Book of the Week: The Golden Mole, And other living treasure by Katherine Rundell  
The animal world is endlessly varied, fascinating and inspiring, and needs to be preserved both for its own sake and for the richness it adds to human experience and thought. Rundell considers 22 animals (including the human) whose existence is endangered by humans, and reveals the depths of wonder embodied in these animals. For instance, did you know that the Golden Mole is luminescent, but blind and therefore unable to see its own radiance? This hardback book is beautifully presented (it even has gilt edges), and illustrated by Tayla Baldwin. 
>>Startling astonishments. 
>>Consider the golden mole.
>>Consider the hummingbird. 
>>Consider the hare. 
>>The world will not starve for want of wonders. 
>>On the illustrations. 
>>Weird and wonderful. 
>>A 21st century bestiary. 
>>Consider a copy of the book. 
>>Other books by Katherine Rundell. 

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Unraveller by Frances Hardinge   {Reviewed by STELLA}

The country of Raddith is an odd place, complex and unpredictable. Kellen, once a weaver, has been gifted or cursed, depending on your perspective, with the ability to ‘unravel’ curses. Nettle, his trusty sidekick (she’s always there — a watchful appeaser to Kellen’s unpredictable temperament) was not so long ago a heron cursed to feed on fish and watch her siblings (each other bird species) struggle with their human-bird / bird-human natures. Though she’s back in her human body, her experience has altered her and some of her heron qualities linger. She’s not the only one haunted by their recent past. Kellen was a weaver from a weaving village, but once he was cursed with unravelling, it wasn’t too long until his parents had to cast him out or suffer the consequences of a village’s livelihood undone.  But there is always work for a curse-fixer, and Kellen and Nettle mostly stay on the right side of law and order. Not all things go smoothly though in the curse game and it’s not too long until Kellen’s temper gets the better of him and they find themselves arrested. No fear, a stranger seeks them out and makes them an offer they are in no position to reject. Gall, a man bonded to a marsh horse (a strange and demonic creature) employs them on behalf of an official. Dark magic and conspiracy are afoot in the chambers of powers and someone wants to see the equilibrium — the deal struck with the Little Brothers (spidery inhabitants of the lowlands) — undone. The Little Brothers spin webs of mystical power and gift the curse eggs to those who carry loathing and hate in their guts. Curse eggs can be controlled, but not easily, and cursers and the cursed alike often regret their actions. Step in the likes of Kellen, who can unpick these spells. With no choice but to follow Gall’s instructions, Kellen and Nettle find themselves pulled tighter into a web of danger and confusion. Will their friendship endure? Will the Little Brothers help or hinder Kellen when he needs them most? The story weaves in uneven and unexpected ways as the two teens travel to the capital to meet their employer — a startling discovery, head to a remote village through a haunted forest, and end up in the lowlands and on the treacherous waters of the Moonlight Market where a clever hand will need to be played if Kellen is to keep his head and Nettle survive a deceit that will surprise the reader as well as her. Hardinge’s latest is a highly structured tale, much like a spider’s web, with two competing but complementary protagonists at its centre. It has those classic elements of loyalty and betrayal, trust and deceit alongside a vividly portrayed fantastical world (at times wonderfully overwhelming and darkly unsettling), which Hardinge does so well. Another stunner from the author of The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows. 

 

VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella

 


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The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
It did not read like a love story, he thought, but it was a love story. It did not even read like a story, not that he likes stories, but it was a story. And he still liked it. It was not just a stream of invective, though it certainly was a stream of invective, and he has nothing against streams of invective, especially literary streams of invective, quite the reverse, he likes them, he even, and he wonders if the word is correct, collects them, if it is possible to collect streams in anything other than a lake. A lake of invective, perhaps, that doesn’t sound right. Fiction always is an essay in time, or on time, though neither sounds right, the act of reading is a linear act and the act of writing is a linear act, no matter how clipped and disordered that act may be in either case, no matter how you cut the strands, all fiction at base is an offence against time, an offence whence springs the hope and splendour of fiction, he thought. There are two strands in this story, he thought, though he wondered why he called it a story, the time of the telling and the time of all that presses upon the telling from the past. The novel, let him call it that, consists entirely of a monologue spoken, if it is even spoken, by a young German woman to a Dr Seligman, a rant of Bernhardian dimensions or proportions, neither of these words seem right, vulgar, surprising, hugely funny, ultimately sad. He could feel the spoilers coming on. Dr Seligman does not speak, or if he speaks he speaks between the paragraphs and his words are not recorded. He is like the auditor in Beckett’s Not I, not speaking but by his silence the enabler of the saying of all that is said, without him the tremendous disburdening, if that is a word, of the voice could not occur, without this receptive silence there would be no story. We might think at first that Dr Seligman might be a psychoanalyst, but he is not a psychoanalyst, nor even a counsellor, though she was sent to a counsellor, Jason, after threatening her workmate with a stapler, of all things, and fair enough, a counsellor who did not keep silent, who could not play the auditor, who shut her down by speaking. “When we are actually forced to talk about ourselves, things always get so awkward, because there is really very little to talk about. … People like Jason only live off making others feel bad about themselves by pretending that they know the way when in the end they will drown just like everyone else,” she says. Dr Seligman is not a psychoanalyst, though he could be to the body what a psychoanalyst is to the mind, whatever that is, a body is more personal than a mind, after all, if indeed there is anything personal at all about a mind, history is an offence on a body by a body, all the rest is stories, and here come some spoilers and it is not too late, even now, even if you have read this far, reader, to stop reading, he thought, I will accept not complaints if you continue, at least no complaints in this regard. What, though, is sayable and what is not sayable? When the Jewish Dr Seligman does not throw her out after her initial provocation-test recounting invented sexual fantasies involving Hitler, if a fantasy can be invented or can be anything but invented, the hurdle at which Jason fell, he begins to gain her trust and she begins to disburden herself to him of her unhappiness, her discomfort, since childhood, with her identity, or, rather, with the identity imposed upon her as all identities are imposed. “And I think that in a way that’s all we are: other people’s stories. There’s no way we can ever be ourselves,” she says, demonstrating, incidentally, how her monologue changes register so often on a comma, passing from vulgar to reflective within a sentence, if not back again as well. Since childhood she has been repelled both by her mother’s body and by her own, she says. At this point, he thought, he might compare the splendid Volckmerian rant with the splendid Bernhardian rant, each filled, he might say, with loathing, each skewering the rot in society, if you want rot on a skewer, each exposing, among other things, the indelible mark of Nazism upon a nation. The Bernhardian rant, as it progresses, though, he thought, rings more wrong, if that is the right way to put it, that is Bernhard’s genius, the narrator’s loathing is seen to be self-loathing, the ills of the world have their bastion within, so to speak, but the Volkmerian rant, as it progresses, rings more right, he thought, that doesn’t sound right, and this is more disturbing, even, what begins as self-loathing spreads out and shows us what is wrong with the world in which the loather sits and soaks, or whatever. All crimes are crimes of identity, he thought, a provocation of his own that he doesn’t really know how to think about, though perhaps he is right. We get everything wrong. “That’s where we differ from animals: with very few exceptions they always look the part, like perfect representations of their species, dignified and in just the right shape.” Bit by bit the monologist’s story is revealed, and we learn of her relationship with K, a relationship that broke all the various taboos with which identity is ring-fenced, though what the difference is between ring-fenced and plain fenced, he does not know, at least in this instance, metaphors aren't fussy. The pact was to remain impersonal, to play out their frustrations and harm upon each other, to use up the harm, to reflect and to become the other in the mirror, but when K. says, “Be with me always,” the monologist, call her Sarah, monologist is a stupid word, if it is even a word, ends the relationship forthwith. When she later hears of K.’s suicide, she completes the journey to deciding to become him, I told you it was a love story, though not the sort you expected, which is why she is delivering her monologue to Dr Seligman, a plastic surgeon who “is fitting a German woman with a Jewish cock,” you were warned about the spoilers, a process paid for with Sarah’s inheritance from her grandfather, the stationmaster at the last stop before Auschwitz. The Holocaust lies at the root of harm. Volckmer lambasts what she sees as the German delusion is having ‘dealt with’ the Holocaust by ensuring “that we remained de-Nazified and full of respect. But we never mourned; if anything, we performed a new version of ourselves, hysterically non-racist in any direction and negating difference wherever possible. Suddenly there were just Germans. No Jews, no guest workers, no Others. And yet we never granted them the status of human beings again or let them interfere with our take of the story.” The victims remain victims, their myriad stories still overwritten by a single story outside their control, Jews still trapped in the German national myth, still othered to the extent that they are Jewish, those losses, those bodies annulled still not seen by the Germans as their own bodies, not properly mourned as their own bodies, writes Voclkmer, or Volckmer seems to write, at least to him, the distance between the story and the body is a scale to measure shame. Guilt is a ritual, he thinks, though he has not yet thought the thought to its end, a ritual that seems to address but actually conceals shame, to address is to preserve, after all, but what else is there to be done? “It takes several minds to be beautiful,” says Sarah, writes Volckmer, and, he thinks, when the desire to be otherwise has more power than identity, when we lose our footing and begin to swim, can he never purge himself of these metaphors, when we submit to or we welcome the urgent undoing of what we are or are seen to be, if there is a difference between them, then, he thinks, though it is not him who thinks the thought, he merely reports what is thought, we can be many things at once or no things, open to whatever. Sarah remarks, writes Volckmer, there comes a time when “someone has split you into two versions of yourself.” This chimes with Bachmann, he thinks, though chimes is not the right word, when she wrote, in Malina, “I am not one person, but two people standing in extreme opposition to one another, which must mean I am always on the verge of being torn in two. If they were separated it would be livable, but scarcely the way it is.” It is hard, he thinks, to find what is livable.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

