
"Here is the biography of Nico, oracle to the giants and losers."  —Iggy Pop
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (translated by Eugene Ostahevsky)      $23
"Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of 'the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies of everyday life' and richly evokes the fatalistic humour of her marginalised characters, one of whom observes, 'If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.'" —The New Yorker
Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, cardplayers, a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; another sits down on International Women’s Day and can no longer stand up. With a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound irony reminiscent of Gogol, Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with twenty-three photographs that form a narrative in lyrical and historical counterpoint.
"Belorusets is interested in the histories of the defeated, of the unseen and unheard, and above all in the experiences of eastern Ukrainian women in wartime. Her willingness to exist between document and fiction is daring, even provocative. This is a moment when facts are both utterly compromised and vastly overvalued—asked to do all the work of politics, to justify whole worldviews with single data points. Belorusets, by contrast, is for plurality, subjectivity, a kind of narrative democracy. She wants us to remember that even documentary photographs and factual narratives are determined, and sometimes distorted, by the worldview that shaped them.” —The Baffler
Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson           $23
D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial — and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him. History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexual liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this, and how — one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love — can we hear his voice above the noise? Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. 
"No biography of Lawrence that I have read comes close to Burning Man." —Ferdinand Mount
Oxblood by Tom Benn           $33
Wythenshawe, South Manchester. 1985. The Dodds family once ruled Manchester's underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby. Matriarch Nedra presides over the household, which bustles with activity as she prepares the welcome feast for her grandson Kelly's return from prison. Her grieving daughter-in-law Carol is visited by both the welcome, intimate ghost of her murdered lover, and by Mac, an ageing criminal enforcer, a man who may just offer her a real and possible future. And then there is Jan - the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby. Over the course of a few days, the Dodds women must each confront the true legacy of the men who have defined their lives; and seize the opportunity to break the cycle for good.
"With a brutal yet compassionate honesty, Oxblood confronts the past as it was and how it shapes who we are now, and confirms Tom Benn as one of the most powerful and urgent writers of our times." —David Peace
Trouble with water increasingly frequent: extreme floods and droughts are the first obvious signs of climate change.
"Reveals the mysteries of water's journey from source to sea, and shows how working with nature can help save us from the ravages of climate change. Through fascinating stories and detailed research, Gies challenges modern societies to relinquish some control, and let water go where it wants to go. This eye-opening book is filled with brilliant insights, creativity, inspiration, and honest hope." —Sandra Postel

Bisexuality is the largest sexual minority in the world and the least well understood. This book sets out to answer some of the questions that many people have about bisexuality. In Bi Julia Shaw explores how people have defined and measured bisexuality during its long and important history. She looks at behavioural bisexuality in animals, and investigates whether there is a bi gene. She introduces some famous bi activists and scholars whom everyone should know. She examines the latest research on bisexual kids, parents and grandparents, and explores bisexual identities across the lifespan. She asks why so few bisexual people are out, and examines the mental and physical health consequences of this. She also questions societal reactions to bisexuality (are bi people more promiscuous? No). She explains the visual language of bisexuality, about bi visibility on screen and the colourful world of bisexual communities. This book aims to demystify bisexuality and celebrate it. Today, most bisexual activists and researchers define bisexuality as attraction to more than one gender, and this is a book for anyone whether they identify as bisexual, plurisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, fluid, unlabelled, any related label or who just wants to know more.
Love and the Novel: Life after reading by Christina Lupton          $40
Romantic love was born alongside the novel, and books have been shaping how we experience and think about our most intimate stories ever since. But what do novels give us when our own lives diverge from the usual narrative paths? Christina Lupton is a professor used to examining stories with a critical eye; until one day in middle age she finds herself falling in love and leaving her marriage for a romance with another woman. This involves a familiar enough tale, but when her new partner suffers a stroke, Lupton begins to reflect on the sorts of love that novels rarely capture. A heady mix of memoir, criticism and storytelling that draws on novels ranging from Pride and Prejudice to Price of Salt, Anna Karenina to Conversations with Friends, to illuminate the ways love and novels work, and show how some types of love, which don't race to a narrative end-point, might be the most important of all.
"In the cause of fathoming how to live life to the full, she spares neither herself, nor anyone she has ever read, no matter how brilliant." —Guardian
The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat by Steven Lukes           $23
A fictional journey through Western political philosophy. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria, in his quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Cut loose from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering professor is made to confront the perplexed state of modern thinking in this dazzling comedy of ideas.
"This book is a box of delights, often wonderfully funny and always deliciously clever, a contemporary political satire to set among the best." —New Statesman
Look Here: On the pleasures of observing the city by Ana Kinsella         $25
Exploring the delight to be found in small everyday interactions and chance observations, Look Here charts an emotional map of London, navigating ideas of anonymity and identity, freedom and space (and who has access to these things), and community, while reflecting on whether the never-ending carousel of clothing we see on strangers holds some deeper meaning.
