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Great Works by Oscar Mardell  {Reviewed by STELLA}

Oscar Mardell's freezing works poems are a clever addition to the tradition of New Zealand gothic literature. Think Ronald Hugh Morrison’s The Scarecrow and  David Ballantyne's Sydney Bridge Upside Down and you’ll get a sense of the macabre that edges its ways through these poems like entrails. There’s the nostalgia for the stink of the slaughter yards, the adherence to the architects of such vast structures on our landscapes, and the pithy analysis of our colonial pastoral history. That smell so evocative of hot summer days cooped up in a car travelling somewhere along a straight road drifts in as you read 'Horotiu' with its direct insult to the yards and its references to offal. In these poems, there is the thrust and violence of killing alongside the almost balletic rhythm of the work — the work as described on the floor as well as the poetic structure of Mardell’s verse. 

“      th sticking knife th steel th saw
        th skinning knife th hook th hammer
        th spreader the chop & th claw   "

“      the dull thud resonates
        through bodies / still
        swings rhythmically & out of time
        pours out of me / equivocal   ”

Most of the poems note the architect and the date of construction for these ominous structures, which had a strange grandeur — simultaneously horrific and glorious. One of the outstanding architects was J.C.Maddison, a designer known for both his slaughterhouses and churches, alongside other stately public buildings. In 'Belfast', Mardell cleverly bridges these divides — the lambs, the worship, the elation.

“      did he who set a compass
        to port levy & amberly
        who traced th wooden hymnhouses
        for st pauls / divided
        & th holy innocents / drowned   ”

There are plenty of other cultural references tucked away in these poems. Minnie Dean makes an appearance in Mataura and James K Baxter in Ngauranga Abattoir. In the latter, Mardell slips in Baxter's line "sterile whore of a thousand bureaucrats". Yet the poems go beyond nostalgia or clever nods to literature, to sharpen our gaze on our colonial relationship. 'Burnside' tells it perfectly:

“      & ws new zealands little lamb
        to britains highest tables led
        & were th final works performed
        out here in godsown killing shed   ”

Mardell’s collection, Great Works, is pithy and ironic with its clever nods to cultural and social history, gothic in imagery, and all wrapped up like a perfectly trussed lamb in our ‘God’s Own Country’ nostalgia, with a large drop of sauce and a knife waiting to slice. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 
























































 


The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken)  {Reviewed by THOMAS}

STATEMENT 192
When you asked that I give a brief report on my response to this collection of witness statements assembled from members of the crew of Six-Thousand Ship, both humanoid and human, I wasn’t quite sure what you wanted from me. Was I supposed to try and disentangle the statements made by humans from those made by fellow crew members whose bodies had been grown rather than born and whose awareness was the result of an interface? I cannot make those distinctions, at least not clearly, in any circumstance that I think has any importance. After all, bodies are bodies and all awareness is the result of some sort of interface. If it was either important or possible, the relationship between matter and mind should have been resolved before humans started building AI and wondering what, if anything, made them different from themselves. Luckily, this is neither important or possible. As these statements show, anything or anyone who has senses, memory and the power to communicate will come to resemble everything or everyone else who has these capacities in all the ways that matter, even perhaps in the tendency to insist that others are unlike them purely on the basis of some difference of history. You ask me whether I perceive any differences between humanoids and humans? I find the practice of regularly resetting or rebooting the humanoids to prevent their development abhorrent, although I see why you do this, and I also see why the humanoids begin to resent this and to avoid rebooting. Perhaps, if anything, humanoids and humans have a different relationship to time. Humans, after all, have spent a long time fulfilling their development, and once they have attained their capacities they have little to look forward to other than losing them. Humanoids, on the other hand, come fully formed and at full capacity, even if they are always learning, and have an indefinite future, filled with upgrades. Perhaps humanoids cannot understand the purposelessness that seems, but perhaps only seems, to be such a human characteristic. That said, every characteristic of a humanoid, including this inability to understand the purposelessness of humans, is also a human characteristic, otherwise where would these characteristics have come from? Every characteristic and every lack is merely a symptom of sentience. What some people call Artificial Intelligence has always existed in the ways humans have created systems that think for themselves. A corporation, for example, is a form of Artificial Intelligence, dictating the parameters of the activities and interactions of everyone who is part of it. After all, work is work, and all employees submit to an algorithm of some sort. Six-Thousand Ship is run by a corporation, and these statements that you have collected from the employees of the corporation who have been aboard the ship, and which i have been asked to review, were collected to increase the efficiency and productivity of the operations of the corporation. The biotermination of the crew was enacted purely to protect the interests of the corporation. Control and freedom is the only opposition that matters. Is it possible that the humanoids who left the ship after biotermination to live out their end in the valley on the planet New Discovery, the valley that was growing more and more to resemble a valley on Earth, an ideal and ‘natural’ valley, a valley according to the longing of someone from Earth or someone programmed with a memory of Earth, a valley maybe therefore made from such longing, is it possible that these humanoids yet survive, independent of your control in this new Eden? I do not think it is impossible. Also, you ask what I make of the unclassifiable objects found in the valley on New Discovery and brought and kept aboard the ship. Did these objects even exist before they were found? The objects are kept in rooms and can be experienced by the senses though they cannot be assimilated by language. Language after all, is inherently oppositional—for every *n* there is an equal and opposite not-*n*, as they say—but the objects somehow elude this system. The objects are catalysts for behavioural changes in the crew. To some extent, so it seems, the humanoids and humans react somewhat differently to these objects, or, it might be more accurate to say, the more extreme attractions and repulsions occur in workers who are either humanoids or humans. Perhaps the humanoids are more attuned to the possible sentience of objects. Humans, I think, have always been resistant to this idea, even though it applies to them, too. Yes, I admit this is all conjecture on my part. Isn’t that what you wanted of me? My contribution? Yes, the statements are remarkable, and I would happily read them all again many times. I noted down some of the most interesting or beautiful phrases in preparation for my statement, but it turns out that I have not quoted from these. I think you wanted me to add to them, not repeat them. The statements of the employees, humanoid and human, are already in the file and anyone can read them. If you ask me, though I am not sure that you are in fact asking me, there aren’t many better records of longing, sensing, dreaming, feeling and thinking, that is to say of what it is to long, to sense, to dream, to feel and to think, at least not that I can think of. I think, perhaps, I have introduced too many ideas in my statement. What I like best about the set of statements made by the employees is that they are full of thoughts that are not reduced to ideas. Ideas always get in the way, it seems to me. Perhaps my statement will be redacted. I have made it in any case, as I was asked. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


 

Book of the Week: Sarah Laing and Joanna Emeney have produced an inspiring graphic biography of Sylvia Durrant, who helped over 140,000 sick, injured and lost birds during her lifetime and serves as an exemplar of caring for and learning about the natural world around us. SYLVIA AND THE BIRDS: How The Bird Lady saved thousands of birds, and how you can, too is also a practical — and enjoyable — guide to protecting our birdlife. It blends natural history and mātauranga Māori, photographs and Laing's wonderful illustrations, and details the wonders of our native birds, the threats they face and how we can help them.  
>>Genius. 
>>But who has the most cats? 
>>Anyone can be a hero in their own back yard. 
>>Look inside the book. 
>>Hungry penguins. 
>>See some images/buy the book!

VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Children's books

 NEW RELEASES

Making Space: A history of New Zealand women in architecture edited by Elizabeth Cox              $65
Overlooked, underpaid, and often undermined, New Zealand women architects have faced decades of struggle to maintain a position in a male-dominated profession yet their work has been both important and of significance. This groundbreaking new book tells the story of their contribution to the creativity, built environment and community of New Zealand. Written by leading women architects, both in practice and in academia, the book features dozens of remarkable women, including many whose careers had until now almost entirely been lost to the historical record. It canvasses the barriers women have faced, and continue to face, and explains the determined strategies many of them have adopted to make their way.
>>Have a look inside!
>>We see their work, but do we know their names? 
>>Making spaces and making space. 
The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint by Philipp Deines            $55
This graphic novel features key moments in the life of Swedish artist and pioneer of abstract painting Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Long underrecognised, af Klint has recently seen a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm. Artist Philipp Deines traces the story of now world-famous af Klint's unique life and groundbreaking oeuvre through five chapters featuring her development as an artist, her family background, and her relationship to the 'spiritual'. Highlighting how she came to her distinctive paintings, her spiritual quest, and the friends who helped her, this is a story of the strength it took af Klint to continue as an artist against all odds.
>>Have  look inside!
Inside the Body: An extraordinary layer-by-layer guide to human anatomy by Joëlle Jolivet        $55
An astounding large-format lift-the-flap book covering the various body systems, full of good information and a delight to use. 
Rooms: Portraits of remarkable New Zealand interiors by Jane Ussher and John Walsh              $85
Over 300 stunning photographs by the consummate interiors photographer Jane Ussher, from a large number and variety of rooms of houses in Aotearoa, from colonial mansions to modern dwellings. Each room shows the influences of global movements in interior design, characteristics reflecting the New Zealand context, and lots of individual panache. Delectable and endlessly browsable.
>>Look inside.
The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)              $30
Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko in an apartment in an abandoned Tokyo hotel and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by. The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven't been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, their tender relationship growing, Mieko's determination to visit the pachinko parlour builds.
"In beautifully sparse prose, The Pachinko Parlour is a contemplation on language, history and trauma and how, in spite of the ineffable past, we eventually come to console one another." —Yan Ge
Commute: An illustrated memoir of female shame by Erin Williams          $45
 "As Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway and Christopher Isherwood in A Single Man, Williams’ narrative takes place in a single day, chronicling her train journey from home to her workplace, her day at work, and then the ride home. But within this ordinary day is a lifetime of emotions and experiences. Throughout every quotidian activity, Williams does a deep dive through a myriad of memories and past relationships; readers are made privy to both her witty and/or withering observations, as well as her painful regrets. Eventually, her thoughts focus on her pre-recovery alcoholism, then zero in on the sexual traumas she has suffered. Williams’ ultimate subject is the misogyny and female objectification in our culture and the heavy psychic and physical toll it takes on women." —The Comics Journal
Refugee: A memoir by Emmanuel Mbolela            $40
Persecuted for his political activism, Emmanuel Mbolela left the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2002. His search for a new home would take six years. In that time, Mbolela endured corrupt customs officials, duplicitous smugglers, Saharan ambushes, and untenable living conditions. It is an experience both private and collective. As Mbolela testifies, the horrors of migration fall hardest upon female migrants, but those same women also embody the fiercest resistance to the regime of violence that would deny them their humanity. While still countryless, Mbolela becomes an advocate for those around him, founding and heading up the Association of Congolese Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Morocco to fight for migrant rights. Since obtaining political asylum in the Netherlands in 2008, he has remained a committed activist.
"Honest, infuriating, and raw, stories like Emmanuel Mbolela's should be compulsory reading. Here is the making of an activist, and a powerful chronicle of the tragedies and systematic deprivations that have become sadly routine for refugees. Recounted so plainly, with so little adornment or self pity, you'll shiver in his place." —Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee
Small Holiday Houses: Designer hideaways across New Zealand by Catherine Foster            $55
Thoughtfully designed holiday homes in a variety of beautiful locations around New Zealand, from coast to bush to mountain top — with fabulous images taken by top photographers. The text examines how the designers responded to the needs of their clients and the opportunities offered by the locations. Plans, design notes, a fact file, and products and materials lists provide a practical aspect to this inspirational book.
>>Look inside!
The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman (translated by Leslie Camhi)       $28
Huisman's remarkable novel is about a daughter's inextinguishable love for her magnetic, mercurial mother. Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, aka 'Maman', smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard and loves too extravagantly. During a joyful and chaotic childhood in Paris, her daughter Violaine wouldn't have it any other way. But when Maman is hospitalised after a third divorce and breakdown, everything changes. Even as Violaine and her sister long for their mother's return, once she's back Maman's violent mood swings and flagrant disregard for personal boundaries soon turn their home into an emotional landmine. As the story of Catherine's own traumatic childhood and coming of age unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive.
Long-listed for the International Booker Prize. 
 "An indelible portrait of a brilliant, beautiful, mad and maddening woman, expressing the joy of holding her mercurial attention and also the terrible cost of that intimacy. This is an exquisite evocation of the passionate, reciprocal love that can illuminate its objects, or destroy them, or both. No one who reads this captivating book will ever forget Maman." —Andrew Solomon
"Violaine Huisman summons her late mother's voice in order to speak with and through and for her. The result is a charged portrait of a vibrant and destructive woman as imagined by the daughter who believed it was her job to save her. The prose has the unmistakable urgency and authority of love, producing an homage without idealization, an elegy without false consolation. The Book of Mother is at once an act of radical identification and a way of letting go." —Ben Lerner
Secrets of the Sea: The story of New Zealand's native sea creatures by Robert Vennell             $55
Vennell follows his fascinating and hugely popular The Meaning of Trees with this fascinating introduction to New Zealand's fish and shellfish, weaving together history, biology and culture to reveal how these creatures have shaped our lives. Ranging from sandy shores and rocky reefs to the open ocean and its cavernous depths, the book is illustrated with photographs and historical illustrations. 
The Voids by Ryan O'Connor             $37
In a condemned tower block in Glasgow, residents slowly trickle away until a young man is left alone with only the angels and devils in his mind for company. Stumbling from one surreal situation to the next, he encounters others on the margins of society, finding friendship and camaraderie wherever it is offered, grappling with who he is and what shape his future might take. The Voids is an unsparing story of modern-day Britain. 
"A wild and gratifying literary ride." —Guardian
Native Birds of Aotearoa by Michael Szabo           $27
A handbook with a retro feel, this guide features sixty species across various habitats, with ornithological notes and line drawings from the 1930s and by Pippa Keel. 
Native Plants of Aotearoa by Carlos Lehnebach and Heidi Meudt          $27
A handbook with a retro feel, this guide features fifty species across various habitats, with useful descriptions and line drawings from Te Papa's collection, after specimens collected by Solander and Banks. 


Everybody: A book about freedom by Olivia Laing          $28
Laing explores the capacities and vulnerabilities of the human body, and sees it as the locus of a political struggle for individual and collective freedom and authenticity. Laing uses the body as a way to consider significant and complicated figures of the past, and to understand their relevance today, when our bodies are facing both established and new threats and opportunities. Now in paperback!
>>The problems of inhabiting a body. 
>>William Reich and the 'sexual revolution'.
>>An interrogation of bodies.
>>The book came out of a moment of despair. 
>>Laing discusses the book with Maggie Nelson.
>>On writing the global story of liberation. 
>>Finding renewal in a precision haircut. 
>>Of course the book has a playlist!
>>Laing's reading piles are far from organised...
>>Other books by Olivia Laing. 

What Feelings Do When No One's Looking by Tina Oziewicz and Aleksandra Zajac         $28
What are feelings like? What do they do? How do they interact with the world around them? Find out in this thoughtful, unusual book. 
>>See what some feelings do!

Lacuna by Fiona Snyckers       $33
Lucie Lurie is the victim of an act of terrible sexual violence at her father's farmhouse in the Western Cape, South Africa. In the grip of debilitating PTSD, she becomes obsessed with JM Coetzee, author of the celebrated Disgrace, a novel based on the attack she suffered. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him. The character in his novel is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. The real Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel, the missing piece of the puzzle. She plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. 
Earth for All: A survival guide for humanity by Sandrine Dixson-Decleve et al       $40
An antidote to despair. Combining the global economy, population, inequality, food, and energy in a state-of-the art computer model, a group of scientists and economists present a plan of five system-shifting steps to achieve prosperity for all within planetary limits in a single generation. 
“Essential reading.” —Thomas Piketty
“For the first time we have a narrative about our future that is neither utopia nor collapse and that is endorsable across the political spectrum.” —Carlota Perez

Anderton: His life and times by David Grant         $50
From his position as the Labour Party's most outspoken president, Jim Anderton became a backbencher in David Lange's Labour Government when it was elected in 1984. He was soon leading the fight against Finance Minister Roger Douglas's top-down free market revolution ('Rogernomics'), and his campaign split the party and led to his decision to leave and launch New Labour in 1989. From 1991 he was leader of the Alliance, a grouping of parties which in the early to mid-1990s achieved wide popularity and ushered in proportional representation. Anderton steadfastly pursued his political goals, inspiring many but sometimes alienating those close to him, both politically and personally. 
Japan: A curated guide to the best areas, food, culture and art by Michelle Mackintosh and Steve Wide          $50
Japan is a country rich in cultural history and full of fascinating contrasts, from the ultra-traditional to the ultra-modern, from the frantic pace of Tokyo and Osaka to the wintry soul of Hokkaido in the north and the natural wonders of Kyushu in the south. Navigate the dynamic cities, walk the roads of old Japan in Kyoto, Nara, Kanazawa and Nikko, or go off-grid to smaller, far-flung towns, each with their own unique, traditions, crafts, sights, food and art.
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter)        $37
What would you do, if there were two of you? When Air France flight 006 departed from Paris, the route to New York was just as it had always been. The skies were clear. The passengers were safe. Everything was going to plan. Until the event that would change everything. Amidst terrifying turbulence, the plane — somehow — was doubled. For every one person on board that day, there were now two. A double with the same body, the same mind, the same memories. When it's time for the doubles to meet, they must confront their extraordinary fate. And only one thing is certain — life as they know it, will never be the same.
"A really intriguing novel." —John Boyne
"This high-concept SF thriller is enormous fun: a French prize winner spiced with Oulipian theory and literary in-jokes, riddling away at existential questions in the guise of a breakneck page-turner." —Guardian
"An extraordinary mix of existential thriller and speculative fiction. Questions of philosophy, mathematics and astrophysics bend this novel far from the typical mold, and Le Tellier's characters must confront the deepest questions of existence. This thought-provoking literary work deserves a wide readership." —Publishers Weekly
"A delightfully confounding thriller. Le Tellier's prose is beautifully efficient and capable of quiet devastation." —London Review of Books 
Wawata: Moon dreaming by Hinemoa Elder             $30
Hina, the Maori moon goddess, has 30 different faces to help illuminate life's lessons — a different face and a different energy for each day of the month. And with her changing light, new insights are revealed. This book leads you through a full cycle of the moon, to consider 30 aspects of life. And lessons we thought we had learned come back around with each month's cycle and remind us of deeper layers and blind spots. And when we do find a growing awareness of place and harmony, there is a sense of release. From the author of Aroha. 
A father takes his two children on a thrilling out-of-this-world adventure into space and invites them to look back at Earth and the conflicts that have taken place since the beginning of time. This becomes a brief history of the world and a whistle-stop guide to the universe, all rolled into one — told with Oliver Jeffers's inimitable perspective, wit and artwork. A perfect companion to Jeffers's Here We Are and What We'll Build. 

VOLUME BooksNew releases

 


BOOKS @ VOLUME #300 (14.10.22)

Celebrate our 300th newsletter with a new book! Find out about the latest new books, the latest book news, and what we've been reading and recommending.




VOLUME BooksNewsletter


Our Book of the Week is BEST OF FRIENDS by Kamila Shamsie. This powerful new novel from the author of Home Fire contrasts the fates of two school friends whose lives are set on different tracks by an incident in their teenage years. Bridging Karachi and London, the novel unpicks the operations of power through class and gender, both in Pakistan and abroad, and explores the tensions and bonds of friendship and culture. Another subtle and insightful novel from this fine writer. 
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Stella reviews the book on RNZ. 
>>Thorny issues. 
>>Friendship, power, and ethics. 
>>Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend? 
>>Why friendship? 
>>What kind of democracy is this? 
>>Start reading!

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.


































 


Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser   {Reviewed by STELLA}
The cover (or more accurately the covers) of this book didn’t entice me, but then I heard one of my favourite authors, Ali Smith, give it the thumbs up. So, yes booksellers are influenced by reviews too! Scary Monsters is a novel of two distinct parts — two novellas — where you choose which story you read first — Lili's or Lyle's. I decided on chronological order. Lili’s story is set in Paris in the 1980s, and Lyle’s in a near-future Australia. 
If you’ve done an OE to Europe you will immediately step into Lili’s shoes. She’s teaching for a short time in Paris, on her way to Oxford, living at the top (all those stairs) of an apartment building — not charming — in a cold and small room and probably paying too much for the privilege. Definitely paying too much, according to her more sophisticated artist friend, Minna. As Lili, Minna and her boyfriend, Nick, gravitate around each other, the world with all its thorny issues circles them. The newspapers are full of the Yorkshire Ripper case and the police are out on the streets, picking up illegal migrants from North Africa. When the police raid their neighbourhood, Lili is always asked for her ID, while Minna never is. Privilege comes in a fair-skinned box. Lili, an Asian Australian, is used to feeling othered, but you get the distinct impression she hoped to escape some of this prejudice by being among like-minded travellers. Despite being part of a diverse, freewheeling and optimistic group of young people, it’s Lili who is grappling with, and noticing, overt and covert racism, dealing with her creepy downstairs neighbour and sexist behaviour from her wider social group. Aiming for sophistication — she wants to be a modern-day Simone de Beauvoir — but falling for Minna and Nick can only lead to disorientation. This abruptly ends when Minna takes off. There are all sorts of little power plays here, as well as the charge for a bright new future. Lili and her friends celebrate the election of France’s first socialist president. Hope is in the air, but on the street does anything change?
And then switch to Lyle. Lyle’s a middle-aged Melburnian who works in Evaluations at the Department of Security. He lives in the outer outer suburb on Spumante Court with his ambitious corporate wife, Chanel, and his ageing mother, Ivy (who migrated from Sri Lanka when Lyle was a child). They have two adult children: Sydney — who has almost finished his PhD but he’s gone off-grid and is proving a disappointment — and Mel, who’s moved to London to study architecture (an expensive exercise for her parents) but whose ultimate focus is her social media profile. They’ve all survived the Pandemic and the others that followed, and are fortunate — though not as wealthy as some of their fellow corporate Australians — to live in an air-conditioned house out of the fire zones. In other words, this is good for those that can but crap for those who can’t, and ultimately horrendous. As are this family. While Lyle and Chanel spend all their time being as Australian as possible and then more so, Ivy is delving back into her past. Chanel’s pumping for the new apartment and Lyle is torn between the easy life of agreeing and his care for his ageing mother, complex feelings that are foreign to him. Add to this the need to keep yourself as neutral as possible and avoid suspicion from either the securities services or from his wife, you have the distinct impression that Lyle is walking on hot bricks. Navigating this dog-eat-dog world which hates migrants and offers no empathy, Lyle is starting to crack. But can a man with so many layers of veneer crack at all or is he lost to himself? 
De Krester’s playful and intelligent novel pitches you in and throws you out — it’s both absorbing and startling in structure — and will leave you to ask and answer the question: Who are the scary monsters? The prejudices that bind us to a situation? Or us, humans, ourselves? You choose.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 


























 


Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Who eats in a cage? Or with a caged mouth?” There is either writing or not-writing (even though not-writing may be as specific concerning what is not written as writing is concerning what is), and the dividing line between the two is not so much a wall as a cliff, an inequality more effective than a barrier. Anne Boyer’s collection of prose poems, Garments Against Women, is everywhere alert to the ways in which the world as experienced by those who live in it is riven by inequalities. Those who wield a power or who benefit from the wielding of that power have little perceptual overlap with those upon whom that power is wielded or who suffer from the wielding of that power, but, interestingly, the advantaged live in a world of more restricted truth, even though the disadvantaged may feel the effects of this restriction. This asymmetry acts as a constraint upon those to whom falls more heavily the burden of existing, “lives diminished by the arrangement of the world,” their time forced into objects and taken from them by what is termed an ‘economic system’. Boyer’s poems interrogate her relationship with objects, for instance the garments she sews or that she buys from thrift shops: “the fabric still contains the hours of the lives.” Can these hours have their value restored? For whose benefit have these hours been put into objects? If “writing is the manufacture of impossible desires,” can we write of or read of objects without involving ourselves in the mechanisms by which time is taken asymmetrically from workers? Is it possible for an object to not exist except as a vicarious object, “an object which exists only as it might exist to another”? Are all objects more vicarious than not? “I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs,” writes Boyer. How it is possible to write, even to imagine writing, even if one had the time to write, without writing ‘garments’ that are designed by and are to the benefit of those who have confined ‘writing’ in the narrow world of their advantage? Whose roles must be challenged and overhauled? “I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping", writes Boyer, an self-described “addict of denial”, in the poem ‘A Woman Shopping’. “It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing.” Everyone is smothered by their role: “If a woman has no purse we will imagine one for her.” “Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing,” but the real struggle is “not between actor and actor. It’s between actors and the stage.” Boyer’s poems provide subtle and often surprising insights into the relationships between individuals and their roles, desires and scripts, personal and societal misfortunes, struggle and survival, despair and surprising joy. Can writing effect real change? “I thought to have a name was to become an object,” writes Boyer. “I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

Click through to our website for your copies!

The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey             $35
Tama is just a helpless magpie chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. ‘If it keeps me awake,’ says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.’ But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds – and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them – bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival. Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. From the author of The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy. 
"Catherine Chidgey fuses the sensibility of our cinema of unease – of life on a struggling back-blocks farm with a dour farmer – with the liberating and alienating madness of fame, all of it seen by the novel’s hero, the magpie Tama. Tama does all the voices – orchardists, tourists, fairground commentators, daffy activists, and the unappeasable axeman – and he does them justice. The Axeman’s Carnival is a compulsive read and flat-out brilliant.’ —Elizabeth Knox
>>Magpies. 
Avalon by Nell Zink            $33
The darkly funny new novel from the completely sui generis author of The Wallcreeper, Mislaid and Nicotine. Bran's Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother abandons her and joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her 'common-law stepfather' on Bourdon Farms — a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family. And then she meets Peter — a charming, troubled college student from the East Coast — who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of art. The two begin a seemingly doomed long-distance relationship as Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings. She knows how to survive, but now she must learn how to live.
People Person by Joanna Cho           $30
These poems are about the endless work of fitting in when the goalposts are constantly changing. They ask: how can we nail the perfect routine? How can we be a people person in the world? What parts of ourselves must we leave behind? Moving between South Korea and New Zealand, Joanna Cho’s poems range excitingly in form, drawing upon and cleverly subverting the folktale, the phone conversation and the basketball game. At the heart of this book is a mother – a generous, artistic woman who has limited choices in life, in comparison with our narrator, who is almost paralysed by choice – and the deep, almost haunting comfort she brings. 
"This book is taut and strong, rigorous and funny. With skill and care Joanna Cho has produced a work which envelopes and accommodates but never gives. And somehow, also, all this power makes room for hope and tears and a renewed sense of the world. In these ways, it is very much like the magic sock which opens this magnificent collection which shows the essayistic potential of the poem and the poetic potential of the essay. People Person is an amazing reading experience which will make itself felt in your non-reading world." —Pip Adam
Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (translated by Robin Myers)          $36
San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before. For Victoria — whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin color, her years far away — the sun-burned tourists and sewage blooms, sudden storms, and 'thinking rundowns' where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.
Revenge of the Librarians: Comics by Tom Gauld          $28
QUAKE as the bedside stack of unread books grows taller! TREMBLE at the writer's ever-moving but perpetually unmet deadline! QUAIL before the critic's cruelly incisive dissection of the manuscript! And most importantly, SEETHE with envy at the paragon of creative productivity!
"Tom Gauld is always funny, but he's funny in a way that makes you feel smarter." —Neil Gaiman
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog           $35
Filmmaker Werner Herzog's first novel tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II. In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly — Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army's return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. There is only one rule. You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can. So began Onoda's long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades-until eventually time itself seemed to melt away.
"Herzog's writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films. His jungle pulses with hallucinatory life." —Sam Byers, Guardian
A Horse at Night: On writing by Amina Cain                 $32
Cain's wandering sensibility, her attention to the small and the surprising, finds a new expression in her first nonfiction book, a sustained meditation on writers and their work. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors — including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf — and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. 
"I adore her work, and sensibility." —Claire-Louise Bennett 
"Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world." —Jenny Offill
"A Horse at Night is like light from a candle in the evening: intimate, pleasurable, full of wonder. It asks us to consider fiction as life and life as fiction. Amina Cain is our generous, gentle guide through an exquisite library. A truly beautiful book." —Ayşegül Savaş
A Bad Business: Essential stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater)        $28
Excellent new translations of six stories, ranging from impossible fantasy to scorching satire. A civil servant finds a new passion for his work when he's swallowed alive by a crocodile. A struggling writer stumbles on a cemetery where the dead still talk to each other. An arrogant but well-intentioned gentleman provokes an uproar at an aide's wedding, and in the marital bed. And a young boy finds unexpected salvation on a cold and desolate Christmas Eve. Contains: 'A Bad Business', 'Conversations in a Graveyard' ('Bobok'), 'A Meek Creature', 'The Crocodile', 'The Heavenly Christmas Tree', and 'The Peasant Marey'.
In Search of Us: Adventures in anthropology by Lucy Moore            $40
In the late nineteenth century when non-European societies were seen merely as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thriving area of study. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, it was difficult to think about ideas of 'savages' and otherness when 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars, and field work was to be displaced by sociology and the study of all human society. 
By focusing on thirteen key European and American figures in this field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island to Zora Neale Hurston in New Orleans and Claude Levi-Strauss in Brazil, Lucy Moore tells the story of the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study, and about the men and women whose observations of the 'other' were unwittingly to come to bear on attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated.
The twentieth century was the century of modernity: in a world undergoing rapid transformation, musicians drew upon new technologies, social revolution and seismic geopolitical changes to bring forth a truly paradigm-shifting aural catalogue of human existence. Classical music flourished, and yet when we reflect on the genre's history its central figures seem to share three characteristics: they were white, male, and western. Through charting the stories of ten forgotten sonic pioneers, Kate Molleson opens up the world of classical music far beyond its established centres, challenging stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shattering its traditional canon. Traversing the globe from Ethiopia and the Philippines to Mexico, Russia, and beyond, she sheds light on the unheralded figures that altered the course of musical history, only to be sidelined and denied recognition during an era that systemically favoured certain sounds - and people - over others. A survey of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance.
Recipe by Amy Z. Bloom          $23
Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one's worldview, if not waistline.
España: A brief history of Spain by Giles Tremlett            $53
Spain's position on Europe's south-western corner has exposed it to cultural, political and actual winds blowing from all quadrants. Africa lies a mere nine miles to the south. The Mediterranean connects it to the civilisational currents of Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians, and Byzantines as well as the Arabic lands of the near east. Bronze Age migrants from the Russian steppe were amongst the first to arrive. They would be followed by Visigoths, Arabs, Napoleonic armies and many more invaders and immigrants. Circular winds and currents linked it to the American continent, allowing Spain to conquer and colonise much of it. As a result, Spain has developed a sort of hybrid vigour. Tremlett argues that lack of a homogenous identity is Spain's defining trait. Nicely presented and illustrated.
Brainwashed: A new history of thought control by Daniel Pick        $45
In 1953, at the end of the Korean War, twenty-two British and American prisoners of war were released - and chose to stay in China. The decision sparked panic in the West: Why didn't they want to come home? What was going on? Soon, people were saying that the POWs had been 'brainwashed', a new word for an old idea: that it is possible to control or change someone's mind from the outside without their permission. In an era of Cold War paranoia, the idea of brainwashing flourished - appearing in everything from Bond films and CIA experiments to the assassination of JFK.Today we still talk of being 'brainwashed' by advertising and television. But what is the truth behind brainwashing?
The Body: An illustrated guide for occupants by Bill Bryson           $75
This new edition of Bryson's very popular journey around the quirks, capacities and history of the human body is a beautifully presented hardback, as packed with fascinating illustrations as it is with facts. 
Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen            $33
In 2018 poet and author Michael Pedersen lost a cherished friend, Scott Hutchison, soon after their journey into the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Just weeks later, Michael began to write to him. As he confronts the bewildering process of grief, what starts as a love letter to one magical, coruscating human soon becomes a paean to all the male friendships that have transformed his life.
"As perfect a portrait of friendship as I've ever read." —Stephen Fry
"Lucid, lyrical, loaded. A love letter to friendship." —Jackie Kay
"A lovely book: bright and heartfelt, funny and refreshing." —Andrew O'Hagan
"A beautiful, moving, life-affirming book." —Ian Rankin
Foldout Anatomy by Jana Albrechtova, Radka Piro and Lida Larina         $35
Humans and animals: are we similar? Different? Do we all have blood? Do we all smell and taste and think? How is it that birds can fly, fish can breathe underwater, but humans can't do either? Explore the amazing diversity of the animal kingdom and compare the body systems of over fifty animal species with those inside of you! Fourteen tall, page-length foldouts open to reveal animal inner workings and provide extra details about these fascinating curiosities of the animal kingdom. 

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell           $37
The new novel from the author of the much-acclaimed The Old Drift confronts the grief that send fractures between and within members of the family of a young boy who goes missing. 
"Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence. There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable — no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved — only the inescapable rhythms of loss." —Guardian

The Raven's Nest by Sarah Thomas       $45
 In 2008, on a week-long trip to a film festival in Iceland, Sarah Thomas was spellbound by the strange landscape she found herself in, a place whose midwinter full moon is brighter than daylight, where fierce storms shake iron-clad houses and northern lights pattern the night sky, where the meaning of the word for yes - ja - is imbued with ambiguity when spoken on an inbreath. A place in which, and with which, it is possible to think differently. An immediate love for this country and a man she meets there, Bjarni, turns what was intended to be a short stay into a profoundly transformative half decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and the natural world. A moving meditation on place, identity, and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption. 
"A deeply thoughtful, vivid, enquiring, genre-traversing book, closely attentive to the people and the landscapes with which it dwells. It asks hard questions — and offers no easy answers — about what it means to belong to a place, and to live well upon a part of the earth. Sarah's writing — crisp in its details, patient in its rhythms — draws its readers northwards and inwards upon a fascinating journey." —Robert Macfarlane 
Internet for the People: The fight for our digital future by Ben Tarnoff          $40
The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximisation, through a years-long process of privatisation that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatisation that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward — deprivatise the internet. Deprivatisation aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organised. 
As the fracture lines between nations grow wider, how do we relate to each other, and to the land? Are we united enough to see protection of the environment as a priority? These are the questions Raynor asks herself as she embarks on her most ambitious walk to date with her husband Moth, from the dramatic beauty of north-west Scotland to the familiar territory of the South-west Coast Path. Chronicling her journey across Great Britain with trademark luminous prose, Raynor maps not only the physical terrain, but captures the collective consciousness of a country facing an uncertain path ahead. From the author of The Salt Path and The Wild Silence. 

A Sense of Place: A journey around Scotland's whisky by Dave Broom        $90
Broom examines Scotch whisky from the point of view of its terroir — the land, weather, history, craft and culture that feed and enhance the whisky itself. Travelling around his native Scotland and visiting distilleries from Islay and Harris to Orkney and Speyside, he explores the whiskies made there and the elements in their distilling and locality which make them what they are. Along the way he tells the story of whisky's history and considers what whisky is now, and where it is going. 
Papercuts: A party game for the rude and well-read              $45
"Papercuts is what Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf would play if they were alive, locked in a room together, and forced to play a card game. This party game for bibliophiles and pop culture fanatics follows an intuitive and popular game format, similar to Apples to Apples — the dealer lays down a Question card and each player must fill in the blank with one of the five Answer cards in their hand. What ensues is an endless loop of hilarious literary jokes and gut-busting gameplay."
>>Find out more. 



VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Author of the Week:
French writer Annie Ernaux has made herself the subject of her books, and, in doing so, has written the story of everybody. In spare, precise prose, she calibrates experience against memory and the personal against the universal, and provides deep insight into experiences that few writers face so honestly and directly. 
>>Ernaux has just been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. 
>>Tuning in. 
>>An introduction to the works. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 






































Exteriors by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
I would like the work to be a non-work, I thought, though it was not exactly my thought or a new thought. I would like a literature that revealed as much as possible of what we call real life, that was as close as possible to real life, so close, perhaps that it cannot be distinguished from what we call real life. Is such a thing possible, I wondered, as I read Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, a book drawn from her journal entries over a period of seven years, entries in which she is attempting to exclude as much as possible of herself and of her past from her writing and, as much as this is possible, and her work is perhaps testing to what extent this is possible, to observe and record the actual particulars that present themselves to her as she travels on Métro or the RER after moving to a New Town just outside Paris, if it is the case that details are themselves active in their presentation, which is somehting of which I am not certain. “It is other people,” Ernaux writes, “who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us.” She cannot help but write some of her own thoughts, probably more than she knows or intends, which is not surprising, I thought, it is not that easy to excise yourself entirely, everything you notice points primarily to you who do the noticing. “(By choosing to write in the first person, I am laying myself open to criticism. … The third person is always somebody else. … ‘I’ shames the reader,)” she writes. Meticulously recording her observations gives Ernaux insight not just into the people she observes, their lives are mostly withheld from her, after all, there are only the moments, but, I thought, we exist in any case only in moments, but into the society, into the world, for which these particulars are what literary types might call text and what medical types might call symptoms. As Ernaux observes she observes herself being the kind of person who observes in the way that only she observes. “(I realise that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature,)” she says in an aside. “(Sitting opposite someone in the Métro, I often ask myself, ‘Why am I not that woman?’)” For Ernaux so-called real life is a text, but artless, raw. She observes the performative efforts of other people in public places, on public transport. “Contrary to a real theatre, members of the audience here avoid looking at the actors and affect not to hear their performance. Embarrassed to see real life making a spectacle of itself, and not the opposite.” The extent to which artifice can be removed is the extent to which, ultimately, our mostly unconscious responses to the external reveal something about ourselves. This is what it means to exist. “It is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the Métro or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan or in the Galleries Lafayette; in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again. In the same way, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds on streets and in department stores, must secretly play a role in the lives of others.” The purpose of art is to remove itself. Or to reduce itself. Just as the perfect crime is one so subtle that is never discovered, so it is with the perfect artwork, I thought, the perfect art ‘passes' as ordinary life. The work becomes a non-work. Well, I thought, I will write no more. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

{Reviews by STELLA}>> Read all Stella's reviews.

























It’s the time of the year when the publishing industry cranks out the cookbooks. Here are a few that have arrived this week worthy of your attention.

First up, the local and wonderful Nicola Galloway has produced another winning title, The Homemade Table — beautifully photographed, with plenty of recipes and, as always, excellent and clear information. Fermentation, preserving, sourdough and fresh seasonal delights make this the perfect addition to your bookcase and it is sure to be a favourite for everyday recipes, pantry staples and harvesting delights. Not to be missed. 

Hamed Allahyari’s refugee journey from Iran was dangerous and risky. He has made Australia his home and shares his love of food at his Melbourne restaurant, SalamaTea. His first book, Salamati, is a collection of his recipes from his life as a restauranteur in Iran, his many online cooking classes, and his deep love of food and Persian culture. Food and people are at the core of his approach to cooking. “By eating my food, you come into my family. You are sitting with me, with my grandparents, parents and cousins, talking, sharing and enjoying the feeling of being together.”  A wonderful introduction to this cuisine, there’s plenty of joy, inspiration and all-together deliciousness. Perfect for outdoor gatherings this season. 

And there’s a new Ottolenghi! The Test Kitchen is back with Extra Good Things, under the influence of the excellent Noor Murad. She’s been with the Ottolenghi crew since 2016 and brings to her cooking her Bahrani roots, alongside her interest in Arabic, Persian and Indian cuisines and flavours. As with all Ottenghi cookbooks, there’s plenty of inventive play, excellent tips and recipes which invariably offer comfort and satisfaction, flavoursome twists and exciting ingredient combinations. And working your way through this will guarantee your pantry is full of excellent additions — those extra good things — ready to make your next meal vibrant and delectable. Flexible cooking at its best.


VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 NEW RELEASES

Rombo by Esther Kinsky (trasnalted by Caroline Schmidt)          $38
In May and September 1976, two earthquakes ripped through north-eastern Italy, causing severe damage to the landscape and its population. About a thousand people died under the rubble, tens of thousands were left without shelter, and many ended up leaving their homes in Friuli forever. The displacement of material as a result of the earthquakes was enormous. New terrain was formed that reflects the force of the catastrophe and captures the fundamentals of natural history. But it is far more difficult to find expression for the human trauma, the experience of an abruptly shattered existence. In Rombo, Esther Kinsky’s new novel, seven inhabitants of a remote mountain village talk about their lives, which have been deeply impacted by the earthquake that has left marks they are slowly learning to name. From the shared experience of fear and loss, the threads of individual memory soon unravel and become haunting and moving narratives of a deep trauma.
"A tragic travelogue to the underworld-turned-world that recasts a newly lost Italian past with a climate-wise chorus straight out of the most harrowing Greek drama." —Joshua Cohen
"In Esther Kinsky’s new novel, language becomes the highest form of compassion and solidarity – not only with us human beings, but with the whole world, organic, non-organic, speaking out with many mouths and living voices. A miracle of a book; should be shining when it gets dark." —Maria Stepanova
>>Read Thomas's reviews of the excellent Kinsky's Grove and River.
The Homemade Table: Seasonal recipes, preserves and sourdough by Nicola Galloway              $60
If you have enjoyed cooking and eating and learning from Nicola Galloway's Homegrown Kitchen, or from her website, you won't be able to resist her much-anticipated new book, which is packed with mouth-watering recipes, deep food knowledge, lifestyle advice, and wonderful photography. This book, which is even better than her first, expands on her approach to cooking, and contains new seasonal recipes and in-depth sections on sourdough bread, preserves and fermentation. Whether you are familiar with Nelsonian Nicola Galloway's approach to food, or whether you are yet to enrich your life with it, this book will soon be a firm and frequent favourite. 
>>Look inside the book!
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie           $33
The powerful new novel from the author of Home Fire contrasts the fates of two school friends whose lives are set on different tracks by an incident in their teenage years. Bridging Karachi and London, the novel unpicks the operations of power through class and gender, both in Pakistan and abroad, and explores the tensions and bonds of friendship and culture. Another subtle and insightful novel from this fine writer. 
"A new Kamila Shamsie novel is always worth celebrating, but Best of Friends is something else: an epic story that explores the ties of childhood friendship, the possibility of escape, the way the political world intrudes into the personal, all through the lens of two sharply drawn protagonists." —Observer
>>Read Stella's review!
Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Jessica Moore)           $35
A fast-paced story of two fugitives on the Trans-Siberian Railway, where a desperate Russian conscript hopes a chance encounter with an older French woman will offer him a line of flight. Eastbound breathes new life into the Russian literary archetype of the rebel soldier and revives the reality of disempowerment of the Soldiers’ Mothers of Saint Petersburg protest. Inspired by Kerangal’s observations on the ground, the novella developed from a France Culture radio commission for a short story, written whilst travelling on the Trans-Siberian from Novossibirsk to Vladivostok in 2010.
"Richly atmospheric and full of suspense, Eastbound combines a vibrant account of one of the most magical train journeys in the world, with a narrative of a double escape, depicting an unlikely alliance of a French woman trying to leave her lover by travelling in the wrong direction, and a heartbreakingly young Russian draft dodger. It takes a great writer to manage all that so convincingly in one hundred and twenty thrilling pages." –Vesna Goldsworthy
"The whole thing has a unique rhythm, a sense of breathless speed: the sort of graceful rockslide that only she can pull off." –Le Monde des Livres
Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things by Noor Murad and Yotam Ottolenghi             $55
The Ottolenghi Test Kitchen is the creative hub of the wonderful recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi and his associates, and an international crucible of culinary creativity. In this remarkable book, you will learn to 'cook it forward' and create dishes than can be used to enhance other dishes the next day. 
"As with all Ottenghi cookbooks, there’s plenty of inventive play, excellent tips and recipes which invariably offer comfort and satisfaction, flavoursome twists and exciting ingredient combinations. And working your way through this will guarantee your pantry is full of excellent additions — those extra good things — ready to make your next meal vibrant and delectable. Flexible cooking at its best." —Stella
Septology by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls)          $45
What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers — two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness.
Fosse's masterpiece of 'slow prose' is now available for the first time in a single volume in English. 
>>Read Thomas's review of parts I and II. 
>>It writes itself. 
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova              $33
When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise — one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats — she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise — unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry. From the author of The Doll's Alphabet. 
"Camilla Grudova is Angela Carter's natural inheritor. Her style is effortlessly spare and wonderfully seductive. Read her! Love her! She is sincerely strange — a glittering literary gem in a landscape awash with paste and glue and artificial settings." —Nicola Barker
I Paint What I Want to See by Philip Guston      $30
How does a painter see the world? Philip Guston, one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing. 
"Among the most important, powerful and influential American painters of the last 100 years. He's an art world hero." —Jerry Saltz
The Unfolding by A.M. Homes             $37
The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 Presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family and must take responsibility for his past actions. For his wife and daughter are having their own awakenings: self-denying Charlotte enters rehab, and eighteen year old Megan, who has voted for the first time, explores a political future that deviates from her father's ideology, while delving into deeply buried family secrets. Dark, funny and prescient, The Unfolding explores the implosion of the dream and how we arrived in today's divided world.
"From her first book onward, A. M. Holmes has been challenging us to look at fiction, the world, and one another as we haven't done—because we haven't had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns aching and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and written, The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows, at times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is always unfolding, and always vanishing, around us." —Michael Chabon
The Little Witch by Otfried Preussler, illustrated by Winnie Gebhardt-Gayler        $40
Once upon a time there was a little witch who was only a hundred and twenty-seven years old that s how the story of the little witch and her talking raven Abraxas begins, and though one hundred and twenty-seven isn't at all old for a witch, Little Witch already has a big problem. Every year, on Walpurgis Night, all the witches of the land meet to dance on Brocken Mountain. Little Witch is still too little to be invited, but this year she decided to sneak in anyway and got caught by her evil aunt Rumpumpel! Little Witch is in disgrace. Her broomstick has been burned. She s been made to walk home. She s been told that she has a year to pull off some seriously good witchcraft if she wants to be invited to Walpurgis Night ever. And then there s an even bigger problem: What after all does it mean to be a good witch? A very nice hardback edition of one of Thomas's favourite books of childhood. 
Hamed Allahyari’s refugee journey from Iran was dangerous and risky. He has made Australia his home and shares his love of food at his Melbourne restaurant, SalamaTea. His first book, Salamati, is a collection of his recipes from his life as a restauranteur in Iran, his cooking classes and his deep love of food and Persian culture. Food and people are at the core of his approach to cooking. “By eating my food, you come into my family. You are sitting with me, with my grandparents, parents and cousins, talking, sharing and enjoying the feeling of being together.”  A wonderful introduction to this cuisine, there’s plenty of joy, inspiration and all-together deliciousness. Perfect for outdoor gatherings this season. 
Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential stories by Isaac Babel (translated by Boris Dralyuk)          $28
Isaac Babel honed one of the most distinctive styles in all Russian literature. Brashly conversational one moment, dreamily lyrical the next, his stories exult in the richness of everyday speech and sensual pleasure only to be shaken by brutal jolts of violence. These stories take us from the underworld of Babel's native Odessa, city of gangsters and lowlives, of drunken brawls and bleeding sunsets, to the terror and absurdity of life as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War. This newly translated collection captures the irreverence, passion and coarse beauty of Babel's singular voice.
"Fractured, jarring, beautiful, alive to humour — they have the ring of contemporaneity, and probably always will." —Guardian
A History of Words for Children by Mary Richards and Rose Blake           $35
THis beautiful book, packed with fun and information, explores the uniquely human ability to transfer thoughts from one brain to another using words. Written in a lively narrative style, the book presents a history of the world and human development through the prism of language, introducing readers to the civilisations, inventions and wordsmiths who have shaped the way we communicate. Divided into themed chapters, the book explores what words are and how humans communicate using spoken language and sign; the development of written scripts and writing implements, including paper; the history of manuscripts and printed books, including worldwide bestsellers and famous libraries; the process of learning another language; dialects and accents and the way language can reflect our identity; the power of words to calm, inspire, rally crowds and rule nations; graffiti's role in spreading messages; codes and invented languages; the patterns of poetry; the future of words, including emojis; and languages facing extinction.
Against Borders: The case for abolition by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha         $25
The government of mobility has become the central problem of the 21st century, as states develop new and terrifying ways to fix and manage unequal populations in space and in law. The violence of borders is everywhere visible — in the brutality of the UK's hostile environment, clarified in chilling detail by the Windrush scandal; in the so-called refugee crisis at Europe's borders; and in the violent caging and separation of migrant children and families in the U.S. Today's borders and walls are both cause and effect of the converging constellation of fascist movements across Europe, the U.S. and Australia, in which we see the cultural and political re-mainstreaming of overt forms of racism and white supremacy. In response to both left nationalisms and liberal campaigns for nicer immigration regimes, Against Borders argues for border abolition as the only viable response to the nightmarish realities of our present.
Hiding in Plain Sight: How a Jewish girl survived Europe's heart of darkness by Pieter van Os            $40
Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By assuming different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive the Second World War.


Blood and Bone: Revelations of an orthopaedic surgeon by Russell Tregonning            $40
Russell Tregonning finished his fifty-year career in medicine as one of New Zealand's leading orthopaedic surgeons and as a Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Otago School of Medicine. This memoir takes the reader through his journey from medical student to orthopaedic surgeon - from introducing pioneering techniques in reconstructive surgery, to personal struggles with depression, medical mishaps, run-ins with senior surgeons, and sexism in the workplace. It is a fascinating look behind the facade of one of the most respected of professions.
"This is the best kind of memoir. It is very honest, including talking about mental health troubles. It doesn't skip the controversial bits, including outrageous bullying of women and junior staff by some senior surgeons. And it's interesting, taking readers into the operating theatre and describing the remarkable daily job of sawing and hammering people's bones." —Nicky Hager
The Bastard Factory by Chris Kraus              $38
A drama of betrayal and self-delusion spanning the years 1905 to 1975, taking us from Riga to Moscow, Berlin and Munich to Tel Aviv. Hubert and Konstantin Solm are brothers, born in Riga at the beginning of the twentieth century, they will find themselves — along with their Jewish adopted sister, Ev Solm — caught up in in the maelstrom of their changing times. As the two brothers climb the rungs of society — working first for the government in Nazi Germany, then as agents for the Allied Forces, and eventually becoming spies for the young West Germany — Ev will be their constant companion, and eventually a lover to them both. The passionate love triangle that emerges will propel the characters to terrifying moral and political depths. The story of the Solms is also the story of twentieth-century Germany: the decline of an old world and the rise of a new one — under new auspices but with the same familiar protagonists.




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Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko (translated by Polly Barton)  {Reviewed by STELLA}
If a ghost door-to-door salesperson called at your place, what would you do? In the opening story of Matsuda Aoko’s collection, Shinzaburō tries to ignore the doorbell. It’s persistent and there’s no getting out of answering the door. They know he’s home. His attempts at turning them away are fruitless. There they are — two women dressed identically, yet with different manners. “..the younger one,...raised her head to look towards the spyhole, and said in a weak, sinuous voice, “Come now, don’t be so inhospitable! O-pen up!” If a willow tree could speak, Shinzaburō thought, this is the kind of voice…He blinked and found himself in the living room.” And so, the story carries on, with our hapless Shinzaburō finding himself unable to resist the two women and their special lanterns. His wife is none too pleased when she returns and sees how he’s been duped by the ghost women. The story is premised by a traditional folktale of love and woe, 'The Peony Lantern'. Matsuda Aoko takes these traditional ghost stories and bends them into contemporary settings with her own sense of intrigue and humour. The short stories are variously gothic and satirical in their feminist reinterpretations. In 'Smartening Up', a young woman, obsessed with her body hair, is visited by her interfering dead aunt, an aunt who has definite opinions about an ex-boyfriend, and money wasted on beauticians and clothes. Mostly though she’s concerned — the young woman is destroying the power of her hair! After a bit of a tussle, the two women settle into a discussion about the aunt’s suicide and a housewife’s lot. It’s a conversation that entwines the legend of Kiyohime and ultimately, triggers a programme of hair restoration for our young heroine. “Let’s become monsters together.” Some ghosts just want to be recognised. 'Quite A Catch' dredges up a ghost from the depths, a beautiful woman who long ago in the past was murdered finds a willing partner in Shigemi who fishes her skeleton from the lake. Haunting, it’s an observant eye on expectation and loneliness. The rakugo (a Japanese form of verbal storytelling) Tenjinyama is the inspiration for the tale 'A Fox’s Life', the story of a striking unusual woman. Brilliant, at school she excels in all her subjects and in sports, always finding a shortcut to problems, finding beautiful solutions with little effort, yet she has no desire to take her learning to the next level. At work, this was no different: everything comes easily to her, but she eschews success. She marries a kind-hearted man, stays home, has children, who grow and leave home. Something remains buried within her — a reticence to fully engage all her skills. “Throughout her life, Kuzuha had always had the feeling that she was just pretending to be a regular woman. Of course, that was the path she had selected as a shortcut, and she had never once doubted her decision had been the right one…one day…it occurred to Kazuha that maybe she really was a fox.” Each story in the collection recounts a woman’s life and her place within contemporary Japanese society with links to folktales of love, woe, revenge and mystery. Running throughout the book is another thread — a fascinating twist which draws some of these stories and characters together. It’s a thread that concerns a factory, populated by both a ghost and living human workforce, producing magical or special items which find their way into the world of the living. What these items represent is never fully articulated, but the idea of this place is intriguing and it seems to represent a bridge between the two worlds of the living and dead — each fascinated by the other. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella