NEW RELEASES
The Summer of Diving by Sara Stridsberg (translated by S.J. Epstein), illustrated by Sara Lundberg $37
Zoe's father isn't home. She still sees him in photographs, laughing and playing tennis, but for now she can only visit him in a building where everyone looks sad and the walls are an ugly pink color. Some days Zoe's father is too sad to see her, but she goes to the hospital anyway. While waiting she meets Sabina, who invites her to swim across the world. Zoe's not sure it's possible, but Sabina tells her, "A girl can do everything she wants." Even though Sabina sometimes dives deep into her own thoughts, the two of them swim around the world many times that summer, until eventually Zoe's father is ready to come home. A tender and thoughtful book. Lundberg's beautiful paintings reflect and validate a child's feelings of loss and longing for closeness when a parent's joy for living temporarily fades.
"This poignant, gentle book will be immensely helpful to anyone caring for the child of someone with major depression. It fills an important gap in literature for young children." —Andrew Solomon
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See some sample pages.
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li $33
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves — until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. The Book of Goose is a beautifully written story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will.
"A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout — I loved it." —Charlotte Mendelson
"One of our finest living authors. Propulsively entertaining." —New York Times
by Seichō Matsumoto (translated by Jesse Kirkwood) $37
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young couple are discovered. The police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, an old and shabby detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they will begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime.
"This 1958 classic of postwar Japanese crime fiction was banned in its day for its 'decadent western ideas'. Now, the fascinatingly detailed investigations of Inspector Torigai echo those of Simenon's Maigret in a pared-down narrative shot through with political critique." —Financial Times
The Song of the Cell: An exploration of medicine and the new human by Siddhartha Mukherjee $40
Since the discovery of the cell in the 1660s and the discovery in the 1850s that most diseases can be traced back to our cells, human beings have been understood as an ecosystem of units that produce exponentially complex structures and effects. How did we discover these units, and their functions? How did we begin to understand hearts, brains, kidneys as collections of cooperating cells? What are cells anyway? How do they work, and how (why?) do they work together? Why build organs and organisms out of these units? And could we re-assemble a new kind of human? Could we alter cells to become resistant to diseases? Could we make new humans out of new kinds cells, endowed with novel properties, functions or intentions? Another fascinating book from the author of
The Emperor of All Maladies and
The Gene.
Strangers to Ourselves: Stories of unsettled minds by Rachel Aviv $40
Does a mental health diagnosis have the power to perpetuate, or even create, symptoms as its subject adapts to live within it? Is there another way of talking about their experience? Are patients being truly heard? In an attempt to answer these questions, Aviv has chosen five subjects who have the capacity to interrogate the theories and explanations they have been given for their own mental states — subjects who at some stage fundamentally reject psychiatry's explanatory framework, and see their own suffering through another lens —spirituality, loneliness, legitimate existential despair. Aviv believes that it is a writer's job to listen and imagine and so tell the stories that other disciplines may be missing. Alongside her subjects' stories she will write about the evolution of psychiatry, with particularly interesting and troubling reference to its imposition through colonial history. How far can we go to the edge of experience and emotion and still remain sane? What happens to us — socially, culturally, medically, psychologically — when we step into the spaces outside of 'ordinary life'?
"So attuned to subtlety and complexity. A book-length demonstration of Aviv's extraordinary ability to hold space for the 'uncertainty, mysteries and doubt' of others." —New York Times Book Review
by Claudia Roden $75
Sixteen years in the writing and now twenty-five years bringing pleasure and knowledge to cooks and foodies worldwide, this wonderful book is endlessly rewarding both to cook from and to read. Roden shines a light on the diverse flavours and cultural origins of overlooked dishes, revealing the beauty and simplicity of traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardi food on the page. This 25th anniversary edition has some new content and recipes.
"One can't imagine a better food book than this, ever: for the reader and the cook." —Nigella Lawson
"The first great encyclopedia of Jewish life. I love it for the narrative embroidery around the recipes." —Simon Schama
by Elin Cullhed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida) $33
A woman's life, erupting with brilliance and promise, is fissured by betrayal and the pressures of duty. What had once seemed a pastoral family idyll has become a trap, and she struggles between being the wife and mother she is bound to be and wanting to do and be so much more. The woman in question is Sylvia Plath in the final year of her life, reimagined in fictive form by Elin Cullhed. As Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes unravels through the heady days of their first summer in Devon together, Sylvia turns increasingly to writing to express her pain and loss, yet also her resilience and power. She has decided to die, but the art she creates in her final weeks will make her name.
An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle—he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy. Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.
"Chaudhuri has already proved that he can write better than just about anybody of his generation." —Jonathan Coe
"Chaudhuri has, like Proust, mastered the art of the moment." —Hilary Mantel
by Rebecca Miller $33
Arresting and darkly prescient, these stories navigate the fault lines of relationships. A middle-aged novelist devoid of inspiration alights on material in the form of an obsessive pet-shop worker from Cincinnati. A pregnant mother of two finds herself increasingly in thrall to her help, Nat. For Joad, the discovery of a haunting type-written document in an old desk in need of restoration is overwhelming. And when Roxanne rescues her sister from an institution, she comes to realise how vulnerable they both are.
"Miller is a luminous writer." —Olivia Laing
"Miller possesses the soaring eye of the epicist and the sly instinct of the satirist." —New Yorker
Delphi by Clare Pollard $33
Set during the 2020 lockdowns, this relatable narrative introduces a protagonist who, faced with a global pandemic and a marriage in crisis, looks to the ancient art of prophecy for consolation. A darkly funny and heartbreaking novel about the way we live now; the way we lived before and the stories, connections and consolations that help us keep on living in a world where everyone is watching and yet none of us feels seen. This is a story about now. It's a story about a woman, and a family. It's about the dramas unfolding on our screens and behind the curtains of our homes, and how time and certainty and, sometimes, those we love can slip away. But it's also about before. It's about the questions we have always asked and the answers that are coming for us whether we like them or not.
"For anyone looking for ways of thinking creatively and with love about art in an emergency and what just happened to us all I would recommend it, because despite the bleakness - you can't have realism without bleakness now - this is clever, warm and funny writing." —Sarah Moss, Guardian
"Funny and sharp and ripe with references and allusions, Delphi is not just a novel about Covid; it's also about how a given historical moment such as the pandemic can connect us to the past and to the universal." —John Self
"Delphi distils something elusive and upsetting about all the things we can't quite see or understand about the present moment, even as all we ever do is look. This feels impressive, part of what good fiction is meant to do." —New York Times
Contemporary life is defined by excess. There must always be more, there is never enough. We need a surplus to what we need to be able to truly enjoy what we have. Slavoj Žižek's guide to surplus (and why it's enjoyable) begins by arguing that what is surplus to our needs is by its very nature unsubstantial and unnecessary. But, perversely, without this surplus, we wouldn't be able to enjoy, what is substantial and necessary. Indeed, without the surplus we wouldn't be able to identify what was the perfect amount.Is there any escape from the vicious cycle of surplus enjoyment or are we forever doomed to simply want more? Engaging with everything from The Joker film to pop songs and Thomas Aquinas to the history of pandemics, Žižek argues that recognising the society of enjoyment we live in for what it is can provide an explanation for the political impasses in which we find ourselves today. And if we begin, even a little bit, to recognise that the nuggets of 'enjoyment' we find in excess are as flimsy and futile, might we find a way out?
"Surplus-Enjoyment is the author at his most supple, addressing urgent current concerns and the need for a global solidarity that cannot be divorced from egalitarianism. Zizek is a pick-me-up for fatigued brains." —Prisma
by Travis Alabanza $40
Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases that have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary. Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most personal transformative experiences as a Black, working-class, non-binary trans person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society, giving us reason to question the very framework in which we live and the ways we treat each other.
"Alabanza lifts the lid on our potential for empathy, alliance and complicity." —Irish Times
The Bear that Wasn't by Frank Tashlin $48
“Once upon a time, in fact it was Tuesday,” the Bear went into the woods to settle in for his long winter nap. But when he awoke what had happened? The trees were gone, the grass was gone, the flowers were gone, and in their place were buildings, cars, a fenced-off courtyard. The Bear had no idea that he was in the middle of a factory. “Get back to work!” a man yelled out of the blue. “I don’t work here,” said the Bear, “I’m a bear.” The man laughed and laughed. “Fine excuse for a man to keep from doing any work—saying he’s a bear.” And so it began and so it went, with the Bear protesting his bearness all the way from the Third Vice President to the First, and no one willing to believe that he wasn’t just a silly man in a fur coat who needed a shave. How the bear endured and how he finally prevailed are the subject of this delightful modern classic—beautifully illustrated with the author’s inventive line drawings—about sticking up for yourself, no matter how many Foremen, General Managers, Vice Presidents, or even Company Presidents stand in your way. A nice hardback edition.
Vagina Obscura: An anatomical voyage by Rachel E. Gross $60
The Latin term for the female genitalia, pudendum, means 'parts for which you should be ashamed'. Until 1651, ovaries were called female testicles. The fallopian tubes are named for a man. Named, claimed, and shamed: Welcome to the story of the female body, as penned by men. But now, a new generation of (mostly) women scientists is redrawing the map of female genitalia. With modern tools and fresh perspectives, they're looking at the organs traditionally bound up in reproduction—the uterus, ovaries, vagina—and seeing within them a new biology of change and resilience. Gross takes readers on an anatomical odyssey to the center of this new world—a world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves.
Vagina Obscura is a celebratory testament to how the landscape of knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.
"The vagina is having a much-belated moment, and thanks to Rachel E. Gross, now so are the ovaries, clitoris, and uterus. In
Vagina Obscura, Gross clears away the linguistic and scientific shroud from the least investigated and most misunderstood structures in the human body and tells their story deftly and beautifully." —Emily Willingham
by Lindsay Galvin $19
England, 1877. Aquarium fever is at its height. Twelve-year-old Vinnie Fyfe works in the tea-shop at Brighton aquarium, and waits for her milliner mother to return from Paris. The arrival of a giant octopus changes her life for ever. Discovering a talent for art, Vinnie begins to draw the extraordinary beast. She soon realises she can communicate with the octopus through colour and — as a gripping mystery begins to unfold — discovers what true courage really means.
There is a vast class of properties that science has so far almost entirely neglected. These properties are central to an understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of fundamental phenomena, yet they have traditionally been thought of as impossible to incorporate into fundamental explanations. They relate not only to what is true — the actual — but to what could be true — the counterfactual. This is the science of can and can't.
Chiara Marletto, a pioneer in this field, explores the promise that this fascinating, far-reaching approach holds not only for revolutionising how fundamental physics is formulated, but also for confronting existing technological challenges, from delivering the next generation of information-processing devices to designing AI.
"A wonderful book, which has taught me new ways of thinking and expanded my mind. It's extremely beautifully written, full of wonder and passion and humour and energy." —Hermione Lee
"Clear, sharp and imaginative. The Science of Can and Can't will open the doors to a dazzling set of concepts and ideas that will change deeply the way you look at the world." —David Deutsch
"I enjoyed this book very much, not least because of the freshness of its approach to a subject that can easily become hard for the non-scientific mind to grasp. The theory of 'can and can't' is an intriguing way of describing problems that are not only scientific (it describes very well what a storyteller does, for instance), and Marletto's account of some things I thought I more or less understood (the nature of digital information, for one) illuminated them from an angle that showed them more clearly than I'd seen them before." —Philip Pullman
A clear and well-photographed examination of 100 geological features of Aotearoa, the forces that formed them and how they are continually changing.
Leslie Kern, author of
Feminist City, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. First observed in 1950s London, and theorised by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in every city and most neighbourhoods. Beyond the yoga studio, farmer's market and tattoo parlour, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities. Kern proposes an intersectional way at looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not natural, that it can not be understood in economic terms, or by class. That it is not a question of taste. That it can be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. Rather, she argues, it is an continuation of the setter colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities. But if gentrification is not inevitable, what can we do to stop the tide? In response, Kern proposes a genuinely decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-gentrification. One that demands the right to the city for everyone and the return of land and reparations for those who have been displaced.
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Housing as a human right.
Taking its title from a chilling warning made by the United Nations that the world's soils could be lost within a lifetime, Sixty Harvests Left uncovers how the food industry is threatening the planet. Put simply, without soils there will be no food. And time is running out. From the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to the Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, author of Farmageddon, goes behind the scenes of industrial farming and confronts 'Big Agriculture', where mega-farms, chemicals and animal cages are sweeping the countryside and jeopardising the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the nature that we treasure. However, he also finds hope in the pioneers who are battling to bring landscapes back to life, who are rethinking farming methods, rediscovering traditional techniques and developing technologies to feed an ever-expanding global population.
"A call to action — to change our world from the ground up. A vitally necessary book." —Isabella Tree
Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape — but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences. He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land — and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism. In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity — as well as hope.
"Landscapes of Silence is a remarkable, often uncomfortable, exploration of difficult terrains in which the author's pain and the damage done to indigenous peoples is livid and raw." —Literary Review
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