"I loved strolling through London with Ana Kinsella, noticing all the things she notices, what people are wearing on the Tube or at the Tate Modern, listening in on her chats with the locals, reading about the history of Embankment, the privatization of public spaces, or the pandemic passeggiata. And the shoes! A whole anthropology of London through its footwear. Look Here renewed my desire to get up and out into the streets of the city I now call home, but not without first practising that other great and under-appreciated act of joy and self-determination: deciding what to wear when I hit the pavement." —Lauren Elkin
eden by Jim Crace       $35
Set in a walled garden, whose inhabitants live an eternal and unblemished life, eden opens with a summons. The gardeners of eden are called by their masters, the angels, to see a dead body. It is that of a bird, a creature who has strayed beyond the garden walls. Outside, where there is poverty and sickness and death, this bird has met a fate that couldn’t have befallen it within the safe haven of the garden. And why would anyone want to leave? eden is a place of immortality and plenty – bountiful fields and orchards and lakes, a place where the lord’s bidding is done. But really this summons is a warning. Because something is wrong in eden. Years after Adam and Eve left the garden, someone has escaped – Tabi – one of the sisters of the congregation, and the angels fear further rebellion. They know there are two in eden, gardener Ebon and Jamin, the angel with the broken wing, who would follow Tabi anywhere, who would risk the world outside if only they can find her. Perhaps a fall is coming. Is this paradise a prison and a labour camp?
"This intriguing, fabular novel speaks to a truth about power and authority." —Irish Times
Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott          $33
A new novel from the author of the outstanding memoir In the Days of Rain. AD 500. An island in the Thames. Isla has a secret: she has learned her father's sophisticated sword-making skills at a time when even entering a forge is forbidden to women. Her sister, Blue, has a secret, too: at low tide on the night of each new moon, she visits the bones of the mud woman, drowned by the elders of her tribe who wanted to make a lesson of someone who wouldn't hold her tongue. When the local Seax overlord discovers Isla's secret there is nowhere for the sisters to hide, except across the water to the walled ghost city, Londinium. Here Blue and Isla find sanctuary in an underworld community of squatters, emigrants, travellers and looters, led by the mysterious Crowther, living in an abandoned brothel and bathhouse. But trouble pursues them even into the haunted city. Dark Earth takes us back to the founding of Britain to explore the experience of women trying to find kin in a world ruled by blood ties, feuds and men in quest of a nation.
"Superb. Radically new and beautiful. This is a book that seeks to do for British myth what Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller have done so brilliantly for classical literature: uncovering stories of feminine power that have been occluded by the male hand of history." —Observer
Far Out: Encounters with extremists by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson          $45
We meet eight people from across religious, ideological, and national divides who found themselves drawn to radical beliefs, including a young man who became the face of white supremacy in Trump-era America, a Norwegian woman sucked into a revolutionary conspiracy in the 1980s, a schoolboy who left Britain to fight in Syria, and an Australian from the far-left Antifa movement. 
"Far Out is an excellent mix of investigative journalism, entertaining storytelling and intelligent analysis. Its individual stories are like pieces of a puzzle that McDonald-Gibson assembles to offer deeply human insights into the drivers of radicalisation and extremism." —Julia Eber, author of Going Dark

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A true story of sex, crime, and the meaning of justice by Julia Laite           $25
1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey, from Oamaru, is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts - and disappears. London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case. As more people are drawn into Lydia's life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made - about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like - that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival - and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history. 
"A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece of scholarly historical research and true crime writing." —Hallie Rubenhold
The Library of the Unwritten ('Hell's Library' #1) by A.J. Hackwith        $23
Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing — a neutral space in hell where all stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organising books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materialising as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto. But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong when the terrifyingly angelic Ramiel attacks them, convinced that they hold the Devil's Bible. The text of the Devil's Bible is a powerful weapon in the power struggle between Heaven and Hell, so it falls to the librarians to find a book with the power to reshape the boundaries between Heaven, Hell...and Earth. 
This exciting and inventive series continues with The Archive of the Forgotten and The God of Lost Words. 
Colours of Art: The story of art in 80 palettes by Chloe Ashby         $55
Colours of Art takes the reader on a journey through history by pairing 80 artworks with infographic palettes. For these pieces, colour is not only a tool (like a paintbrush or a canvas), but the fundamental secret to their success. Colour allows artists to express their individuality, evoke certain moods and portray positive or negative subliminal messages. And throughout history, the greatest of artists have experimented with new pigments and new technologies to lead movements and deliver masterpieces. But as something so cardinal, we sometimes forget how poignant colour palettes can be, and how much they can tell us. When Vermeer painted The Milkmaid, the amount of ultramarine he could use was written in the contract. How did that affect how he used it? When Turner experimented with Indian Yellow, he captured roaring flames that brought his paintings to life. If he had used a more ordinary yellow, would he have created something so extraordinary? And how did Warhol throw away the rulebook to change what colour could achieve?
>>See inside the book. 
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty         $33
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents. Separated by the thin walls of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the run-down Indiana town of Vacca Vale, these individual lives unfold. But Blandine is different. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, she shares an apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all of them like her products of the state foster system. Plagued by her past, let down by the very structures that were supposed to keep her safe, she spends her days reading Dante and dreaming of becoming a female mystic. Until, that is, one sweltering week in July culminates in an act of violence that will change everything, and finally offer her a chance to escape. Blandine is desperate to save a community that has been left behind, but that salvation will come at a terrible price.
"Dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing, a novel of impressive scope and specificity." —The New York Times
Farm: The making of a climate activist by Nicola Harvey            $37
In 2018, Nicola Harvey and her husband, Pat, left their careers and inner-city Sydney life to farm cattle in rural New Zealand. They thought it would be exciting, even relaxing, but soon found themselves in the middle of heated arguments and deep divisions about food, farming, and climate change. Read about how Harvey made her farm into a site for climate activism, and about her attempts to find an alternative the destructive status quo of current food production. 
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness by Paul Gilroy      $28
Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Caribbean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality. 
"It was in this book that Gilroy laid out his concept of the 'black Atlantic', the idea that black culture is essentially a hybrid, a product of centuries of exchange, slavery and movement across the Atlantic. Exploring everything from the lives and work of African American philosophers such as WEB Du Bios, to black popular music, Gilroy demonstrates that black culture is both 'local' and 'global', and cannot be constrained within any single national culture. It flows across the black Atlantic of the book's title." —David Olusoga
>>"Useful violence."
The Wondrous Prune by Ellie Clements          $17
Magic comes from within! Uprooted by her single mum along with her troublesome older brother, eleven-year-old Prune Robinson is trying to settle in a new town. She figures she can't burden her hard-working mother with the fact she's being bullied. Or the fact that her drawings have started coming to life.But with her brother soon in danger, Prune comes to realise that she can't hide her power forever; in fact, it might just be the one thing that brings her family back together and saves them all.
Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a warming planet by Matthew T. Huber          $35
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of 'believing science' or individual 'carbon footprints' it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society- the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we so need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.
"The most powerful missile yet hurled against bourgeois climate politics. With a laser-sharp focus, it strikes at the central fortress: the sphere of production, where one class dominates another and wrecks the planet in the process. A book for every union organiser and every climate activist and everyone who wishes for the two to join forces - to be read, studied, debated, aimed and fired." —Andreas Malm
The Book of Sisters: Biographies of incredible siblings through history by Olivia Meikle and Katie Nelson        $23
Queens. Warriors. Witches. Revolutionaries. History is full of sisters making their mark. Find out why Egyptian ruler Cleopatra went to war against her younger sister Arsinoë; how Native American sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief became America’s first star ballerinas; what made samurai sisters Nakano Takeko and Nakano Koko take on an entire army. 
VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Is literature a good guide to life? If not, is anything a good guide? In our Book of the Week, EITHER / OR by Elif Batuman, the quasi-protagonist, Selin, is in her second year at university, struggling to comprehend her relationships and life in general in terms of the Great Novels on her syllabus, and following some very dubious advice from friends and others. Can only an exciting and vivid life be transformed into literature, and, if so, is the necessary price of this craziness and loneliness? Batuman's novel grapples with deep issues but never stops being a large amount of fun. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.
























 

Free Kid to a Good Home by Hiroshi Ito   {Reviewed by STELLA}
Irresistible!  I liked this book so much I’ve read it twice already! From the delightful premise to the simple yet evocative illustrations, this will capture young readers' attention and yours too. Free Kid to Good Home is for all of us who have had to accept the arrival of a younger sibling, for all of us who have thought about running away, wondering about greener pastures or feeling a bit restless at home, and for anyone who’s ever tried to sell themselves or give away surplus goods. Not that this kid is surplus at all — far from it! Recently translated from Japanese, this bestseller first published there in 1995 and now in its 31st edition, is a standout. It has lost nothing in translation nor time and, like Russell Hoban’s A Baby Sister for Frances, remains relevant. Siblings still keep coming along, upsetting the equilibrium. So when Potato Face seems to be taking too much time and attention, our heroine decides it's time to make a move. A good box will do the trick. She positions herself with a well-written sign and waits for someone to notice her. While she’s waiting, she imagines all the great things that will await her in her new home. A great backyard to play in, servants to take her to and from school, amazing parties with lots of friends, no potato-faced brother, and rich and smart and beautiful parents! When a likely new parent (she avoids the ones with other kids — no way!) comes along, she sits up straight with her best smile. No takers. Maybe she needs to be more creative — a fun kid! Oops, too much fun — “No one’s going to feel sorry for a kid who’s dancing.” Waiting isn’t much fun so she’s quite pleased when a lost dog joins her, then a cat, and finally a turtle. (The reaction to the turtle — the looks on the faces of the other three in the box — is perfect). They all talk about their ideal home and one by one they are selected from the box except for the kid until…a young couple come by (with a quiet baby). Hiroshi Ito’s illustrations give great depth and humour to the interactions between the kid and her world, dovetailing and enhancing the text. He says, “ Humour is most important to me. It’s a means of survival. Some issues feel so huge they can crush you if you confront them head on, but humour helps us approach problems from a different angle.” The illustrative style is simple, with its spare use of black lines and details in red and plenty of space to focus your attention on the action. His aim is “for illustrations that might not look special at first glance but invite a closer look…art as a means to make myself happy and other people happy.” The images are sparky and spontaneous — just right for this kid and this story. As I said at the beginning, irresistible — it was a good thing that I wasn’t a character in this book — I would have taken this kid home. Fortunately, I can have the book instead. 

VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella

 

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Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The fact that the wind is now making the branches scrape against the wall of the house as he sits down to write, though at least they only scrape when the wind blows, he thinks, and even when the wind blows it blows in gusts, so the scraping is not constant, not that it’s any less irritating, he thinks, the fact that this irritation is preventing him from starting to write, the fact that here he is, starting to write his review at the end of the day, despite what he just said, at what is almost the end of the day, at the end of the week, and such a week, the fact there is therefore a deadline of sorts to the completion of his review, the fact that he has not even started to write his review, despite what he just said, the fact that he would prefer to finish reading his book than write his review of the book, the fact that he is enjoying the book, very much, while he is reading it, but if he enjoys reviewing the book the enjoyment will only come when the writing is completed, which seems hardly fair, the fact that the book he is reading and enjoying is over one thousand pages long and is floppy and unwieldy like a paperback dictionary, which seems somehow appropriate, both in that it is floppy and unwieldy, in that it is about the floppiness and unwieldiness of being alive, as a human, in the twenty-first century, conscious and at the mercy of thought, and also in that the book is, in a way, similar to a dictionary in that it could make a fairly good claim to being an exhaustive catalogue of the miseries of consciousness, which is a sort of language, or a field in any case defined by language, the fact that the book is very funny, funny and painful, he thinks, just like consciousness, the fact that nobody should ever publish a paperback dictionary, unless it is a dictionary for incurious people, and there could be a market for that, he thinks, otherwise paperback dictionaries are insufficiently robust to be used more than a very few times, the fact that the floppiness and the unwieldiness of Ducks, Newburyport, the novel by Lucy Ellmann that he is going to review, seem somehow appropriate qualities for this novel of over one thousand pages, being slightly irritating but also in a way comedic and intriguing, just like life in the twenty-first century, the book’s ostensible subject, the fact that Ellmann is “the Proust of modern afflictions”, which quote he made up himself and disposed in speech marks to give it authority, perhaps that should have a capital M, he thinks, that fact that Modernism is a project to undo, or outdo, the strictures of form in order to make literature more resemble thought, the fact that Lucy Ellmann has made her novel resemble thought to the extent that it is both terrifying and compulsive, the fact that thought pops up all over the place, the fact that thought resurges, that is not a good word, he thinks, the fact that we are besieged at all times by thought, the fact that we are submerged in thought at all times, thought from outside our heads, both absolutely us and not us really at all, the fact that we are trying to keep our heads up, above the thoughts, but we can’t, the fact that we think to avoid thinking, the fact that wherever we look there’s a thought, the fact that, if he has to compare Ducks, Newburyport with something, it would be with an itch, as in when you ask yourself, Do I have an itch, then, invariably, you have an itch somewhere, perhaps on your elbow, or at the back of your neck, or an itch on your back, and, if you ask yourself, Do I have another itch, then you have another, and soon, as you know, you will have an itch anywhere you think about, you have itches everywhere, you are one great itch, well Ducks, Newburyport is like that, he thinks, a woman is assailed by her thoughts, she is at the mercy of her thoughts, the thoughts she produces, or, rather, the thoughts that assail her, for, he thinks, obsession is the state of being at the mercy of your own proclivities, the fact that Ducks, Newburyport is written as an endless stream of everything that annoys, or itches, or stimulates, or pains, same thing, a mind in this world, it is, he thinks, a catalogue of thoughts and the thoughts that get in the way of thought, for, he thinks, we all think to avoid thought, we’ve been there before, but, he thinks, not really a catalogue, the opposite of a catalogue, whatever the word for that is, a mishmash perhaps, now there’s a good Yiddish word, a mishmash of thought, linearly recorded, how else, the fact that Ducks, Newburyport is largely a one-thousand-page sentence, no, more than a one-thousand-page sentence, Ducks, Newburyport is a one-thousand-page list, the fact that he had always liked lists, in literature at least, the fact that he had at one time made a list of his favourite lists in literature, though he has lost this, the fact that the one-thousand-page list in Ducks, Newburyport, the one-thousand-page list that is Ducks, Newburyport, except for a short intercut story, told in sentences, about a mountain lion searching for her cubs, told from the mountain lion’s point of view, from a point of bafflement and disgust at humans and their world, which is pretty much an appropriate conclusion, judging from the rest of the text, which is told from a human’s point of view, the fact that the one-thousand-page list that comprises (most of) Ducks Newburyport, uses the phrase “the fact that” to separate its entries, or, rather, to introduce its entries, or, shall we say, to structure its entries, the fact that he finds the fact that the author uses “the fact that” to structure a novel, or a list, if the two forms can be separated, who cares, to structure a novel about living, about striving to live, rather, in a so-called post-factual world, the fact that this post-factual world is overwhelmed with information but short on truth, whatever that is, he thinks, this is the world in which we are all immersed, you’re soaking in it, a meme predating memes, it’s all memes, way back to the beginning of time, that fact that he decided he could write like this, too, in fact it became, as he read Ducks, Newburyport, more and more difficult not to write this way, in a list, like thought, he thinks, the fact that the more he writes in this way, the easier it becomes, and soon, he thinks, the difficulty will not be in writing but in stopping writing, the fact that he might not be able to stop, at least until he has written at least one thousand pages, which would be a remarkable application of method, apart from the fact that Lucy Ellmann has already written one thousand pages in this way, at whatever cost to herself, and to her family, and to her sanity, she had done it, so his achievement in writing his one thousand pages would be a fairly useless and unimpressive achievement, unimpressive on the literary front even if it might remain impressive on the insanity front, the fact that it would still be impressive for its cost to himself, and to his family, and to his sanity, impressive in a negative sense but not impressive in a positive sense, the fact that Lucy Ellmann has already, rightly, appropriated all the benefit from such an enterprise, the fact that Lucy Ellmann was short-listed for the Booker Prize for her one-thousand-page sentence, whereas he would have achieved nothing but the limits of his sanity, the fact that Lucy Ellmann may have achieved the limits of her sanity, though she has nerves of steel, he thinks, and may not even have neared the limits of her sanity, although the book might not have been so good if she had not, the fact that he does not have nerves of steel, he has nerves of tin, the fact that he would soon achieve the limits of his sanity, if he has not already achieved them, the fact that a one-thousand-page review of a one-thousand-page novel would not get him shortlisted for the Booker Prize, or even short-listed for even one person’s attention, the fact that he did not deserve even one person’s attention, the fact that Lucy Ellmann has already appropriated all the available attention for writing in this way, even if this is less attention than she deserves for writing in this way, the fact that she has written an outstanding one-thousand-page novel about human consciousness in the twenty-first century, but that, if he completes his one-thousand-page review of this novel he will be acclaimed as nothing more than a nuisance, if he is acclaimed anything at all, which is unlikely, the fact that benefit is finite but, it seems, detriment is infinite, the fact that negative consequences are inexhaustible, whereas positive consequences are soon exhausted, the fact that Lucy Ellmann’s project is forensic, though forensic about a crime that is infinitely dispersed in both its origins and consequences, the fact that this novel is not only about a woman's life, it is a woman’s life, but not her life only, the fact that a mountain lion’s life has clarity whereas a human life is without clarity, or so it seems, there are too many thoughts, and where do they come from, he thinks, the fact that reading Ducks Newburyport has made him aware of his thoughts, all his thoughts, including the thoughts he represses because they get in the way of his thinking, the fact that, now that he is aware of the mishmash of his thoughts, to use the technical term, his brain will just keep coming up with thoughts, make it stop, a list of thoughts, like in Ducks, Newburyport, structured by the phrase “the fact that”, even at times, such as when he is in the shower, or driving, when it is impossible to record these thoughts, the fact that these thoughts are lost but that the thoughts that arise from these thoughts keep arising, the fact that they show no sign of abating, the fact that this frightens him, at least a little, the fact that there will always be more thoughts is a thought that he finds horrible, the fact that all these thoughts are pushing at him, crowded at the edge of his awareness, waiting their turn, this is a horrible thought, he thinks, the fact that he needs to stop writing before it becomes impossible to stop writing, which has occurred to him before, the fact that he has, in any case, run out of time, there's a deadline after all, and whatever he's written must pass for a review, he'll call it a review, the fact that although he cannot bear to carry on, neither does he want to stop. 


VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell            $38
The new novel from the author of Hamnet is one of the most anticipated books of the year. This one is set in 1560s Florence. Lucrezia, third daughter of Cosimo de' Medici, is free to wander the palazzo at will, wondering at its treasures and observing its clandestine workings. But when her older sister dies on the eve of marriage to Alfonso d'Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: Alfonso is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father to accept on her behalf. Having barely left girlhood, Lucrezia must now make her way in a troubled court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appears before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble? As Lucrezia sits in uncomfortable finery for the painting which is to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court's eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferrarese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, her future hangs entirely in the balance.
"Finely written and vividly imagined." —Guardian
>>On the inspiration for the novel. 
99 Interruptions by Charles Boyle           $28
Without a kink in the line there’s no story to tell. The kinks are the story. There is gridlock on the M40 and a banana skin on every pavement. Lovers are disturbed in bed and my father becomes a rain god. Complacency is mocked. Death hovers. Shit happens. How the messiness of life is translated into fiction is considered and no conclusions are reached. Why, anyway, setting out from A, am I so sure that B is where I want to get to? Interruptions push back, disrupting the status quo or derailing progress. 99 Interruptions – a cross-genre exploration of interruptions in both life and literature, and of the relationship between the two – attempts to take them in its stride.
"I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now." —Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 
Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell)         $28
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"The 'last truly great book' I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust. A total knockout.' —Junot Diaz
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The Last Colony: A tale of exile, justice, and Britain's colonial legacy by Philippe Sands         $35
After the Second World War, new international rules heralded an age of human rights and self-determination. Supported by Britain, these unprecedented changes sought to end the scourge of colonialism. But how committed was Britain? In the 1960s, its colonial instinct ignited once more: a secret decision was taken to offer the US a base at Diego Garcia, one of the islands of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, create a new colony (the 'British Indian Ocean Territory') and deport the entire local population. One of those inhabitants was Liseby Elysé, twenty years old, newly married, expecting her first child. One suitcase, no pets, the British ordered, expelling her from the only home she had ever known. For four decades the government of Mauritius fought for the return of Chagos, and the past decade Philippe Sands has been intimately involved in the cases. In 2018 Chagos and colonialism finally reached the World Court in The Hague. As Mauritius and the entire African continent challenged British and American lawlessness, fourteen international judges faced a landmark decision: would they rule that Britain illegally detached Chagos from Mauritius? Would they open the door to Liseby Elysé and her fellow Chagossians returning home - or exile them forever? Taking us on a disturbing journey across international law, The Last Colony illuminates the continuing horrors of colonial rule, the devastating impact of Britain's racist grip on its last colony in Africa, and the struggle for justice in the face of a crime against humanity. It is a tale about the making of modern international law and one woman's fight for justice, a courtroom drama and a personal journey that ends with a historic ruling.
"Rarely does a book combine erudition and empathy so eloquently." —Elif Shafak
Unraveller by Frances Hardinge           $30
In a world where anyone can create a life-destroying curse, only one person has the power to unravel them. Kellen does not fully understand his talent, but helps those transformed maliciously — including Nettle. Recovered from entrapment in bird form, she is now his constant companion, and closest ally. But Kellen has also been cursed, and unless he and Nettle can remove his curse, Kellen is in danger of unravelling everything — and everyone — around him. Another gripping and multi-levelled novel from this remarkable author. 
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba by Carlos Manuel Álvarez (translated by Frank Wynne with Rahul Bery)          $33
Alvarez employs the cronica form — a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative non-fiction, and novelistic forms — to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the US, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement. The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring sportsmen in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers from the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night.
"A journalistically rigorous picture of Cuban life, The Tribe is characterized by the gaps between Alvarez's subjects. Using interviews and on-site reportage, Alvarez profiles people from various socioeconomic backgrounds, with contrasting political affiliations. The sketches he compiles demonstrate a wide range of experiences and perceptions of Cuba. Alvarez allows the juxtapositions between these profiles to reveal a country that looks different from person to person. A nation is, after all, nebulous — the only way to make an honest portrait is to approach it from myriad perspectives. In The Tribe, the resulting mosaic is rich for its nuance and contradictions." —Chicago Review of Books
Granta 159: What Do Youi See?                $28
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Own Sweet Time: A diagnosis and notes by Caroline Clark          $28
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The Shadow of the Coachman's Body (translated by Rosemarie Waldrop) by Peter Weiss             $33
Peter Weiss's first prose work was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of inert objects in a dismal boarding house—stones, buttons, hooks, needles, chairs, newspapers in an outhouse, clinking tin cups, celestial orbs, sewing machines, an overwound windup music box—which have oblique characters' shadows as their supporting cast. Described by Weiss as a 'micro-novel', The Shadow of the Coachman's Body can be obscene, trivial and brutal, and yet it is also peculiarly intimate and offers endless possibilities—like a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.
"Exhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original." —Bookforum
Happy Trails to You by Julie Hecht             $40
Our postmodern world, re-examined: With an unwavering gaze on the absurdities and ironies of the larger world, the stories in Happy Trails to You recount the narrator's attempts to find a place of unspoiled nature on the once peaceful island of Nantucket, where power mowers, nail guns, and speeding trucks have blocked out the sounds of birdsong and crickets. A visit to a friend or restaurant touches upon every subject from the color of paint to the world situation and infinity.
"These aren't merely the worries of an eccentric middle-aged East Coast vegetarian; they're the all-too-common concerns of the mainstream liberal consciousness. In the new century, Hecht's narrator is suddenly less alone in her alarm and alienation, finding more kindred spirits than ever before. But Hecht plays with this stereotype on many levels, and the collection's strongest moments describe a frustration with civilization that can't be blamed solely on psychosis." —Bookforum
Māori Moving Image edited by Melanie Oliver and Bridget Reweti     $35
A fully illustrated book of film, animation and video art made by Maori artists. Texts in English and te reo Maori by editors Melanie Oliver and Bridget Reweti, Maree Mills, Ariana Tikao, Nina Tonga and Matariki Williams, as well as interviews with artists Shannon Te Ao, Jeremy Leatinu'u, Nova Paul, Nathan Pohio, Rachael Rakena and Lisa Reihana.
Magnificent Rebels: The first Romantics and the invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf         $40
In 1790s Jena a small group of friends — including Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Hegel, and centred around a free-spirited, thrice married, single-mother named Caroline Michaelis-Boehmer-Schlegel-Schelling — began a revolution in thinking that has shaped culture since. Working in poetry, drama, philosophy and science, these first Romantics forged new ways of thinking of ourselves and of our relationship to others and to nature. 
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Before Your Memory Fades by Yoshikazu Kawaguchi           $25
In northern Japan, overlooking the spectacular view Hakodate Port has to offer, Cafe Donna Donna has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Cafe comes another story of four new customers, each of whom is hoping to take advantage of the cafe's time-travelling offer. 


The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher        $70

How was the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi understood by the British in 1840? That is the question addressed by historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher, in this extensive work. With one exception, the Treaty sheets signed by rangatira and British officials were in te reo Māori. The Māori text, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, was a translation by the missionary Henry Williams of a draft in English provided by William Hobson, the Consul sent by the British government to negotiate with Māori. Despite considerable scholarly attention to the Treaty, the English text has been little studied. In part, this is because the original English draft exists only in fragments in the archive; it has long been regarded as lost or ‘unknowable’, and in any event superseded by the authoritative Māori text. Now, through careful archival research, Fletcher has been able to set out the continuing relevance of the English text. The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi emphasises that the original drafting of the Treaty by British officials in 1840 cannot be separated from the wider circumstances of that time. This context encompasses the history of British dealings with indigenous peoples throughout the Empire and the currents of thought in the mid-nineteenth century, a period of rapid change in society and knowledge. It also includes the backgrounds and motivations of those primarily responsible for framing the Treaty: British Resident James Busby, Consul and future Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson, and Colonial Office official James Stephen. Through groundbreaking scholarship, Fletcher concludes that the Māori and English texts of the Treaty reconcile, and that those who framed the English text intended Māori to have continuing rights to self-government (rangatiratanga) and ownership of their lands. This original understanding of the Treaty, however, was then lost in the face of powerful forces in the British Empire post-1840, as hostility towards indigenous peoples grew alongside increased intolerance of plural systems of government.

The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem by Luke Elworthy          $35

Traumatised by his failure to match the creative successes of his precocious younger siblings — early over-achievers in theatre, music and fine arts — Godfrey Cheathem never expects that his baffling experimental pottery will one day lead him to the unlikely heights of international book publishing. There he meets a mysterious artist, a pivotal encounter on a journey of self-discovery that points up some of the many absurdities of New Zealand life and culture, and culminates in Godfrey's comic yet anguished unravelling at a grand reunion at the Cheathem turangawaewae, the farm that has been in his wider family for generations. Godfrey Cheathem died not long after completing his last letter in his cell in Paparua prison, never living to see the publication of his great novel. Cheathem's letter is written to his sister, and tries to explain the events that led to his imprisonment. A tragically funny novel of father figures, bullshit and belonging. 
"A comic novel – and, unusually in New Zealand, a very funny one – with serious themes underlying it. It is terrific, impressively inventive. It is so clever without being clever-dick." —Stephen Stratford
>>Surviving both Centrepoint and Christ's College. 
Haven by Emma Donoghue           $38
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks — young Trian and old Cormac — he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island, inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?
"Haven is a beautiful and timely novel about isolation, passion and the conflict between obedience and self-preservation. The island setting and the characters stayed with me long after I finished reading." —Sarah Moss
"Emma Donoghue combines pressure-cooker intensity and radical isolation, to stunning effect. What is Divine Grace? Purity of soul? Virtue? Not what they think." —Margaret Atwood
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo          $37
Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger, newly arrived in the Trinidadian city of Port Angeles to seek his fortune, young and beautiful and lost. Estranged from his mother, he is convinced that the father he never met may be waiting for him somewhere amid these bustling streets. Meanwhile in an old house on a hill, Yejide's mother is dying. And she is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide- the power to talk to the departed. Darwin and Yejide's destinies are intertwined, and they will find one another in the ancient cemetery at the heart of the city, where trouble is brewing and destiny awaits.
"Tender and lonely and powerful. A love letter to Trinidad and a vivid debut about romance and loss in the Caribbean. —Guardian
Around the World in 80 Trees by Ben Lerwill and Kaja Kajfez            $33
Where can you find Methuselah, the oldest tree in the world? Why is the baobab's trunk so fat? Can trees really warn each other that something is about to eat them? Including a stunning central gatefold that opens out to reveal all 80 trees and how they relate to each other, this book is a visual celebration of the huge variety of trees found across the world, from those you know to those you almost certainly don't. As the book takes the reader on a journey around the world, it reveals trees that give us food and medicine, trees with ancient legends, record-breaking trees and more.
>>Look inside.
Sunken City by Marta Barone             $37
Newly-bereaved, bookish and lonely in Turin, a young woman sets out to chronicle her father's secret lives — and her struggle to accept his loss. She is startled to discover that the gentle, mercurial doctor was sentenced to jail in 1986 for membership of an armed band. Her father, L.B, lived through the Years of Lead, a time of unrest when extreme factions of left and right took hostages, set bombs and murdered their countrymen. Unable to move on before she can understand her family's past, she goes in search of him — and ultimately of herself too — the only way she knows how, by reading everything she can. Through her search for the truth, a very different picture starts to emerge.
Our fossil fuel driven society has run out of time. Only by rapidly giving up our reliance on carbon can we pay down the debt of fossil capital and buy a liveable future without a mass extinction or global warming. In this manifesto, environmental scholars Vettese and Pendergrass outline the structural, economic, and social changes de-carbonisation will require. Drawing from detailed environmental modeling of our planet's many possible futures, Vettese and Pendergrass argue that we will need to give half of the earth's land, now used for agricultural and meat production, back to nature rewilding half the earth. The only political program that can give us a livable half-earth, they argue, is socialism — a planned socialist society can constrict the destructive industries ravaging our world fossil fuels, cars, aviation, meat, and real estate while expanding renewable energy systems, organic agriculture, public transport, and health and education systems. Half-Earth Socialism argues that we can consciously and democratically direct human society's interaction with nature and in fact, we must, if we want any kind of livable future on this planet.
"The best way to subvert a dystopia is to plan a utopia. In Half-Earth Socialism, Vettese and Pendergrass delve into this vital work of practical dreaming. So what does a better world look like? Blending science, history, philosophy and fiction, the authors thoughtfully chart a possible future to avert the worst impacts of the climate crises. Importantly, beyond climate mitigation and adaptation, this book tackles the critical need to address large-scale system change. Read this book if you not only dream of saving the world, but want a plan for how to do it." —Ziya Tong
A Brief History of Black Holes (And why nearly everything you think you know about them is wrong) by Becky Smethurst            $40
The Moon goes around the Earth, the Earth goes around the Sun, the Sun goes around the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole. As you read this you are currently orbiting a black hole. Black holes make the universe go round, but what we think we know is largely wrong.




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Worn: A people's history of clothing by Sofi Thanhauser   {Reviewed by STELLA}
Worn is a wide-ranging and compelling look at clothing and textiles through the lens of five fabrics: linen, cotton, silk, synthetics and wool. Thanhasuer explores the social, economic, and environmental impacts of one of our most intimate possessions. A material culture history that reveals global links, as well as personal stories and our desire for clothes from ancient to contemporary times. As a maker of objects and a lover of clothes and their construction, with a good dose of interest in history and the social fabric that binds people and things, I loved this book. Each page revealed another fascinating detail in the history of clothing and the people who were engaged in the planting and harvesting of plants, in the processes — natural or chemical — and manufacture of fibre and the twisting, weaving or whatever other method imaginable to make fabric and then those textiles into the clothes we wore (and wear), through necessity and desire. Whether it is the arrival of the ‘season’ as denoted by the French court of Loius XIV or the rise of the factory workers in New York city fueled by the influence of young educated Jewish migrant women or the appalling treatment of workers in the American South, historically (slave and cheap labour) and today (illegal migrants) or the environmental impact of over-production of cotton in both America and China to the detriment of the land, the people and water reserves, you will find something in Thanhuaser's explorations that will surprise, intrigue and pique your curiosity about our relationship with what we wear and the origins of this relationship. The crafting of this book makes the vessel filled with so many facts, geopolitical analysis, fine details, expansive timeframes, technological advances, rich personal stories and empathetic observation, a pleasure to read. The decision by Thanhauser to tell this story through the lens of the five fabrics and the focus on particular (historical as well as contemporary) individuals — its people — makes Worn a lively, empathetic and engaging cultural history. 

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Autoportrait by Édouard Levé   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“I am inexhaustible on the subject of myself,” states Édouard Levé in this book which is nothing less than an attempt to exhaust everything that he can think of to say about himself, no matter how banal or embarrassing, with relentless objectivity. In one long string of seemingly random declarative statements without style or development or form (other than the form of the list, if a list can be said to be a form), the details accumulate with very fine grain, but the effect is disconcerting: the author comes no closer to exhausting his observations, and the idea that there is such a thing as a 'person' beyond the details seems more and more implausible. The list is not so much an accumulation as an obliteration: facts obscure that which they purport to represent. “I dream of an objective prose, but there is no such thing.” Levé’s style is deliberately and perfectly and admirably flat throughout (all perfect things should be admired (whatever that means)), like that of a police report. “I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.” The constructions often feel aphoristic but eschew the pretension of aphorisms to refer to anything other than the particulars of which they are constructed. There is no lens formed by these sentences to ‘see through’, no insight, no intimation of personality other than the jumbled bundling of details and tendencies assembled under the author’s name, no ‘self’ that expresses itself through these details or is approachable through these details, because we are none of us persons other than what we for convenience or comfort (or, rather, out of frustration and fear) bundle conceptually, mostly haphazardly, and treat as an entity or ‘person’. The more fact is compounded (or, rather, facts are compounded), the stronger the intimation that any attempt to exhaust the description of a person will never be approach we usually think of as a person. “If I look in mirrors for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.” As well as demonstrating the impossibility of the task which it attempts, description also cancels itself by implying for each positive statement a complementary negative statement. Each statement of the self-description of Édouard Levé functions to include those of us among his readers who are similar and to exclude those who are dissimilar. We find each statement either in accord or in disagreement with a statement we could similarly (or dissimilarly) make about ourselves. The reader is charted in the text as much as the author. The reader is continually comparing themselves to the author, finding accord or otherwise, exercising the kind of judgement concealed beneath all social interaction but typically hidden by content and mutuality. In Autoportrait, the author’s self-obsession is matched by our fascination with him, with the kinds of details that may or may not come to light in social interchange. Because the author is not aware of us and is not reciprocally interested in us, or feigning reciprocal interest in us, as would be the case in ‘real life’ social interaction, we feel no shame in our fascination, our fascination is dispassionate, clinical. He is likewise unaffected by our interest or otherwise in him. But as well as bundling together an open set of details that we may conveniently think of as facts (“Everything I write is true, but so what?”) about Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’), the text also conjures an inverse Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’) who is the opposite to him in every way, the person who nullifies him (in the way that all statements call into being their simple or compound opposites, their nullifiers). Levé’s obsession with identity, facsimile and the corrosive effects of representation reappear throughout the book, and towards the end he mentions the suicide of a friend from adolescence, which would form the basis for Levé’s final book, Suicide (after which Levé himself committed suicide). Édouard Levé was born on the same day as me, but on the other side of the planet. In Autoportrait he writes, “As a child I was convinced that I had a double on this earth, he and I were born on the same day, he had the same body, the same feelings I did, but not the same parents or the same background, for he lived on the other side of the planet, I knew that there was very little chance that I would meet him, but still I believed that this miracle would occur.” We never met. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas