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28 February 2025
This is a remarkable piece of writing. A memoir, a story about his parents, a family history, an island’s history, a treatise on writing, a question — the question, an exploration of death, of guilt, of shame, and of dominance and harm, but also a book of forgiveness, of wonder, hope, and most definitely, of love. Here tossed up in a looping story literary geniuses rub shoulders with brilliant physicists, and the ordinary Tasmanian, alongside the forgotten, are wheeled in and brilliantly scooped up into a telling of the everything and the particular, and it’s also immensely personal. A telling which is now, the future, and the past. A past which is 40,000 years; and just a blip— a few 1000, and also the merest moment. The bomb. This is a book which talks of war and consequence, where trauma feeds its way into the rivers of generations, where violence is erased, where memory is what we have in all its unreliability, where a truth may be found in what is unsaid or voided. As the reader, are we in the river, beside it keeping pace, or watching it flow past? Or do we find ourselves in one of its many tributaries letting the current take us, to discover we need to turn back and fight our way upstream? Or is this just the task of the writer? There is turbulence — a power working at us. But when we are midstream all is clear whether we are swimming or flying. There is calm, and humour, and an imagination that brilliantly guides us and buoys us on. Flanagan’s father was a POW in Japan. Without the bombing of Hiroshima he would have died. If he had died, the author would not exist. The bomb changed the world. H.G. Wells wrote a book because he was confused about love. A book which inspired a Hungarian Jewish scientist to have an idea about nuclear chain reaction, and then fear drove him to both embrace and reject the consequences. The wry brilliance of Chekhov filters through the pages. The love of language — of words — is delightfully explored on the page and in childhood memories, and in the author’s descriptions of his father’s reading and reciting. And here is the connection to the earth: as his mother fills bags of red soil at the side of the open road for her grey Hobart suburban plot, as Flanagan lies beneath his car by the river on a dewy night, as his great-great-grandfather labours, and his mother’s father ploughs. And here is the story of genocide, whether it is here, or over there, of violence that permeates and of lives that cannot be extinguished. Question 7 is compelling, thoughtful and almost overwhelming. It’s storytelling at its finest — powerful, beautiful and deeply moving.
What is the relation between the real-life Sheila and the Sheila of this book, her real-life friend Margaux and the Margaux of this book, between her other real-life friends and acquaintances and their counterparts in this book? These are not interesting questions (unless you happen to be Sheila’s demon-lover Israel (in which case, serve you right)). This book is at once an excoriating self-examination, a pitiless self-satire (although it may in fact not be as satirical as it seems to be) and an unforgivably self-indulgent exercise in self-exposure (and is these things all at once and not by turns). You will be irritated by Sheila, but she is irritating in pretty much the same way that you are irritating to yourself, and you will grow tired of Sheila, but in the same way that you grow tired of yourself. You will put the book aside, but, without really knowing why, you will keep coming back to it in pretty much the same way you keep coming back to vaguely important but imprecise and somewhat irritating aspects of your own life. Sheila nobly asks herself “How should a person be?”, and gets the same unsatisfactory, earnest and ridiculous answers as you would get if you asked yourself the same impossible question. The book contains passages of painful honesty and vapid bullshit (both at the same time, mostly), and beautiful, sad and hilarious passages, too (again, beautiful, sad and hilarious all at once and not by turns). By asking big questions in a life that contains only small answers, Sheila holds herself up to show us that we don’t know how to be, or how to make our lives the way we want them, or even to know what we want with any sureness or consistency: “Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." Thinking against the grain of received ideas, anthropologist, activist and author David Graeber imagined new ways of understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future — a social order based on fundamental freedoms. In these essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time — inequality, technology, the identity of ‘the West’, democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest — he challenges old assumptions about political life. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, as we find ourselves in converging political, economic, and ecological crises and our politics dominated by either ‘business as usual’ or nostalgia for a mythical past, Graeber offers us new ways to think about how we live together — and how we can live together better.
As I was fixing the puncture on the delivery bike last week, I remembered the last puncture event. It was December and I was in the process of making the Christmas cakes (yes, multiple, and yes, a bit late to the party for a good aging — saying that, my recipe is delicious straight away or well in advance. Thank you Lois Daish!). There was going to be a social media post. Hashtag #whatbooksellersdointheweekend. Alas, December had more pressing matters, like book enquiries and chasing stock, in the ascendant. Anyway, the cakes are eaten, the punctures fixed, but the idea of sustaining treats is still very much on the agenda. For years now, I’ve made at least 2 fruit-filled cakes: one to eat and get you through December and the other for the festive season quietly waiting its turn.
A cake in the tin is a promise of a sit-down and a cup of tea, or a piquantly paired coffee if spice is the taste game. (Top recommended coffee match is the Cardamom Cake recipe from Magnus Nilsson’s The Nordic Baking Book. And our coffee of choice KUSH Port Blend). But back to the point of this post. Puddings et al. , not punctures. If a tinful of cake is a promise, a pudding is the cherry on top.
Belgian culinary historian Regula Ysewijn’s cookbooks are a delightful, and wonderfully informative! From the nifty titles to the contents, to the results. The Belgian writer and photographer focuses on food and social history of Britain and the Low Countries. Pride and Pudding is a history of British puddings (both savoury and sweet), Oats from the North, Wheat from the South is focused on British baking, and Dark Rye and Honey Cake covers festive baking of the Low Countries.* The books are packed with recipes, history and great photogrpahy (her own) and charming illustrations.
In Dark Rye and Honey Cake enjoy Regula’s Waffles for breakfast, a rich Kramiek loaf for morning tea, find out about the Earl of Laetare, partake in a Flemish pancake, and find delight in a special apple cheesy tart.
Pride and Pudding — so many good things, Let’s start with Syllabub — even the word is delcious! Quinces are rippening on the tree, so try that intricate pastry pie — it looks divine. Icecream without a machine? And break out your molds! Filled with recipes, processes, hints, history and joy.
*She’s also produced the recipes for The Officail Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook and more recently, The Official Bridgerton Cookbook.
A selection of books from our shelves.
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We Do Not Part by Han Kang (translated from Korean by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) $40
One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalised in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting. [Hardback]
”Unforgettable. A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang's prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship.” —Hernan Diaz
”A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form.” —Katie Kitamura
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse (translated from German by Katy Derbyshire) $36
A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations. Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat. In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish. [Paperback]
Gloss by Kyra Wilder $38
Transposing the Greek myth of the Hesperides nymphs (guarding the Golden Apples in the legend of Hercules) to Marin County at the turn of the millennium, Gloss is an unconventional psychological thriller with feminist bite. Apple farmer Lee Lotan is a passionate cook who runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from an unnamed eating disorder. Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet at his farm, Golden Apples, one summer. His seemingly benevolent methods have a long-term impact on his young charges. A year later, a trial is underway and the girls reunite to testify. From the chorus of their voices emerges a surreal, kaleidoscopic picture of trauma and its aftermath: ambivalence, guilt, denial, lingering fascination, and the gaps left by things too difficult to speak aloud. As the story reaches its surreal climax, the girls discover the incompetence of the criminal justice system and the cathartic delights of personal revenge. Wilder paints desire and disgust alike in sensuous, delicate prose. [Wrappered paperback][
”Taut and vivid. It is like stepping into a delicately described hallucinatory nightmare and I was completely mesmerised all the way through. The themes of coercive control and psychological disintegration are so chilling and important.” —Suzanne Joinson
Cold Kitchen: A year of culinary journeys by Caroline Eden $50
”With its union of practicality and magic, a kitchen is a portal offering extended range and providing unlikely paths out of the ordinary. Offering opportunities to cook, imagine and create ways back into other times, other lives and other territories. Central Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, Russia, the Baltics and Poland. Places that have eased into my marrow over the years shaping my life, writing and thinking. They are here, these lands I return to, in this kitchen.” A welcoming refuge with its tempting pantry, shelves of books and inquisitive dog, Caroline Eden finds comfort away from the road in her basement Edinburgh kitchen. Join her as she cooks recipes from her travels, reflects on past adventures and contemplates the kitchen's unique ability to tell human stories. This is a hauntingly honest, and at times heartbreaking, memoir with the smell, taste and preparation of food at its heart. From late night baking as a route back to Ukraine to capturing the beauty of Uzbek porcelain, and from the troublesome nature of food and art in Poland to the magic of cloudberries, Cold Kitchen celebrates the importance of curiosity and of feeling at home in the world. Nicely written [Hardback]
”A quiet and beautiful book, a unique blend of history, place, love, food and belonging. Eden writes so sincerely and so intimately you miss her as soon as you've read the last page.” —Diana Henry
”Powerfully evocative and beautifully written Cold Kitchen will warm your heart. Curl up with this book and let it gently take you places near and far; you will find a sense of home, the hearthstone of our shared humanity.” —Elif Shafak
”A hugely accomplished work that manages to be wildly enjoyable, often moving and always thoughtful.” — Olivia Potts, The Spectator
”One of the most brilliant travel writers of her generation, Caroline Eden is masterful at evoking the flavours and emotions of her encounters while on the road in eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Cold Kitchen, she weaves together the contemporary and the historical, the mundane and the magical, in a heartfelt memoir on the meanings of both distant adventures and the comforts of home.” —Fuchsia Dunlop
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton $45
”Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.” When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a newly born hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival. Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife. This improbable bond of trust serves to remind us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them. [Hardback]
”I savoured every carefully chosen and perfectly polished word and I cared so deeply about Hare that I found myself holding my breath . . . This is more than a wildlife memoir, it's a philosophical masterpiece ruminating on our place as human beings in nature.” —Clare Balding
”Raising Hare is an astounding achievement. Not since I read Salar the Salmon by Henry Williamson have I witnessed such insight into a creature of the wild. This is a great and important tale for our times, for all of us, in the same league as Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Thomas Hardy and indeed Henry Williamson himself. I am so pleased Chloe Dalton told us about raising hare. I will not forget it and nor will anyone who reads it.” —Michael Morpurgo
”A beautiful book that makes you think profoundly about how we so often tune out the natural world around us. Chloe Dalton is a tender, curious, wise, mind-expanding guide, connecting readers with the wild we humans once knew so well. I will be recommending this to everyone.” —Matt Haig
Mrs Calder and the Hyena by Marjorie Ann Watts $38
”Mrs Calder is frail and distracted. She annoys her daughter by living in disorder, taking up with vagrants, hanging around churchyards and giving free rein to her imagination (she thinks about her doctor with no clothes on). But the real hindrances to right perception in this tale, and throughout Marjorie Ann Watts’s exhilarating second collection, produced at the tender age of ninety-eight, are not the fantasies by which we sustain ourselves but the suffocating illusions of others. Particularly those who want what’s best for us. Where is safe? Where can we start again? Whether in homes troubled by age and bereavement or foreign cities consumed by idealistic revolution, ‘there are no answers’, as Mrs Calder herself puts it, except to pick up these stories wherever we left off, and – gratefully – read on.” —Will Eaves
”As in the fiction of Penelope Fitzgerald, which whom Watts shares attributes, there runs through these stories the sometimes unnerving perspective of the visionary. Watts is especially good on the alchemy that chance affinities between seemingly disparate sorts can generate. An extension of this is her sense of the liberation that attends a confluence between the natural world and the human spirit. Humankind, with its frailties and follies but occasional defiant triumphs, is portrayed within a world where birdsong, the scent of wild narcissi, the sound of water and the broad palette of skies complement the coolly ironic but compassionate voice of a born storyteller.” —Salley Vickers, Spectator
Playing Possum: How animals understand death by Susana Mons $58
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralysed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom. With humour and empathy, Susana Mons tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Mons, an expert on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own. Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal. [Hardback]
"Mons upends our anthropocentric views of death and makes the case that other species possess the cognitive requirements to understand death and mortality." —Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
"Playing Possum is an unexpected mix of witty and grisly, cerebral and earthy. Monso doesn't so much answer questions about death as raise new ones, encouraging us to shed our reflexive anthropocentrism by paying close attention to what animals do, even when it fails to accord with human modes of behavior." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Playing Possum identifies a new discipline: comparative thanatology, the study of 'how animals react to individuals who are dead or close to dying, the physiological processes that underlie their reactions, and what these behaviors tell us about the minds of animals.' Monso is tender-hearted in her empathic descriptions but hard-headed when it comes to interpreting what an animal might be experiencing."—David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal
Hekla and Laki by Marine Schneider $40
Carried in by a strong wind, a tiny creature named Hekla twirls delicately into a crater, falling at the feet — and, very suddenly, into the life — of an old giant named Laki. Each is vastly different from the other: Laki is a solitary being, preferring order and calmness, while Hekla is young, spirited, and messy. But in their newfound state of coexistence, they learn to live together and help each other grow, forging an attachment that binds them in life — and in death. Inspired by two Icelandic volcanoes, Hekla and Laki is a story about the beauty and the brutality of life, the passing of knowledge over time, and new possibilities that follow loss. [Hardback]
The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne) $38
In September 1933, the Peruvian Rubber Company delivers nineteen indigenous people from the Amazon to businessman Amado Dam, intended for Argentina's first Ethnographic Theme Park. Unexpected among the human cargo is an artefact harbouring a sloth with a fascinating yet terrifying secret: the ability to create erotically explosive telepathic connections between people. What ensues is a raucous satire of men's fear of women's bodies, of the illusion of logic in the structures of so-called civilisation, and the way class and race obscure identities when the observer is a man with power. In The National Telepathy, Roque Larraquy, one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentinian literature, brings us a literary high-wire act, an over-the-top comic grotesque about atrocity. This shocking, bizarre, funny, imaginative novel lays all-too-bare the secret longings and not-so-secret machinations of a social class that will stop at nothing in order to stay on top. [Paperback with French flaps]
"The National Telepathy is a graphic, acerbic work of satirical science fiction unlike anything you're likely to have ever read." —The Skinny
The Elements of Baking: Make any recipe gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, or vegan by Katarina Cermelj $70
The definitive guide to making any recipe gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, vegan or even gluten-free vegan. With a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry, Katarina Cermelj lays out the science behind baking and the ingredients that make it work, so you can easily adapt your baking to your diet and lifestyle, and still make sure it tastes spectacular. With an abundance of mouth-watering recipes together with actual quantitative rules that you can use to convert any recipe into whatever version you fancy, The Elements of Baking will transform the way you think about ingredients. It will be a constant companion in the kitchen and the book you refer to every time you want to bake. Interesting and useful for gluten-inclusive, dairy-inclusive, egg-inclusive no-vegans too! [Hardback]
The Universe in Verse: 15 portals to wonder through science and poetry by Maria Popova $40
Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, "are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply." In 15 short essays on subjects ranging from the mystery of dark matter and the infinity of pi to the resilience of trees and the intelligence of octopuses, Popova tells the stories of scientific searching and discovery. These stories are interwoven with details from the very real and human lives of scientists--many of them women, many underrecognized--and poets inspired by the same questions and the beauty they reveal. Each essay is paired with a poem reflecting its subject by poets ranging from Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, and Tracy K. Smith, and is stunningly illustrated by celebrated artist Ofra Amit. Together, they wake us to a "reality aglow with wonder." [Hardback]
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine story by Nathan Thrall $30
Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits- his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad's fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as a Palestinian. Interwoven with Abed's odyssey are the stories of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and pasts unexpectedly converge- a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a deeply immersive, stunningly detailed portrait of life in Israel and Palestine, and an illumination of the reality of one of the most contested places on earth. [New paperback edition]
”A deeply immersive portrait of daily life in Israel and the West Bank arranged around the story of a Palestinian child and a school trip that ends in tragedy following a traffic accident. Weaving together the ordinary and interwoven lives of Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants, Thrall, a Jerusalem-based author and journalist, illuminates the complex realities of one of the world's most contested regions.” —Financial Times
How to Choose a Chess Move by Andrew Soltis $37
International Grandmaster Andrew Soltis brings you a foolproof guide to choosing your best next chess move, every time. There are more than 30 moves you can choose from an average position, yet Chess Masters regularly manage to select the best moves - and they do it faster, more confidently and with less calculation than other players. This practical guide, a brand new, fully updated edition of a chess classic, explains the tricks, techniques and shortcuts Masters employ to find the best way forward, at every stage of a game. Drawing on the wisdom of some of the greatest chess players of all time, with analysis from over 180 games, it covers: Employing specific cues to identify good moves. Streamlining analysis of the consequences of moves. Using both objective and highly subjective criteria to find the right move - from any position. This invaluable book provides a fascinating insight into the way Chess Masters think, and is a must for all players who want to hone their decision-making skills. [Paperback]
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21 February 2025
My life is a sort of an orbit, he thought. My life is a repetitive circular thing, or something very closely approximating a circle, not that an orbit needs to be circular, necessarily, but I think mine is. How many times will I pass this same point in the geography of my life, so to call it, how many times will I pass by, caught in the momentum of my orbit, unable to touch what I observe of my life below, changing slowly, or fast, as it does by the influence of various forces that I also cannot touch. But what am I if I am remote from what I have just called my life, he thought, what am I, the orbiting observer, if I am not my life, if I am orbiting above my life as the astronauts or cosmonauts in the space station in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital orbit above the planet Earth, orbiting and observing, enthralled by the attractive wonderful damaged planet below, remote from it but falling always towards it though never getting closer, in an equilibrium of gravity and momentum. An orbit, after all, he thought, is always firstly an act of attention. “Is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?” Harvey asks in the novel, as the astronauts stand in awe at the systems and patterns below them. “If you could get far enough away from Earth you’d be able finally to understand it.” Are understanding and participation mutually exclusive, he wondered, then, in my life, on this planet, necessarily, or is participation in itself a form of understanding, albeit enabled by an inescapable narrowing of perspective? As I circle in my orbit, far above my life, falling towards the object of my attention but carried away anyway by momentum, there in the equilibrium of my distance, I see there are no borders, no edges, no entities other than a oneness, if that could even be thought of as an entity, no entities other than those that exist in our minds, arbitrary borders, arbitrary edges, arbitrary entities, not seen from above but only by the participants in the struggle that they enable, the struggle that they condemn us to maintain. The moonshot is the opposite of an orbit. We divide ourselves with edges to get things done, to act one thing upon another, to intend and do, to participate or at least be aware of what we think of as our participation to the limited extent that we are somehow aware. This is how we get things done. This also is how harm is done. Up here in my orbit I observe how tiny all that is, I understand to the extent that I am remote, I am in a plotless place, I am in a place where everything is in an indefinite tense, where everything is a submission to a larger system, somewhere that I am hardly me. “As long as you stay in orbit you will be OK,” says the astronaut. “You will not feel crestfallen, not once.” I do not want to return, he thought. I do not want to leave my space of suspension, though “our hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.”
There’s nothing like a journal to keep you up with the play, reinvigorate your thinking and introduce you to new ideas. Counterfutures is published biannually in Aotearoa, it’s peer reviewed, and has a bunch of good people on its editorial and advisory boards. It’s a multidisciplinary journal of Left research and thought, and includes essays, interviews and reviews. Published here, and about here, it also connects with international colleagues, both scholarly and grassroots. In this issue, editor Neil Vallelly interviews Princeton Professor Wendy Brown. ‘Towards a Counter-Nihilistic Politics’ is a wide-ranging interview that looks at the 2023 protests on American campuses, an analysis of current left politics, specifically in the US but also broadly relevant to other nations; — its reinvention in the face of one might say disenchantment, and a delve into political philosopher Max Weber, as well as Brown’s own work on neoliberalism and nihilism. In ‘Whakapapa of a Prison Riot’ Emma Rākete and Ti Lamusse, unpack the 2020 uprising at Waikeria Prison with an eye-opening and passionate exposition on the riot, prisoner rights, censorship and free speech. Their critique is sharp and powerful drawing on history, injustices of the past and present, and it’s a call to action for change in our criminal justice system — the kind of thinking and discussion that is missing from most media. In ‘Māori Marx, Māori Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’ Dougal McNeill gets under the skin of the poet’s work. Here is Tuwhare’s socialist connections in his words and deeds. Engaging, and adding further depth to this excellent poet’s body of work. And if you are needing to continuously find a way to unpick the complexities of Israel-Palestine, a conversation between Tariq Ali and historian Rashid Khalidi is enlightening and thoughtful. ‘The Neck and the Sword’ is an in-depth interview which gives excellent insight into Palestinian struggles for statehood. Khalidi goes back to the Arab Revolts of the late 1930s, and how it connects to the Nakba of 1947-8. He highlights the impacts of displacement, the war of 1967, the evolution of the PLO and later Hamas. This is a conversation with clarity of thought, facts and analysis, a conversation rooted in a people’s struggle, and above all humanity. While this interview was recorded in mid-2023, it feels even more important now, when booksellers can be arrested for doing their job, and powerful players are intent on a course of action in Gaza and the West Bank which will lead to further disenfranchisement. And these are just a few of the journal’s entries. Get Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa on your radar and on your reading pile!
Contradictions, misunderstandings, oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges — these messy troubles are the stuff of life. In Pretty Ugly, Gunn reminds us of her unparalleled acumen in handling ambiguity and complication, which are essential grist to the storyteller's mill. These 13 stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are a testament to Gunn's ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. Gunn's is a steady, unflinching gaze. In this collection, Gunn practises 'reading and writing ugly' to pursue the deeper (and frequently uncomfortable) truths that lie under the surface, at the core of both human imagination and human rationality.
”Fiercely conflicting energies are in play in these sparkling stories, as Kirsty Gunn at once lavishly evokes and savagely destroys the worlds of propriety and respectable community.” —Tim Parks
A selection of books from our shelves.
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14 February 2025
How dangerous is a sad man? Sister Perpetue is on the night shift. She is under strict instructions to watch the patient (or is he a prisoner, shackled to the bed?) — to never let her eyes or mind wander. Yet when he talks, she listens and is caught up in his tale. His horrific story. For is he merely unfortunate, or is he a monster? In The Glutton, A.K. Blakemore turns from witches (her previous award-winning novel captured the puritanical fervour of England, 1643) to the infamy of The Great Tarare — ‘The Glutton of Lyon’. A man so perverse, so tortured by his insatiable hunger, that he will eat anything. The Glutton is a glorious novel. Glorious in its writing; Blakemore paints with her words a world alive with visceral undertakings, both beautiful and appalling. Glorious in its depiction of depravity and desire; the futile attempts to capture love or meaning in a maelstrom of corruption and ignorance. Glorious in its observations of time; this turbulent history of dissatisfaction, desperation, and rebellion. The revolution calls all men to its reckoning, and a boy-man like Tarare turns the heads of more powerful men — men that will command him to perform and then spit him out like gristle that irritates the tooth. And then there are his fellows who will not claim him — who prefer him a spectacle. For what are they, but curious? Hardened and bored by the grind of their days and the poverty of their hearth and heart. In all this, can Tarare be anything other than the monstrous man with his jaws wide open, his throat slack as he ingests mountains of offal, eats small animals alive, and takes in copious buttons, belts, and other fancies as the crowd demands? Grotesque, exhilarating, and strangely beautiful, Blakemore’s The Glutton is a delectable dish. Gobble it up!
“I write: I write because we lived together, because I was once amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.” Both of Perec’s parents were killed in the 1939-1945 war, his father early on as a French soldier, and, soon after, his mother sent to a death camp. Their young son was smuggled out of Paris and spent the war years in a series of children’s homes and safe villages. “My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don’t know much about,” he writes. W alternates two narratives, the first an attempt by Perec to set down the memories of his childhood and to examine these not only for their accuracy but in order to learn the way in which memory works. Often factual footnotes work in counterpoint to the ‘remembered’ narrative, underscoring the limitations of the experiences that formed it. Right from birth the pull of the Holocaust is felt upon Perec’s personal biography, and his story is being shaped by this force, sucking at it, sucking his family and all stability away. Sometimes he attaches to himself experiences of which he was merely a witness, the memories transformed by remembering and by remembering the remembering, and so forth, and by the infection of memories by extraneous imaginative details. “Excess detail is all that is needed to ruin a memory.” The absences around which these memories circulate fill the narrative with suppressed emotion. The other narrative begins as a sort of mystery novel in Part One, telling how one Gaspard Winckler is engaged by a mysterious stranger to track down the fate of the boy whose name he had unknowingly assumed and who had gone missing with his parents in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego where they had gone in search of an experience that would relieve the boy’s mutism. In Part 2, the tone changes to that of an encyclopedia and we begin to learn of the customs, laws and practices of the land of W, isolated in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego, a society organised exclusively around the principles of sport, “a nation of athletes where Sport and life unite in a single magnificent effort.” Perec tells us that ‘W’ was invented by him as a child as a focus for his imagination and mathematical abilities during a time when his actual world and his imaginative world were far apart, his mind filled with “human figures unrelated to the ground which was supposed to support them, disengaged wheels rotating in the void” as he longed for an ordinary life “like in the storybooks”. Life and sport on W are governed by a very complex system of competition, ‘villages’ and Games, “the sole aim to heighten competitiveness or, to put it another way, to glorify victory.” It is not long before we begin to be uncomfortable with some of the laws and customs of W, for instance, just as winners are lauded, so are losers punished, and all individual proper names are banned on W, with athletes being nameless (apart from an alphanumeric serial number) unless their winnings entitle them to bear, for a time, the name of one of the first champions of their event, for “an athlete is no more and no less than his victories.” Perec intimates that there is no dividing line between a rationally organised society valuing competition, and fascism — the first eliding into the second as a necessary result of its own values brought to their logical conclusions. “The more the winners are lauded, the more the losers are punished.” The athletes are motivated to peak performance by systematic injustice: “The Law is implacable but the Law is unpredictable.” Mating makes a sport of rape, and aging Veterans who can no longer compete and do not find positions as menial ‘officials’ are cast out and forced to “tear at corpses with their teeth” to stay alive. Perec’s childhood fantasy reveals the horrors his memoir is unable to face directly. We learn that the athletes wear striped uniforms, that some compete tarred and feathered or are forced to jump into manure by “judges with whips and cudgels.” We learn that the athletes are little more than skin and bone, and that their performances are consequently less than impressive. As the two strands of the book come together at the end, Perec tells of reading of the Nazi punishment camps where the torture of the inmates was termed ‘sport’ by their tormentors. The account of W ends with the speculation that at some time in the future someone will come through the walls that isolate the sporting nation and find nothing but “piles of gold teeth, rings and spectacles, thousands and thousands of clothes in heaps, dusty card indexes, and stocks of poor-quality soap.”
Question 7 is a masterful exploration of love, history, and the interconnectedness of human lives. Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, the book navigates the choices we make about love and the profound chain reactions that follow. This hypnotic work is both a love song to Flanagan's island home and a tribute to his parents. Exploring the idea that reality is never shaped by realists and that our lives often emerge from the stories of others and the narratives we create about ourselves.
Question 7 defies labels. It’s a memoir, a family history, a sweeping view of salient events, and, when paired with philosophical reflections, inventive imaginings, and a brilliant writer’s questing curiosity, the result is profoundly moving and in the words of Colm Toibin, Mark Haddon and The Observer— a masterpiece!
“Once I had the idea of writing the book as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima, my father living and me being born – once I understood that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me – then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place. I thought much about my parents who, in a world they knew to be meaningless, nevertheless asserted an idea of love as their answer to the horrors out of which my island home is torn.”
Find out more:
We will be discussing Question 7 in our online book group, Talking Books, on Tuesday 11 March. >>Join the Discussion
Out of the carton and onto your shelves! Any of these books will provide the substance for an increase in your reading time. Your books can be dispatched by overnight courier, or collected from our door.
Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies $38
The alpacas are nervous. Accusations are flying about a rigged election, a mysterious illness is spreading, the Alpaca News is being censored by higher powers, and skullduggery is threatening the Breeders Showcase. Amidst a mass of self-interested parties, a forthright vet and a diplomatic engineer strive to protect the herds and restore democracy. By turns vital, farcical, heartbreaking and chilling, the much-anticipated alpaca novel by Duncan Sarkies is a wild and tender leap – or, more accurately, pronk – into the heart of alpaca breeding, and a snapshot of a world at a crossroads. [Paperback]
”It’s like Succession, but with alpacas.” —Toby Manhire, The Spinoff
”I cannot think of another New Zealand writer who comes close to Sarkies’ restless intelligence, swift shifts of tone, technical control across several genres and sheer creative inventiveness.” —Fiona Farrell
”Any book about an election, political intrigue and general ratfuckery is going to grab my attention. An allegorical narrative that is most definitely of its time. Sarkies asks important questions, challenging his readers and doing it in an accessible way. I loved it.” —Grant Robertson
Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel $30
A soft worrier, I’m Nua-No-Myth
speaking in centipede,
with a sweet hiding
in the dark of my cheek.
Restless in form and address, these engaging and generous poems ricochet from light to dark, quiet to loud, calm to violence. We meet a loved twin sister as she dives towards the Sacred Centre, a grandmother who knows everything by heart, a shrugging office clerk, and Nafanua herself, an enigmatic shapeshifter.
At the heart of Black Sugarcane is a sequence of erasure poems arising from the seminal essay 'In Search of Tagaloa' by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi. From the worlds contained in the text, these poems rise as if inevitable. Another sequence responds to the devastating tsunami that stuck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila in September 2009. Within the line, within the word and even the letter, these poems speak to creation and translation, destruction and regeneration. [Paperback]
”The poems in Black Sugarcane are laced with panthers and cobras. Nafanua Purcell Kersel yields her machete-pen with ease, humour and aroha, clearing paths, riding waves, carving memory and bending time. Her poetic vision is both minuscule-microscopic and drone-distant, opening space for the va to take shape. She is writing on a branch from the same rakau as Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tusiata Avia.” —Anne-Marie Te Whiu
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $30
How do we write about the singular experience of parenthood? Written in a 'state of attachment', or 'under the influence' of fatherhood, Childish Literature is an eclectic guide for novice parents, showing how the birth and growth of a child changes not only the present and the future, but also reshapes our perceptions of the past. Shifting from moving dispatches from his son's first year of existence, to a treatise on 'football sadness', to a psychedelic narrative where a man tries, mid-magic mushroom trip, to re-learn the subtle art of crawling, this latest work from Alejandro Zambra shows how children shield adults from despondency, self-absorption and the tyrannies of chronological time. At once a chronicle of fatherhood, a letter to a child and a work of fiction. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Childish Literature shows shows boundless — and bounding — enthusiasm for the chaos and curiosity that his son, Silvestre, has brought into his life. Alejandro Zambra makes being a writer seem like the least solitary, most joyful job in the world — an enthusiasm that makes this his most engaging book yet.” —Jonathan Gibbs, Times Literary Supplement
”What a rare and wonderful experience, to read a writer of such brilliance, wit and style as Alejandro Zambra on the subjects of fatherhood and childhood. I relished every page of this beautiful, surprising book.” —Mark O'Connell
”Zambra is one of my favourite living writers (which makes Megan McDowell one of my favourite translators). Childish Literature is funny, playful, sincere and, for me, as a new father, reassuring, not because of parenthood platitudes (quite the opposite), but for its line of anxious questioning on how one fathers a child without a ‘tradition of fatherhood’. It has clarified some of the depth of love alongside the concerns I have as a new father. Zambra is once again doing the work of great literature, providing (and provoking) old and new ideas around family, education, literature and art. He is childlike and deeply serious about the spaces and times we live in. If you have read this book, let's talk about it!” —Raymond Antrobus
”Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.” —Rivka Galchen
Heroines by Kate Zambreno $30
“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order―pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature." Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it―from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism―she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor”, and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivised criticism. [Paperback]
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by Lee Murray $28
Wellington, 1923: a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman 'falls' from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver. All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese-Pakeha writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit huli jing as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories. Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history. [Paperback]
Speak / Stop by Noémi Lefebvre (translated from French by Sophie Lewis) $44
Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write — a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology. Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is "a madhouse of earthworm sentences" interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre's work. [Paperback]
"Lefebvre stages a sparkling dialogue about class, literature, and longing to escape one's life. Readers of experimental literature are in for a treat." —Publishers Weekly
"Lefebvre's approach is intellectual but unpretentious. Her pugnacious prose is consistently delightful. Using cultural criticism and fiction to further the possibilities of both, this is another rapturous work from Lefebvre, allergic to cliché and lazy thinking alike." —Declan Fry
The Magic Cap by Mireille Messier and Charlotte Parent $35
A delightfully illustrated picture book. Many moons ago, in a tiny, thatched cottage at the edge of the woods, lived two children named Isaura and Arlo with their hedgehog, Crispin. When their beloved pet becomes ill, Isaura suggests that they seek the magical healing power of gnomes. Convinced this will heal it, the children set off into the woods with humble offerings, hoping to attract the gnomes. The trick does not seem to work, however, and gnomes are nowhere to be seen despite the children's good intentions. Isaura and Arlo will have to remain hopeful and wish for a magical solution!
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life by Lulu Miller $37
When Lulu Miller’s relationship falls apart, she turns to an unlikely figure for guidance — the 19th-century naturalist, David Starr Jordan. Poring over his diaries, Lulu discovers a man obsessed with nature's hidden order, devoted to studying shimmering scales and sailing the world in search of new species of fish. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake sends more than a thousand of Jordan’s specimens, housed in glass jars, plummeting to the ground, the story of his resilience leads Lulu to believe she has found the antidote to life’s unpredictability. But lurking behind the tale of this great taxonomist lies a darker story waiting to be told: one about the human cost of attempting to define the form of things unknown. An idiosyncratic, personal approach to this fascinating scientific biography, Why Fish Dont Exist is an astonishing tale of newfound love, scientific discovery and how to live well in a world governed by chaos. [Now in paperback]
“I want to live at this book's address: the intersection of history and biology and wonder and failure and sheer human stubbornness. What a sumptuous, surprising, dark delight.” —Carmen Maria Machado
”Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review
”A story told with an open heart, every page of it animated by verve, nuance, and full-throated curiosity.” —Leslie Jamison
”This book will capture your heart, seize your imagination, smash your preconceptions, and rock your world.” —Sy Montgomery
”Moves gracefully between reporting and meditation, big questions and small moments. A magical hybrid of science, portraiture, and memoir-and a delight to read.” —Susan Orlean
Silk: A history in three metamorphoses by Aarathi Prasad $28
Through the scientists who have studied silk, and the biology of the animals from which it has been drawn, Prasad explores the global history, natural history, and future of a unique material that has fascinated the world for millennia. For silk, prized for its lightness, luminosity, and beauty is also one of the strongest biological materials ever known. More than a century ago, it was used to make the first bulletproof vest, and yet science has barely even begun to tap its potential. As the technologies it has inspired - from sutures to pharmaceuticals, replacement body parts to holograms - continue to be developed in laboratories around the world, they are now also beginning to offer a desperately needed, sustainable alternative to the plastics choking our planet. Prasad's Silk is a cultural and biological history from the origins and ancient routes of silk to the biologists who learned the secrets of silk-producing animals, manipulating the habitats and physiologies of moths, spiders and molluscs. Because there is more than one silk, there is more than one story of silk. More than one road, more than one people who discovered it, and wove its threads. [New paperback edition]
”A tour of the anecdotal, the industrial and the gruesome. Readers coming to this globetrotting and species-leaping volume expecting vignette after genteel vignette of 5,000-odd years of Chinese silk manufacture are in for a nasty shock. Here be spiders, and not just spiders, but metre-long Mediterranean clams, and countless moth species spinning their silks everywhere from Singapore to Suriname.” —Financial Times
Birds of the Nelson/Tasman Region, And where to find them by Peter Field $25
This clear and useful illustrated book describes the history, habits and habitats of all the birds known from this region, noting changes in abundance and distribution. The best sites to find the species are described, along with a set of maps to show these locations in detail. [Paperback]
Girl by Ruth Padel $38
Ruth Padel takes a fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons. Across a triptych of interlocking sequences, she unravels the millennia of myth woven around girls. A moving retelling of the Christian story transforms the Virgin Mary into a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped at the hands of a male archaeologist. Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. Delicately crafted lyrics, sometimes taking adventurous shapes, explore snapshots from the poet's own life blended with archetypes from India, European fairy tale, ancient Greece and Urban Dictionary- girl as soul, girl as creative energy, girl as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. [Paperback]
”One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is tender and exquisite poetry” —Mona Arshi
”In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again ‘Who makes you girl? When does it stop?’ Formally inventive and with a dazzling control of the lyric line, Padel uses the poem as time travelling machine, examining the acts of resistance that connect girls to the women they will become.” —Kim Moore
The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming our humanity in a digital world by Christine Rosen $40
Human experiences are disappearing. Social media, gaming and dating apps have usurped in-person interaction; handwriting is no longer prioritised in schools; and emotion is sooner expressed through likes and emojis than face-to-face conversations. With headphones in and eyes trained on our phones, even boredom has been obliterated. But, as Christine Rosen expertly shows, when we embrace this mediated life and conform to the demands of the machine, we risk becoming disconnected and machine-like ourselves. There is another way. For too long, under the influence of corporate giants and tech enthusiasts, we've accepted the idea that change always means better. But rapidly developing technology isn't neutral - it's ambivalent, and capable of enormous harm. To improve our well-being, help future generations flourish and recover our shared humanity, we must become more critical, mindful users of technology, and more discerning of how it uses us. From TikTok challenges and algorithms to surveillance devices and conspiracy culture, The Extinction of Experience reveals the human crisis of our digital age - and urges us to return to the real world, while we still can. [Paperback]
”Technology is having pervasive effects on us all, effects which are hard to put into words. Christine Rosen finds the words I've longed for. The Extinction of Experience is an extremely important book, and its message all the more urgent as AI threatens to make everything effortless, frictionless, and disembodied.” —Jonathan Haidt
”A fascinating and timely book about the essential real-world experiences we're watching vanish before our screen-addled eyes. Resisting the lure of nostalgia, but rejecting the glib assumption that more technology is always better, Christine Rosen makes a passionate case for the face-to-face, embodied, analogue, unpredictable, unmediated life, and its centrality to a vibrant and truly meaningful human existence.” —Oliver Burkeman
A selection of books from our shelves.
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February already. Read our latest newsletter, and find out what you’ll be reading next.
7 February 2025
There are still plenty of gems in our fiction sale. It’s a great opportunity to discover a new author, to delve into a different genre, and improve your reading addiction. If you haven’t read Nell Zink, you can choose: Doxology or Nicotine. Both are excellent. If you like music the former, but for me the latter is still my favourite. Zink’s writing, with its overtones and undertones (plenty of sly digs at cultural norms and hilarious metaphors about relationships), is clever and exhilarating. In Nicotine she explores family and relationships in her own surprising way. Enter Penny, the unemployed business school graduate, daughter of Norm, the Jewish shaman who is famous for his healing clinics and extreme spiritualism, and Amalia, a Kogi, the young second wife rescued from the poverty of South America, who has become a very successful corporate banker. With parents like this, you know from the beginning that Penny carries some baggage. When her aged father dies, Penny is distraught and is left with more questions than answers about her family. Needing distraction, her family decides that she needs something to do. They send her to rescue her grandparents’ long-abandoned home in a dodgy suburb of New Jersey. We enter Nicotine; — the home of squatter activists whose common cause is the right to smoke. Penny is intrigued by the squatters and attracted to Rob, the very good-looking bicycle mechanic. Rather than throw them out of the house, she becomes part of the group, developing relationships with the home dwellers that will change not only her life, but theirs too. Penny, despite her seeming uselessness, becomes the catalyst for change for all, with many hilarious machinations and sly digs at social conformity on all sides along the way. Zink puts her characters through the paces, never letting up on them, (nor giving up), and plays with societal concepts of capitalism, pragmatism and spirituality. Zink is a ‘naughty’ writer — toying with her reader and her characters, constantly making fun of both in a very appealing and clever way. If you like to look at life a bit sideways then you’ll enjoy her style, playfulness and reflections on people — their gullibility, as well as their backbone.