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Te Motunui Epa by Rachel Buchanan            $50
The story begins in the early 1800s in Peropero swamp, just north of Waitara. Taranaki was teetering on the edge of what would be almost a century of war, and Te Atiawa hapu moved quickly to dismantle their most important public buildings and hide significant pieces in the swamps. The epa – serpentine figures carved in five totara panels – went to sleep, only to awaken one hundred and fifty years later to hands that would take them to New York, Geneva, London and the Royal Courts of Justice. Te Motunui Epa have journeyed across the world and changed practices, understanding and international law on the protection and repatriation of stolen cultural treasures. By placing these taonga/tupuna at the centre of the story, Rachel Buchanan (Taranaki, Te Atiawa) presents a vivid narrative, richly illustrated, that draws on newly released government records to tell a story of art, ancestors and power.
>>A return home.
>>Book trailer.
>>Look inside.

Book Manifest by Irma Boom               $90
In Book Manifest, renowned Dutch designer Irma Boom presents her vision on the essence, meaning and relevance of the book. Based on the in-depth research that Boom conducted into the development of the book in the library of the Vatican, Book Manifest is at once a survey of the history of the book and a miniature Irma Boom retrospective, reproducing a selection of more than 350 books she has designed over the course of her eminent career. Alongside reproductions, Boom extensively discusses the relationship between her work and older book forms. With this tiny (65mm x 75mm), 1000-page, richly illustrated volume, Boom aims to inspire and encourage designers to experiment and develop new ways of conceiving this simplest and most enduringly effective of forms. Irresistible. 
>>Some of the 1000 pages. 
>>The architecture of the book. 
One and Everything by Sam Winston                  $33
Once there were many stories in the world. Some had beautiful sunsets, some lived at the bottom of the sea, and some were simply about dogs. Until one story decided that it was going to be the most important story ever. It called itself the One and started to consume every other story in existence. Soon it seemed that the One was all that was left ... or was it?
Inspired by the Endangered Alphabets Project, aimed at preserving cultures by sharing their unique scripts, author-illustrator Sam Winston incorporates writing systems such as cuneiform, Canadian aboriginal, Egyptian hieroglyphs and ogham in the abstract illustrations of this colourful, wonderful book.
Cooking: Simply and well, for one or many by Jeremy Lee          $75
From a lifetime of cooking with some of the UK's greatest chefs — as well as lessons from his cookery teacher mother's home cooking — this book is about good food honed from good ingredients whether that be some great potatoes, asparagus or some berries. It is they that invariably and best spark the idea of what to cook. The book is a masterclass in simple things done well. There are sections on the usefulness and frugality of breadcrumbs, whether black olive crumbs or parsley to serve on spaghetti, impromptu puddings like peaches in wine with bay leaves or plum compote with ricotta and hazelnuts, pea dishes galore, the most useful jams and jellies from a Dundee childhood, classics like potatoes and wild garlic aioli, essentials like anchovy dressing. 
"A beautifully written instant classic that is every bit as exuberant and delicious as the man himself!" —Nigella Lawson
"Already a classic." —Fergus Henderson
"One of the most beautiful cookery books I have ever seen. It should be prescribed." —Rachel Roddy
>>Have a look inside.
Granta 160: Conflict           $28
Granta 160: Conflict features Lindsey Hilsum and Volodymyr Rafeyenko (tr. Sasha Dugdale) on the war in Ukraine, but the theme of conflict is internal as well as external. This issue also includes memoir by Janet Malcolm, Sarah Moss, Suzanne Scanlon, and essays by Rebecca May Johnson, George Prochnik, Daniel Trilling and Sana Valiulina (tr. Polly Gannon). Plus: new fiction by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, Jane Delury and Dizz Tate and poetry by Rae Armantrout, Sandra Cisneros and Peter Gizzi. Photography by Aline Deschamps (introduced by Rattawut Lapcharoensap) and Thomas Duffield.
>>Issue sampler. 
Bill Andersen was one of the most significant figures in New Zealand's trade union movement in the later twentieth century. Locke's biography recovers the relationships between communism and working class trade unionism during World War Two and the following decades, drawing over forty oral interviews, as well as Bill's unpublished autobiography, to explore what it meant to be a working class, communist trade unionist through those years of social change. The post-war splintering of the world communist movement fractured New Zealand communists; in the 1970s, the Northern Drivers' Union emerged as a powerful social movement; and Maori land rights and sovereignty activism reframed radicalism through the last decades of the century. The impact of neo-liberalism on trade unions in the late 1980s and 1990s is starkly shown. 
Creature: Paintings, drawings and reflections by Shaun Tan       $70
A collection of Shaun Tan’s artwork from the past 25 years. The drawings and paintings in the book come from his work in picture books and other works including films and graphic novels. Others were created for no specific purpose beyond the desire to see what something looks like, or just to follow a sketched line to see where it goes. Many works are previously unpublished. As the title suggests the collection and accompanying essays by Shaun explore his use of non-human creatures as a motif throughout his artwork.

Between the Flags by Rachel Fenton           $25
What if the worst thing that could ever happen to you had already happened, but you didn't realise? Like your brain couldn't handle it, so you turned it into a comic. Then closed it. Fourteen-year-old trainee lifeguard Mandy Malham has wanted to beat Jen in the surf lifesaving championships at Soldier Tree Bay ever since Jen bullied her in primary school, but to do that, Mandy comes to realise that first she must rescue herself. Some days it feels like the only friend you have is the pen in your hand. A YA novel from author and graphic artist Rachel J Fenton.
Nietzsche in Italy by Guy de Pourtales (translated by Will Stone)            $25
For fifteen years, after his first visit to the country in1876, Nietzsche was repeatedly and irresistibly drawn back to Italy's climate and lifestyle. It was there that he composed his most famous works, including Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ecce Homo. This classic biography, now translated into English for the first time) follows the troubled philosopher from Rome, to Florence, via Venice, Sorrento, Genoa, Sicily and finally to the tragic denouement in Turin, the city in which Nietzsche found a final measure of contentment before his irretrievable collapse.

Small Fires: An epic in the kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson            $38
Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. (cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought), but in this fascinating, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation. Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world.
"An intense, thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished it." —Nigella Lawson
"One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious, a radical feast of flavours and ideas." —Olivia Laing
Sleeping Among Sheep under a Starry Sky: Essays, 1985—2021 by Wallace Shawn            $40
Born in 1943 in New York, Shawn has been writing plays since 1967. He has also worked as an actor. As he says of himself, he can be seen as someone who has spent his life 'sunk deep in the not particularly grown-up world of pretending and make-believe, but one could also note that writing plays and acting both involve the close observation of human society and human behaviour'. In a way entirely unique to himself, Shawn here attempts to understand the social and political realities of his time, whilst also offering some of his thoughts about 'the relatively innocent and provincial activity of creating small imaginary worlds with made-up characters'. His ultimate goal in the book is to determine whether people who are intimately concerned with the pursuit of the beautiful, can play a role in fighting against the horrifying injustice and vicious destructiveness that characterise our world.
"Shawn has a powerful sense, both as an actor and political essayist, of the extent to which our better selves are constrained by lines that have been written for us; by received ideas, the comforting deceptions of class, agency and so on. Behind most of these essays are questions about the unfairness of life to which the author responds — fairly, I think — without answers, only further questions of his own." —Will Eaves
Look! We Have Come Through! Living with D.H. Lawrence by Lara Feigal                $33
Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window their circling, strident calls and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the spring of 2020 and, as the pandemic takes hold, she locks down in rural Oxfordshire with her partner, her two children, and that most explosive of writers. Proceeding month by month through the year, she sets out to start again with Lawrence — to find vital literary companionship; to use him as a guide to rural living and even, unexpectedly, to child-rearing; to find a way through his writing to excavate the modern world she feels he helped bring into being. Tracing the arc of Lawrence's life and delving deep into his writings, she confronts his anger, his passion, his tumultuous vitality. In the process, she faces some of today's most urgent dilemmas, from secular religion to the climate crisis, from sex and sexuality to feminism's ideas about motherhood. And, as she watches the seasons change alongside Lawrence, Feigel finds the rhythms of her own life shifting in unexpected ways.
"A lovely, urgent, serious book." —Tessa Hadley
The Edge of the Plain: How borders make and break our world by James Crawford            $45
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Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua: Māori housing realities and aspirations edited by Fiona Cram, Jessica Hutchings and Jo Smith          $40
surveys the many ways Maori experience home and housing across Aotearoa New Zealand. These accounts range from the broader factors shaping Maori housing aspirations through to the experiences of whanau, hapu and iwi that connect to specific sites and locations. From statistically informed analyses to more poetic renderings of the challenges and opportunities of Maori housing, the book encompasses a rich range of voices and perspectives, including many wahine Maori authors. Opening with chapters on the wider contexts - history, land, colonisation - the book moves through to focused, and often intimate, discussions of the relationships between housing, home and identity. An expansive concluding section explores how Maori are developing housing solutions that are being called papakainga. These chapters cover rural, urban and big-city developments and complete a book that revitalises our understanding of what constitutes a home for Maori in the twenty-first century.
How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo          $40
An exploration and manifesto investigating the power of reading - and our potential to become radically better readers in the world. How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our life? Of course, these beautiful words are sometimes true. But reading is—and can be—more powerful, more relevant, and more vital than we currently let it be. Castillo illuminates—and insists upon—our potential to become better readers, readers who will wield the power of reading ruthlessly, effectively, and to startling result to enact equity, kindle authentic connection, and clear space for voices to be heard.
Idol, Burning by Rin Usami            $33
High school student Akari has only one passion in her life: her oshi, her idol. His name is Masaki Ueno, best known as one fifth of Japanese boyband Maza Maza. Akari's devotion to her oshi consumes her days completely. She keeps a blog entirely devoted to him, piously chronicling and analysing all his events. He is the spine of her life, she cannot survive without him. When Masaki is rumoured to have assaulted a female fan, facing waves of social media backlash, Akari's world falls apart. Offering a vivid insight into otaku culture and adolescence, Idol, Burning is a story of obsession, coming-of-age and the addictive, relentless nature of fandom culture. 
Winner of the 2021 Akutagawa Prize. 
Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan            $50
Created from over forty hours of conversations, this book is a thoughtful exploration, in Cave's own words, of what really drives his life and creativity. The book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave's life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years. 
>>'Straight to You'. 

Kahurangi Out West: More stories from Northwest Nelson by Gerard Hindmarsh             $40
Following Kahurangi Calling and Kahurangi Stories, this book is the final in this trilogy of stories from the backcountry of Northwest Nelson. An area of outstanding ecological and geological complexity, Kahurangi also generated a rich and colourful social history. Told here are the stories which start with the earliest human arrivals and finish with the family stories of the graziers who live along Kahurangi’s wild western flank today. Drovers, loggers, mill workers, top secret coast watchers, linesmen, miners and uranium prospectors, there’s also the story of King Tom of the Matakitaki, and one man’s obsession with traversing the formidable Dragon’s Teeth of the Douglas Range. Highly readable and engaging.
From the Bottom... to the Top by Harry Bell            $48
Starting as a young rope boy at Liverpool No 2 coalmine near Greymouth in 1948, Harry Bell went on to manage other mines around New Zealand, including Strongman, Denniston and Huntly. He also became chief mines inspector around New Zealand – including at Ohai.






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The Hotel by Sophie Calle  {Reviewed by STELLA}

This book is exquisite. It’s not just the packaging, even though this is a great start: cloth-covered, gilt-edged, and excellent layout make this a pleasure to hold in the hand and eye. The cover is a triptych of patterns, reminiscent of wallpaper, fabric sheets or curtains and the golden edges are just the right touch of tack and glamour. The endpapers are the perfect hotel green. For this is a book about hotels, or rather those who stay in them through, the eyes of a chambermaid. In fact, a not-a-chambermaid. French artist Sophie Calle spent a few months in 1981 employed at a Venetian hotel. Here she conducted a series of observations in photography and text of the rooms she cleaned when the guests were absent. She was a voyeur, an explorer into what is both intimate and anonymous. She cleaned rooms and took photographs, read guests postcards, noted their underwear, the way in which they slept in the beds. She opened suitcases and clicked her camera. She pried. The result was an exhibition and later a book — a book which until now has been available only in French. This new English-language edition from Silglo is a welcome addition to Calle’s other artist books. The photographs are a mix of black and white and stunning colour. The elaborate decor (the floral glitz and the formal wooden furniture) of the hotel rooms is lovingly juxtaposed with the personal effects of the visitors: some drab, commonplace; others surprising and cumulatively interesting. Why does this guest have a letter from 16 years ago on holiday with them? What can it be but nostalgia? The two women in Room  26 have near-matching pyjamas, porn magazines and cigarettes — they leave behind the two coke bottles, mostly empty and the magazines in the rubbish. The family in Room 47 have a balloon tied to a drawer handle, towels piled up in the bidet, repetitive postcards, and Calle’s assessment on day one, “On the luggage stand, a second suitcase. It is full. I don’t go through it; I just look. I am bored with these guests already.” And what do they leave behind — a deflated balloon and stale biscuits. Some guests are neat, others unpack everything. Calle notes their nightclothes, whether they use them, the arrangement of their pillows — the different approaches between couples. What medicines and cosmetics do they carry with them? She leaves us to draw our own conclusions as to the why. The photographs are intriguing — the objects, the angles with which Calle captures these fleeting moments, these ‘peepings’ into others’ lives through things and the way in which they interact with their environment — the hotel room. The careful calculations of light that cross these rooms, highlighting a crease in the sheet, or a slight rucking of the carpet, or the shine of new luggage or the wear and tear of old, is testament to Calle's skill behind the lens. And the text adds another dimension. It tells us what Calle does, how she sees the guests and what she does in the rooms. Each episode is recorded by Room, date and time. The best episodes straddle multiple days — with each visit to a room (with the same occupants) Calle seems bolder and more intrigued with the evidence of the guests. This isn’t merely reportage — Calle laces her words with droll humour and a storyteller’s gift, taking us, the readers, into our own imagination as we become voyeurs alongside her. Somehow it never seems that she is stepping over a border, although she trends very closely to the edge. We are briefly submerged in the lives of others while remaining at a distance, remote, despite this most intimate experience.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Hotel by Joanna Walsh  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
As a relief from an unhappy marriage, Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer and spent a period of time living only in places that are intended to be alternatives to home (places in which ‘staying’ means not remaining but merely deferred leaving). In this series of short pieces, with occasional appearances by Freud, Dora (the subject of Freud’s early work on hysteria), Katherine Mansfield, KM (her alter ego), and the Marx brothers, Walsh plays rigorously with the idea of the hotel and with the idea of home that is its complement and shadow. Throughout the book, she does such a thorough job of picking away at ideas that vertiginous spaces open up within them, terrifying emptinesses in what had seemed like smooth and continuous thought. She is, understandably, intent on the mechanisms and ellipses by which her marriage has disintegrated: is the fault in the idea of marriage, in her husband or in herself, or is this “only ordinary unhappiness”? Walsh is adept at the re-flexing of banal tropes into fresh and sturdy thought: “We went into marriage to fulfil our individual desires, but we found ourselves required to be fulfilled by what we found there. The marriage problem is the same as the hotel problem. I have second-guessed your desires, and those of others. I have made myself into a hotel.” She is under no illusion that thinking can provide resolution (indeed the benefits of thought are magnified when resolution is impossible or eschewed), aware that problems will remain problems (we may at best hope for them to be problems we to some extent understand): “Plot is good in books but bad in life. There is no plot in a hotel. When I am in a hotel, the bad thing is in abeyance but it is waiting to happen outside the hotel nevertheless.” 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


Our Book of the Week is Gotcha! A funny fairy tale hide-and-seek by Clotilde Perrin. Chased by monsters, each more comically hideous than the last, a child hides here and there inside three fairytale houses (the three little pigs' brick house, Cinderella's palace, the gingerbread house visited by Hansel and Gretel) before coming out and frightening the monsters away. Each house is a wonderland of lift-the-flap discoveries and hilarious details. This is a large, very enjoyable and very special book. 

Also by Clotilde Perrin: 

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VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Children's books

 NEW RELEASES

Gotcha! A funny fairy tale hide-and-seek by Clotilde Perrin           $42
Chased by monsters, each more comically hideous than the last, a child hides here and there inside three fairytale houses (the three little pigs' brick house, Cinderella's palace, the gingerbread house visited by Hansel and Gretel) before coming out and frightening the monsters away. Each house is a wonderland of lift-the-flap discoveries and hilarious details. This is a very enjoyable and special book. 
Also by Clotilde Perrin: 
Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy (translated by Jennifer Croft)            $38
Almost every day, the narrator visits ML, a close friend who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Based on these encounters and ML.’s fragments of memory, she constructs a powerfully moving tale about the breakdown of a mind that progressively erases everything in a very peculiar way. An attempt through writing to ‘make a relation endure despite the ruin, to hold up even if only a few words remain’. ‘How does someone who can’t remember say ‘I’?’ asks the narrator, considering this woman who shows her around the house as if she were visiting for the first time, or who is unable to say she feels dizzy, yet is perfectly capable of translating into English a message saying that she feels dizzy. Passages from a shared past and present that are transformed into fiction when faced with a forgetting that can no longer refute them. A book that opposes disintegration with a precise and vital prose and a unique sensibility.
"A masterclass in writing, with a brevity and clarity which is both rare and welcome, and firmly situates Molloy as an outstanding talent." —The Skinny
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami             $40
The famously reclusive writer shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. How does Murakami think about his own novels, and how does he craft them? 
>>Read an extract. 

Downfall: The destruction of Charles Mackay by Paul Diamond              $45
In 1920, New Zealanders were shocked by the news that the brilliant, well-connected mayor of genteel Whanganui had shot a young gay poet, D'Arcy Cresswell, who he thought was blackmailing him. They were then riveted by the trial that followed. Mackay was sentenced to hard labour and later left the country, only to be shot by a police sniper during street unrest in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. Downfall shines a clear light on the vengeful impulses behind the blackmail and Mackay's ruination. The Mackay affair reveals the perilous existence of homosexual men and how society conspired to control and punish them. This careful examination of a little understood moment is unique for the queer lens through which it views the complex lives and motivations of key figures in late-Edwardian New Zealand and the systems within which they operated.
>>The mayor makes a comeback. 
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez              $37
Gaspar is in danger. Only six-years-old, he is frightened he may have inherited the same strange abilities as his father, Juan; a powerful medium who can open locked doors, commune with the dead, and possess the ancient forces of the Darkness. Now father and son are in flight, hunted by the Order, a group of wealthy acolytes who seek to harness the Darkness, no matter the cost. Among them, Gaspar's grandmother, whose twisted desires have already driven her to commit unspeakable acts. Nothing will stop the Order, nothing is beyond them. Surrounded by horrors, can Gaspar and Juan break free? Spanning the brutal years of Argentina's military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a haunting, thrilling novel of broken families, cursed land, inheritance, power, and the terrible sacrifices a father will make to help his son escape his destiny. From the author of the International Booker short-listed The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. 
Nocilla Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo (translated by Thomas Bunstead)         $28
The globe-spanning narratives that explode across the trilogy take us from a lone poplar tree in the Nevada desert to a barnacle-covered cliff in Galicia, Spain, through scientific treatises and film-editing manuals, personal journals, and comic strips. The books are full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel. And yet, for all the freewheeling, fragmentary swagger, a startling order emerges and takes hold. The Nocilla Trilogy charts a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience.
"Like having multiple browser windows open, and compulsively tabbing between them." —Chris Power, Guardian
"The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain." —Mathias Enard
'Think of Nocilla Trilogy as three novels at the edge of the form, their manifold narratives folded into each other: all highly imaginative, all fairly unhinged, all methodically interrupted by a range of scientific, theoretical and literary quotations." —Kevin Breathnach, London Review of Books
A Book of Days by Patti Smith            $43
In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message "Hello Everybody!" Known for shooting with her beloved Land Camera 250, Smith started posting images from her phone including portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots, and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith's world, photographs of her daily coffee, the books she's reading, the graves of beloved heroes--William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Simone Weil, Albert Camus. Over time, a coherent story of a life devoted to art took shape. This book combines those images with vintage photographs: anniversary pearls, a mother's keychain, and a husband's Mosrite guitar; and photographs from Smith's archives of life on and off the road, train stations, obscure cafés, a notebook always nearby.  In wide-ranging yet intimate daily notations, Smith shares dispatches from her travels around the world.
>>Look inside!
In 2018, boundary-breaking visual and sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti received a commission to write the soundtrack to a film about Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer who influenced the likes of Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. While researching Derbeyshire's life, CFT became immersed in Derbyshire's story and uncovered some fascinating parallels with her own life. At the same time she began reading about Margery Kempe, the 15th century mystic visionary who wrote the first English language autobiography. 
Re-Sisters is the story of three women consumed by their passion for life, a passion they expressed through music, art and lifestyle; they were undaunted by the consequences they faced in pursuit of enriching their lives, and fiercely challenged the societal and cultural norms of their time.
Swanfolk by Kristín Ómarsdóttir (translated by Vala Thorodds)          $35
In the not-too-distant future, a young spy named Elisabet Eva is about to discover something that will upend her carefully controlled life. Elisabet's work is the lynchpin of her existence in the city; her friends and social life centre around the Special Unit. But recently Elisabet has found herself taking long solitary walks near the lake. One day, she sees two creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-swan. She follows them through tangles of thickets into a strange new reality. Elisabet's walks turn into regular visits to these swan women, who reveal to her the enigma of their secret existence, and their deepest desires. Pulled further and further into the monomaniacal, and often violent, quest of the swanfolk she finds her own mind increasingly untrustworthy. Ultimately, Elisabet is forced to reckon with both the consequences of her involvement with these unusual beings and a past life she has been trying to evade.
"One of the most original authors in contemporary Icelandic literature, known for subverting traditional binaries like fantasy and realism, feminine and masculine, good and evil, and the animal and the human." —Ord um Baekur
The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger             $23
London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, the hunt is on for a Nazi surgeon hiding somewhere in Britain...
"A wonderfully compelling noir thriller and audacious and challenging act of imagination." —William Boyd
"A haunting, remarkable novel, as startlingly original as any of Pressburger's films." —Nicola Upson
Is This a Cookbook? Adventures in the kitchen by Heston Blumenthal         $53
This is probably Blumenthal's most intimate cookbook, allowing us to see the way he thinks and approaches (and rethinks) relatively simple but interesting food. Each of the seventy recipes includes Blumenthal's thoughts, hacks and anecdotes, and show that the most important ingredient is personality. Illustrated with gusto by Dave McKean. 
"Heston's done it again. With the original molecular gastronomist, nothing is ever straightforward, and his latest cookbook is no exception. Why is banana and parsley such a winning combination? What is it about a cheese sandwich that causes such a nostalgic rush? But perhaps the biggest surprise is that every musing leads to a simple recipe well within the reach of any curious home cook." —Tony Turnbull, The Times
"This is a glorious sprawl of a book, beautifully illustrated by Dave McKean, that looks at the practical and emotional components of food. Is this a cookbook? For me this is a picture book, a collection of questions that hit you like little darts, and uncomplicated recipes you'll approach in a different, more thoughtful way." —Diana Henry, The Telegraph
Moro Easy by Sam and Sam Clark           $65
Following their acclaimed Moro: The cookbook, which introduced us to the Moorish cuisine, fresh ingredients and fragrant spices of North Africa and Southern Spain, this new book continues their project to reinvigorate home cooking, with simple and speedy dishes such as Courgette, Lemon and Manchego Salad, Spiced Potato Cake with Egg, Asparagus and Jamon and Seabass with Migas, Lemon Zest and Garlic, as well as one-pot Spring Greens with Crispy Chorizo and Brown Rice and Potato Pilaf. 
"A rare and very special cookbook." —Nigel Slater
Oxygen Mask: A graphic novel by Jason Griffin and Jason Reynolds         $23
Set within the walls of a family home, this graphic novel for young adults is an  artefact of the historic year we have all lived through. We travel from the depths of despair but not without hope; the mundane details contained within four walls becomes our sanctuary. This is a gift in commemoration of a time and place, of a worldwide pandemic, of loss, and of the murder of George Floyd. It is a reminder of how, in uncertain times, we can cling to the simple things for respite, for hope. A reminder of how comforting books and artworks are in times of extreme stress.
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to dismantle systems of oppression to protect people + planet by Leah Thomas            $28
Activist and environmental scientist Leah Thomas shows how Black, Indigenous and People of Colour are unequally and unjustly impacted by climate change and environmental degradation - and argues that the fight for the planet lies in tandem with the fight for civil rights. In fact, one cannot exist without the other. This book provides an accessible foundation in the theory, exploring everything from the birth of the environmental movement to Kimberle William Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, 'mainstream feminism' to ecofeminism. It helps readers frame their experiences and those of their community, question concepts of privilege and ownership, and better understand how climate change impacts the most marginalised and how to help amplify their voices.
Saving Freud: A life in Vienna and an escape to freedom in London by Andrew Magorski           $37
The dramatic true story of Sigmund Freud's last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria, and of the group of friends who made it possible.
Existential Physics: A scientist's guide to life's biggest questions by Sabine Hossenfelder         $38
In this lively, thought-provoking book, Hossenfelder takes on the biggest questions in physics: Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything? She lays out how far physicists are on the way to answering these questions, where the current limits are, and what questions might well remain unanswerable forever.
"Hossenfelder is a rare gem. There are other theoretical physicists out there who can write for a popular audience, but very few of them are able to do so in such a no-nonsense way. The result is not just illuminating, but enjoyable." —Charles Seife
Am I Normal? The 200-year search for normal people (and why they don't exist) by Sarah Chaney           $40
Before the nineteenth century, the term normal was rarely ever associated with human behaviour. Normal was a term used in maths, for right angles. People weren't normal; triangles were. But from the 1830s, this branch of science really took off across Europe and North America, with a proliferation of IQ tests, sex studies, a census of hallucinations — even a UK beauty map (which concluded the women in Aberdeen were 'the most repellent'). This book tells the surprising history how the very notion of the normal came about, how it shaped us all, often while entrenching oppressive values. Sarah Chaney looks at why we're still asking the internet: Do I have a normal body? Is my sex life normal? Are my kids normal? And along the way, she challenges why we ever thought it might be a desirable thing to be.
A Ballet of Lepers: A novel and stories by Leonard Cohen          $37
 "This fascinating collection of Cohen's early fiction foreshadows motifs and concerns that the performer later mined across decades." —Observer 
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor            $23
When an Antarctic research expedition goes wrong, the consequences are far-reaching — for the people involved and for their families back home. Robert 'Doc' Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, holds the clues to what happened, but he is no longer able to communicate them. While Anna, his wife, navigates the sharp contours of her new life as a carer, Robert is forced to learn a whole new way to be in the world.
"It leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story." —Hilary Mantel
"So moving and delicate and terrifying and haunting." —Maggie O'Farrell
A Is For Bee: An alphabet book in translation by Helen Peck         $28
A is for bee, L is for rabbit, M is for jellyfish, T is for octopus, U is for mouse, X is for bear, Y is for porcupine. Not in English, perhaps, but in other languages the names of things often start with different letters. Boldly illustrated, this book introduces children to language diversity.

Living Pictures by Polina Barskova             $25
Two lovers remain in a gallery of the Hermitage, refusing to shelter underground while Leningrad is under siege. Freezing and gnawed by hunger, they recite poems and stories to pass the time, re-enacting the paintings that are being evacuated from the museum. As their voices and bodies begin to fail and fragment, their conversation is interspersed with sections from a diary — a real document from a person who died during the blockade. This is the centrepiece of Living Pictures, Polina Barskova's genre-defying collection of fiction that reckons with the history and aftermath of the siege of Leningrad. Drawing on archival material and refracting it through fiction, Barskova draws arresting, fearless portraits of the lives caught up in the blockade. A work of inventiveness and richly poetic language, Living Pictures is a collage of a city and a culture in crisis.
"A precise, tremendous and beautiful book." —Maria Stepanova
Freedom, Only Freedom: The prison writings by Behrouz Boochani, edited by Moones Mansoubi and Omid Tofighian             $35
Over six years of imprisonment on Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book — No Friend but the Mountains — which was painstakingly typed out in text messages while he was incarcerated. In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which speaks for the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world. In this book, his collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative, and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout the western hemisphere and beyond.
Black and Female by Tsitsi Dangaremba               $23
Being categorised as black and female does not constrain my writing. Writing assures me that I am more than merely blackness and femaleness. Writing assures me I am.
This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an exploration of Dangarembga's complex relationship with race and gender. At once philosophical, intimate and urgent, Dangarmebga's landmark essays address the cultural and political questions that underpin her novels.
"Poignant, profound, essential. The human cost of colonisation laid bare." —Audrey Magee
Empire City by John E. Martin              $70
Empire City brings the story of Wellington to life, from the invasions of iwi from further north in the early 1800s and uneasy coexistence of different iwi to the purchase of land by the New Zealand Company and the beginnings of Pākehā settlement. Whaling was replaced by pastoralism, the mercantile community rose to prominence, and a viable town with a polyglot population was established. The tales are wide-ranging and compelling, from politicians butting heads, to merchants prospering and others going bankrupt, to earthquakes and shipwrecks, Māori endeavouring to keep the peace or resisting the depredations of Pākehā settlement, the impact of the military in town, the citizenry’s establishment of a variety of social institutions and their enjoyment of diverse entertainments and sports, tales of the distressed and unfortunate underclass as exposed in court, and prisoners escaping from gaol. For its long-term future Wellington needed to secure a rural hinterland but it was hemmed in by rugged hills and heavy bush and the lack of land further north. The war that erupted in 1846 consolidated British sovereignty, purchases of land in Wairarapa and the west coast and the extension of roading helped the town gain a stronger economic footing, while its commercial sector developed apace. Gaining its own provincial government allowed a voice for Wellington and the long campaign began for it to become the capital. Political deadlock and the involvement of the lower North Island in the wars for a time hindered the town’s development and its agitation to become the capital, but in 1865 what had been a long-held dream became a reality. Wellington had truly become the Empire City. In the contributions made by Māori, the New Zealand Company, early Pākehā settlers, merchants, shopkeepers, working people, worthy and less worthy citizens alike, together with a host of institutions and organisations, we appreciate how Wellington came to be from such unpromising beginnings. This diverse, rich and turbulent story is the key to understanding Wellington’s status as the capital of New Zealand.



VOLUME BooksNew releases



Kiwi Christmas Books. If you can't imagine the festive season without a pile of good books, remember that there are children whose whānau are experiencing hardship and who have little to look forward to at Christmas. If you would like to give books to needy children in our community, either 1. Make a donation and we will choose books on your behalf; or 2. Choose books from our website yourself and just put "Kiwi Christmas Books" in the 'notes' field as you check out. Thank you for making a difference! >>Find out more about the Kiwi Christmas Books scheme. 
VOLUME BooksChildren's books

 

Our Book of the Week, Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, has just been awarded the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize ("for fiction at its most novel"). This unique multivocal multilocational collaborative novel tells of two friends, blocked writers struggling with the relationship between fiction and reality, who make friends with a man whose mother was forced to leave one of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean under the unlawful administration of the British government. Will fiction provide the friends with a way to tell a story that is not their own without appropriating or colonising that story? 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.




























 


Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin   {Reviewed by STELLA}

Tamara Shopsin has written a personal and lively memoir about growing up in New York in the 1970s, specifically, about growing up in Greenwich Village in the shadow, or more precisely in the arms, of The Store. The Store was famous in spite of itself, and still is an iconic New York institution. What started solely as a grocer became a restaurant of repute in the 1970s, a place with its very own style and culture and a centre of the conversation, happenings and relationships of a neighbourhood. Tamara’s father Kenny Shopsin was a New York personality running The Store with his partner Eve. The five children grew up on the street and in the restaurant - on the sawdust floor, beside the freezer that gave electric shocks, in the arms of regulars, and under the feet of customers. Each had their shop chores and all chipped in as needed. Tamara Shopsin’s memoir is a homage to New York City, a New York that she sees as under threat from developers, increased housing prices and homogenised culture. It’s a homage to her eccentric father who had his own style, constantly changing the vast menu (especially if a dish became too popular) and making crazy customer rules - rules that made his place even more attractive to some and completely repellent to others: no phones, parties of no more than four people (don’t even try to sneak in with a three and a two and then pretend it is a coincidence), and no copying what someone else has just ordered. You could be a friend for life or blacklisted by putting a foot wrong with Kenny. The book is a homage to friends, family, and the importance of neighbourhood. Shopsin recalls the famous and the ordinary, drawing out the stories of those closest to her, particularly her father’s friend Willy, who in his unusual way sees them all through some sticky situations. There is a fascinating account of the development of the crossword puzzle and Margaret Petherbridge’s role in this at the New York Times. Kenny sometimes submitted puzzles and kept up a correspondence with Margaret over numerous years. There are numerous asides and insights making reading this memoir a delight. Arbitrary Stupid Goal is arranged as small pieces loosely connected, pieces that scoot from present day to a Tamara of age five and back, into times before her birth and retold stories. Over the course of the book she shapes a conversation that gives you an insight to her and her siblings’ childhood, the bohemian nature of The Village, the quirks of her father's cooking practices and temperament, the significance of the seemingly ordinary, and the importance of place. The Store was a meeting place that attracted celebrities, eccentrics and local, a place that accepted people for who they were but brokered no quarter for fakes or demanding clientele. In fact, Kenny feared success (and having to work too hard) and shrugged off reviewers and interviews, even going as far as to tell guidebook publishers that the restaurant had closed or that The Store was now a shoe shop. Tamara Shopsin’s writing style is quirky and idiosyncratic. She writes from the point of view a middle child, a keen observer with an agile mind, the point of view of a woman still very much connected to the place that made such an impact on her. Tamara Shopsin cooks weekends at The Store and is passionate about its legacy and the New York City she believes in. Touchingly personal and endlessly fascinating, this is a memoir which moves from hilarious to tragic and back again in a half a breath.  

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 
































































 


Speedboat by Renata Adler   {Reviewed by THOMAS}

You’re soaking in it, he said when I asked him how he was getting on with the review of Renata Adler’s novel Speedboat, the review he was supposedly writing for the newsletter that his bookshop issued each week. You’re soaking in it, he said, but he did not elaborate further, and it was unclear to me what he meant. He was referring, perhaps, to the decades-old advertisement for a dishwashing liquid that softens your hands while you do the dishes, if we are to believe the advertisement, a liquid that undoes the effects of work upon the worker, a liquid that leaves a person who commits a certain act seeming less like a person who would commit that act than they seemed before they committed that act, in this case washing the dishes but presumably the principle could apply to anything, providing that the appropriate liquid could be found. You’re soaking in it, he repeated, and, yes, I thought that perhaps he was right, we are immersed always in something that undoes the effects upon ourselves of our own intentions, something that Adler alludes to when she writes, “For a while I thought that I had no real interests, only ambitions and ties to certain people, of a certain intensity. Now the ambitions have drifted after the interests, I have lost my sense of the whole. I wait for events to take a form.” But there is an uneasy relationship between the narrating mind and the world in which it soaks, in which it is softened as it does its work, he might think. “Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind,” wrote Adler. The world in which we soak is comprised of random events, or at least of events sufficiently complex as to appear random or to be treated without fear of correction as random, he might think, a world of discontinuity, of agglomeration and dissolution, of fragmentations, collisions and tessellations, he might think, a world in which the one who is soaking in it instinctively, or, perhaps, instinctually, it’s hard to tell which, searches for meaning even while acknowledging its impossibility, for this, he probably is thinking, is the nature of thought, or the nature of language, if that is not the same thing. We cannot help but narrate, narrate and describe, observe and relate. There is no meaning, I suppose he is thinking as he contemplates, or as I suppose he contemplates, the review he could be writing of the book that he has read, or claims to have read, may well have read, no meaning other than the pattern we impose by telling. Stories both create and consume their subjects, he thinks, I think, or he might as well think. Writing and reading, the so-called literary acts, are concerned with form and not with content, or, he might say, more precisely, concerned primarily with form and only incidentally with content, so to call them, he might think, the literary acts are patterning acts and it is only the patterning that has meaning. Renata Adler writes beautiful sentences, he thinks, and this you can tell by the small pleasant noises he makes while reading them, she turns her sentences upon the sharpest commas. The comma is the way in which life, so to call it, impresses itself upon us. Each assertion Adler makes is mediated by the realisation that it could be otherwise, either in point of fact, or in change of context, perspective, or scope. There is no progress without hesitation: no progress. Each comma is a rotation. There is humour in precision: “Doctor Schmidt-Nessel, sitting, immense, in his black bikini, on a cinder-block in the steam-filled cubicle, did not deign immediately to answer.” Speedboat is filled with such perfect sentences arrayed on commas. Sentences in paragraphs, often brief, filled with the jumble, so to call it, of the life of its ostensible narrator, Jen Fain, but, perhaps, of the life of Renata Adler, if such a distinction can sensibly be made, the narrator does not observe herself but those around her, she is a space in what she observes, she is an outline in the snippets that attach themselves to her. The real subject of the book, though, is language, others’ language and her own. The book might be a novel, it is almost a novel, it is a novel if you don’t expect a novel to do what a novel is generally expected to do, it is information is caught in a sieve, the nearest to a novel that life can resemble, or vice-versa, if this is of any importance. All novels, even the most fantastic, are comprised predominantly of facts, he is probably thinking, if he is in fact thinking, and it is only the arrangement of facts that comprises fiction. Adler’s narrator is entirely extrospective. She reports. She dissolves the distinctions between novelist, gossip columnist, journalist, and spy, the distinctions that were always only conceptual distinctions in any case and not distinctions of practice. Fain wonders what several of her friends actually do who have become spies. “I guess what these spies — if they are spies, and I’m sure they are — are paid to do is to observe trends.” Fain as a journalist cannot conduct an interview, she cannot impose herself to seek an answer, she has no programme, she can only observe. At one point she “receives communications almost every day from an institution called the Centre for Short-Lived Phenomena”. Her news, and it is news, is her own life, but not herself within it. She knows the risks: “The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you will miss the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.” Is meaning a hostage to circumstance, or is it the other way round? When the narrator starts to think about the world in terms of hostages it is because she has what she sees as a hostage inside her, a pregnancy she has not told her partner about, all things are hostages to other things, this is perhaps a sort of meaning. Hostages are produced by grammar; grammar cannot do other than make hostages. There he sits, hostage, I suppose, to his intention to write a review, or at least to the set of circumstances, odd though they may be, that contrived to expect of him this review, the review he will not write, disinclined as he is to write, though he will say, I am sure, if you ask him, that he enjoyed the book Speedboat very much. He makes no presumption upon you. As Jen Fain or Adler writes, “You are very busy. I am very busy. We at this rest home, this switchboard, this courthouse, this race track, this theatre, this lighthouse, this studio, are all extremely busy. So there is pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say but to justify its claim on our time.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981—1988 by Matthew Goody           $70
Stupendously well documented and illustrated, this book takes a clear and generous look at the over 140 records produced by Flying Nun during its prime years in the 1980s, when it was based in Christchurch and was an effective catalyst for homegrown music that rejected the ethos of the corporate labels. The book is packed with information about the bands that were central to an Aotearoan cultural resurgence, and also about bands that you have never heard of or had (sometimes justly) forgotten. Goody's discographic history provides a clear view from a distance, and is even better than you might have hoped it would be. 
>>See some of the many, many pages. 
>>The best and most interesting period.
>>A faraway fanatic. 
>>Somewhere in the room. 
>>Our (nonrepresentative) playlist of sorts: Pin Group; The Builders; The Clean; Tall Dwarfs; Sneaky Feelings; Look Blue Go Purple; 25Cents; Victor Dimisich Band; Gordons; DoubleHappys; The Bats; Scorched Earth Policy; All Fall Down; The Fall; Marie and the Atom; The Terminals; &c, &c.
Liberation Day by George Saunders            $33
Saunders's fist short story collection in ten years explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose — funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned — Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of nine stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
"The world's best short story writer." —Telegraph

The Golden Mole, And other living treasure by Katherine Rundell         $45
The animal world is endlessly varied, fascinating and inspiring, and needs to be preserved both for its own sake and for the richness it adds to human experience and thought. Rundell considers 22 animals (including the human) whose existence is endangered by humans, and reveals the depths of wonder embodied in these animals. Did you know that the Golden Mole is luminescent, but blind and therefore unable to see its own radiance? This hardback book is beautifully presented (the book even has gilt edges), and illustrated by Tayla Baldwin. 
"A rare and magical book. I didn't want it to end." —Bill Bryson
>>Startling astonishments. 
Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell)         $38
Playful and unsettling, teeming with the energy of barely contained violence, the stories in Seven Empty Houses dismantle the neat appearance of domesticity to expose the darkness and discomfort that lies beneath. A neighbour looks on as a couple grieve the loss of their son. A young girl makes an unwelcome acquaintance in a hospital waiting room. A woman prepares for death with ruthless precision.
'The Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin loves Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Strout. It's hard to conceive of two more different writers. But imagine a fusion between their styles — dreamlike surrealism and taut domestic drama — and you'll have some idea of Schweblin's uniquely weird storyscapes. What does it mean to inhabit a house, or a body, and what do those spaces become when we're no longer fully there? Haunting, elemental questions that run right through this bold writer's eerie, mysterious oeuvre." —The Sunday Times
"Starting a story by Samanta Schweblin is like tumbling into a dark hole with no idea where you'll end up." —Chris Power
Tauhou by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall         $30
Tauhou envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa, two lands that now sit side by side in the ocean. Each chapter in this innovative hybrid novel is a fable, an autobiographical memory, a poem. A monster guards the cultural objects in a museum, a woman uncovers her own grave, another woman remembers her estranged father. On the rainforest beaches or the grassy dunes, sisters and cousins contend with the ghosts of the past—all the way back to when the first foreign ships arrived on their shores. In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism. Tauhou is an ardent search for answers, for ways to live with truth. It is a longing for home, to return to the land and sea.
Small Fires: An epic in the kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson               $38
Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought. In this innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation. Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world — and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen.
"One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious, a radical feast of flavours and ideas." —Olivia Laing
Alison by Lizzy Stewart             $45
A beautifully drawn subtle and insightful graphic novel, from the author of It's Not What You Thought It Would Be. Alison is newly married, barely twenty and struggling to find her place in the world. A chance encounter with an older artist upturns her life and she forsakes convention and her working-class Dorset roots for the thrumming art scene of London in the late seventies. As the thrill of bohemian romance leads inevitably to disappointment, Alison begins to find her own path — through art, friendship and love.
"This book is a testament to the right to choose your own life. It is a tender, heartbreaking meditation on the bonds between women, the dazzle of the city, the struggle to become a female artist within the bounds of patriarchy, and the desire to make a mark on the world." —Jessica Andrews
The Novelist: A novel by Jordan Castro              $45
In Jordan Castro's inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind. The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor's embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability. The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.
>>Just one more click. 
A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín       $38
This essay collection subtly uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.
Where Is It in Town? A wildlife hunt for kiwi kids by Ned Barraud           $20
This is a ‘look and find’ book for all children who want to learn about New Zealand’s wildlife, focusing on wildlife that Kiwi children will encounter in town. Each page illustrates a different urban environment, including a garden both in the daytime and at night, the local botanic gardens, a creek, the sea below a wharf, in long grass and the trees above, and in the country on the edge of town. 
Mokorua: Nga korero mo toku moko kauae | My story of moko kauae by Ariana Tikao, with photographs by Matt Calman          $45
One woman’s journey to her moko kauae as an expression of her Kāi Tahu identity. Ariana Tikao grew up in suburban Christchurch in the 1970s and ’80s surrounded by te ao Pākehā. This book tells the story of Ariana exploring her whakapapa, her whānau history and her language. This is one woman’s story, but it is interwoven with the revival of language, tikanga and identity among Kāi Tahu whānau over the last thirty years. Ariana’s journey culminates in her decision to take on Mokorua – her moko kauae – from tā moko artist Christine Harvey. After an emotionally charged ceremony that brought together whānau, young and old, for songs and tautoko, hugs and tears, Ariana writes: "Our whānau had reached another milestone in the decolonisation process – or, rather, in our journey of reindigenising ourselves, becoming who we always were."
>>Look inside. 
All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Angus Davidson)         $23
Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, after a brief romance finds herself pregnant. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend and they move to his village in the south. Her relationship with Cenzo Rena is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism — and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief. At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.
"I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style — her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear." —Maggie Nelson
"This is a perfect novel." —Sally Rooney
Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk                 $37
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingeria—the (fictional) twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca, or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island—an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader, Sheikh H, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And the sultan's expert is murdered. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans dooms the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingeria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is set more than one hundred years ago but has themes that feel remarkably contemporary.
"Pamuk's lovingly obsessive creation of the invented Mediterranean island of Mingeria is a world so detailed, so magically full, so introverted and personal in emphasis, that it shimmers like a memory palace. The effect is daringly vertiginous, at once floatingly postmodern and solidly realistic. Nights of Plague is a big but swift novel, a novel about pain and death that is fundamentally light and buoyant." —James Wood, The New Yorker
Belated Accolades: Joint historical biography of Rosaline Frank and William Tyree by Rosalina-Ludmila McCarthy        $160
The Tyree Studio Collection, now held in the Nelson Provincial Museum, comprises one of the most important photographic records of life in New Zealand from 1882—1947. The Tyree Studios were founded by brothers William and Frederick Tyree but were largely operated by Rose Frank, and McCarthy's impressively detailed book celebrates Frank's importance to New Zealand photographic history and Nelson provincial culture. 

Big Ideas from History: A history of the world for you          $50
The present can loom very large in a child's mind: all the crises and challenges of the modern world can feel overwhelming and at times dispiriting. This book is a big history of the world, from the beginnings of the universe to now, which places the reader at its centre. It encourages them to think about how and why they experience the world as they do and offers a helpful perspective by placing their thoughts and feelings in the context of our history and evolution.
Gaylene's Take: Her life in New Zealand film by Gaylene Preston            $40
Gaylene Preston has always sought out the stories that have not yet been told, and in this book she reveals the challenges and sometimes heartbreak that have come with that ambition. In both wide lens and close-up, she writes of formative experiences: her childhood in Greymouth in the 1950s, working in a psychiatric institution near Cambridge, England in the 70s, interviewing her tight-lipped father about his life in the war, and a mysterious story of her great-grandfather chiselling a biblical text off a gravestone in the dead of night. Along the way she takes us behind the scenes and into the shadows of some of the most enduring popular classics of New Zealand cinema, including Mr Wrong, Ruby & Rata, War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, and My Year With Helen, and how she has worked to realise her vision, come what may.
"I had no idea Gaylene was so hilarious. I adored this brilliant memoir: part liar, part cowgirl, mouthy and determined Gaylene grows up in Greymouth and migrates into the wild 70s, ending up in the tough-as-gumboots world of New Zealand film. Her book is irresistible." —Jane Campion
Thrust by Lydia Yuknavitch            $40
It is 2085 and Laisve is learning to use the ancient waterways to travel through water and time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as The Brook, she discovers a talisman that will connect her with people from the past two centuries, including a squad of labourers at work on a huge, national monument to liberty. As waters rise and a police state encroaches, Laisve must find her way back to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a bond that might save all their lives — and their shared dream of freedom.
"Brilliant and incendiary." —Jeff Vandermeer
The Poverty of Ethics by Anat Matar             $40
The Poverty of Ethics stands the usual moral-political dichotomy on its head. It argues that moral principles do not in fact underlie or inform political decisions. It is, rather, the conceptual primacy of political discourse that rescues ethics from its poverty. Our ethical convictions receive their substance from historical narratives, political analyses, empirical facts, literary-educational models, political activity and personal experience. Yet morality, essentially, doesn't leave room for relativity: not every ethos deserves to be titled 'moral'. Hence the book argues further, it is the left ethos, as it has evolved over years, which forms the basis for ethics: morality is left-wing! 
"It is rare that one sees such a combination of progressive political engagement and deepest philosophical reflection as in The Poverty of Ethics. Matar's book is a guide for all those who are trying to survive with dignity in a topsy-turvy world that is our own." —Slavoj Zizek
Vanishing Ice: Stories of New Zealand's glaciers by Lynley Hargreaves          $60
Glaciation has had a huge impact on the shape of the New Zealand landscape. Enormous rivers of ice once flowed out onto the Canterbury Plains, stretched beyond the current West Coast shore of Te Waipounamu/ South Island, and spread down the slopes of the volcanoes in central Te Ika-a-Maui/North Island. These glaciers of past ice-ages built plains and vast rocky moraines, sculpted fiords and valleys, and carved out deep lakes. This book tells the stories of our glaciers though the lens of human interaction, with chapters moving through time from first Maori discoverers to colonial explorers, mountaineers and modern glaciologists. In the process, the book investigates the way nature, science and culture interact and sometimes collide, while providing a fascinating insight into the way New Zealand's glaciers work. As the world warms, our glaciers are disappearing at an unprecedented rate.
Faber & Faber Poetry Diary 2023           $28
Our most popular diary! Every week there is either a poem to read or a poetry book cover design to admire, drawn from Faber's incomparable list. We have only limited stock of this sturdy, well produced handbook to the year ahead, so be fast to order. 








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