A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

Little Doomsdays by Nic Low and Phil Dadson $45
It’s said — in the quiet between buses, down the back of the pub, in the hushed elevator rising to the penthouse — that in the late twentieth century an unstable grouping of scholars, writers and fanatics from several Ngāi Tahu hapū in Murihiku created what has come to be known as the Ark of Arks . It’s said that this project aimed to catalogue all known arks from the last five millennia. It was a failed attempt to capture previous civilisations’ failed attempts to preserve whatever was valuable to them: waka huia, time capsules, caches, burial ships, seed banks. … You have found the Ark of Arks. You are reading it now.
The fifth in the ground-breaking Kōrero series conceived and edited by Lloyd Jones, Little Doomsdays is a collaboration between an artist and a writer. This time musician and painter Phil Dadson responds to an innovative text that's steeped in te ao Māori by Ngāi Tahu writer Nic Low. Together they play with the notion of ark and arc in a manner that is at once beguiling and challenging.
”The standard all university presses and publishers of literary works, artists' monographs and photobooks should aspire to.” —PhotoForum
>>Look inside!
>>On the collaboration.
>>Other books in the Kōrero series.

Gordon Walters by Francis Pound $90
In this remarkable study by the late Francis Pound, we are shown the making of a New Zealand modernist. This beautifully presented and deeply researched book traces the work of Gordon Walters (1919-1995), from student charcoal sketches in the 1930s to the revelation of the mature Koru works at the 1966 New Vision Gallery exhibition in Auckland. Pound follows Walters through steps and missteps, explorations and diversions, travel in Aotearoa and overseas, as the artist discovers new forms, invents others and discards many more. Pound looks hard at the paint, the brushes, the rulers, the scrapbooks, to reveal an artist at work. And, resolutely internationalist like the artist, the author provides not only astute insights into Walters' art, but also a guide to the elements and ideas that informed the work — notably, Maori and Pacific art, surrealism, Mondrian, De Stijl, the Bauhaus and Euro-American abstraction, conceptual art and minimalism.
>>Look inside!

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe – a Nobel Prize-winning physicist – thought he might represent the next step in human evolution. After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world’s first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was the darling of the military industrial complex, but when illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. It begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master, Lee Sedol, and the AI program AlphaGo. Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon. From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World.
”Brilliantly cerebral.” —The Telegraph
”Monstrously good. Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller.” —Mark Haddon

Te Reo Kapekape: Māori wit and humour by Hona Black $40
Following on from the successful He Iti te Kupu: Māori Metaphors and Similes, Hona Black’s new book explores the rich vein of humour in Māori life. Want to know how to call a silly person a ‘roro hipi / sheep’s brain’, or tell someone to get stuffed in te reo Māori? The answers are all in Te Reo Kapekape (literally, ‘the language of poking fun’), with more than 130 humorous and unique phrases in te reo and English that can be used to describe people, events and actions. The sayings are divided into four chapters — above the hip, below the hip, other phrases, and idioms. Using a cast of characters and dramatised dialogue, Hona explains each phrase and gives examples and suggestions for use — whether to tease, crack a joke or just add some flair to your daily use. This book is a valuable resource for anyone wanting to spice up their te reo or English with some fun and cheeky sayings, and will appeal to both language learners and fluent speakers of Māori.

Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere by Jade Kake and Jeremy Hansen $75
A fully-illustrated and beautifully designed tribute to the late architect Rewi Thompson (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa), a visionary thinker who believed that great architecture is crafted through careful consideration of people and place, and who was instrumental in exploring how our built environments could better express te ao Māori. This book brings together a breathtaking range of his projects, from conceptual dreamscapes to one-of-a-kind homes. It is written by one of the rising stars of architecture and a well-known commentator on urban issues, and includes interviews with those who worked with him.
”This important study punctures conventional ideas of Indigenous design to reveal a complex, multifaceted thinker, deeply engaged in both expressive and pragmatic architecture.” —Cathleen McGuigan
>>Look inside!

Ziggle! The Len Lye art activity book by Rebecca Hawkes $35
As lively and unconventional as the artist himself, this art activity book brimming with ideas and inspiration has been developed by the team at the Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, who work with the thousands of children every year and really understand how the great New Zealand artist Len Lye's approach to art sets young minds abuzz and alive. With 65 activities, and a running narrative thread about Lye's fascinating life, it offers hours of fun to young readers, their whanau and teachers.
>>Look inside!

Commune: Chasing a utopian dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones $40
In 1979, teenager Olive Jones was one of a group of hippies, idealists, and subsistence farmers that set up an alternative community on a farm in the Motueka Valley near Nelson. Influenced by the countercultural movement sweeping the country during the 1970s and 80s, they were part of a widespread interest in communal living, a generation of young people inspired to reject mainstream culture. These experiments in communal living were an attempt to achieve social, sexual and physical liberation from the 'uptight' world they grew up in. This book documents the rise and fall of Olive Jones's community, Graham Downs. Achieving self-sufficiency was a hugely rewarding experience, using draft horses to carry out old-world methods of farming, building shelters by hand and growing enough food to support a fluctuating population of assorted hippies, nutters, spiritual seekers and dreamers, who all arrived eager to participate in the dream. Ultimately, however, this unstructured community, without rules and membership, failed to fulfil the early vision. Olive Jones's memoir recalls the dreams, the madness, the humour and hard work of living an alternative lifestyle.

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow $38
Sunday Forrester lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dolly, in the house she grew up in. She does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly — her clever, headstrong daughter, now on the cusp of leaving home. Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday's book. Soon they are in and out of each others' homes, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo's polish lies something else, something darker. For Sunday has precisely what Vita has always wanted for herself: a daughter of her own. Long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
”Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow's is a distinct and poetic new voice. This novel about the complex desires behind our closest relationships is undercut with the darkness of Sicilian folklore: the fisherman who promises away his child; the lover who is a wolf; a caged magpie; burning fields.” —Clare Pollard
>>Lloyd-Barlow’s experience as an autistic writer.
>>Read an extract.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith $37
Who deserves to tell their story — and who deserves to be believed? It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper — and cousin by marriage — of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The 'Tichborne Trial' captivates Mrs Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. Based on the actual Tichborne case.
>>On killing Charles Dickens.
>>”I really want to write the books I want to write before I die.”
>>”Any writer who lives in England will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel.”
>>Avoiding anachronism.
>>A legal cause célèbre.

Root Leaf Flower Fruit: A verse novel by Bill Nelson $30
A woman lies helpless after a stroke, her family gathered. Her grandson, healing slowly from a head injury after coming off his bike, takes leave from his job and family to prepare her rundown house and farm for sale. As he works, he sifts through what remains of his grandmother’s daily life. Then, after an auction result for which he was not prepared, and echoing her desperate flight years earlier, his uncertain return leads to a haunting and unguessable destination. Root Leaf Flower Fruit is a verse novel about slow time – the turning of the seasons, the farming of land, the generations of a family – and about sudden, devastating interruptions.
”This book kept surprising me. I loved its fascination with the body’s sleights of hand, and the careful attention it paid to childhood, memory and other buried things.” —Anna Smaill
”Root Leaf Flower Fruit seems to me to be a sort of Pākehā whakapapa, or a yearning for it, and a commentary on the ways in which Pākehā reach for connection to place and people but sometimes miss. The most beautiful passages describe the body failing while the whenua continues its seasonal rotation. I was completely absorbed by this story song of a grandson and grandmother trying to connect both to the world around them and to their sense of self.” —Tina Makereti

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson $35
Composed of a series of short first-person statements concerning mundane or cultural or philosophical topics and personages, this remarkable novel purports to be the work of a woman who believes herself to be the last human left on earth, though whether this is actually the case or is evidence of an insane solipsism is never resolved, and is, in any case, not relevant to the novel’s exploration of loneliness, the uses and unreliability of memory, the transience of cultural constructs and of those who labour at their construction. The character unpacks the mental baggage of a lifetime and leaves us acutely aware of the illusory nature of our freedoms and of the fragility of personhoods. Back in print at last. Highly recommended.
”Pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country." — David Foster Wallace
>>A postmodern turn.
>>Reviewed in 1988.

The Stuff of Life by Timothy Morton $33
There are many ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do continues to preoccupy philosophers. In The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton chooses the objects that have shaped and punctuated their life to tell the story of who they are and why they might think the way they do. These objects are 'things' in the richest sense. They are beings, non-human beings, that have a presence and a force of their own. From the looming expanse of Battersea Power Station to a packet of anti-depressants and a cowboy suit, Morton explores why 'stuff' matters and the life of these things have so powerfully impinged upon their own. Their realization, through a concealer stick, that they identify as non-binary reveals the strange and wonderful ways that objects can form our worlds. Part memoir, part philosophical exploration of the meaning of a life lived alongside and through other things, Morton asks us to think about the stuff, things, objects and buildings that have formed our realities and who we are and might be.
>>I, Object.

The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa $38
After the death of both parents, Kauri and Black must find a way to survive in a world that doesn't care much about them. Kauri embarks on a journey into his father's past, to come to terms with the trauma he's experienced in his short life, and to break the cycle of violence he fears perpetuating as he raises his younger brother. The Bone Tree is a gritty coming of age novel, where the unforgettable young protagonist faces immense challenges, and the stakes are life or death — yet it also has a message of love at its heart. It gives voice to characters who are on the margins of society in Aotearoa, raised in poverty, and who have a deep mistrust in the systems that are meant to protect them — and it considers the question of how we can best protect the ones we love.

Loaded: The life (and afterlife) of The Velvet Underground by Dylan Jones $40
This definitive oral history of The Velvet Underground draws on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, film-makers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, to celebrate not only their impact but their legacy, which burns brightly into the 21st century. Crystallising the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang, around a psychedelic rock and roll band — a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory — The Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up; they never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and in the process invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone from Sid Vicious to Bobby Gillespie. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love. In that sense they invented punk. Drawing on interviews and material relating to all major players from Lou Reed, John Cale, Mo Tucker, Andy Warhol, Jon Savage, Nico, David Bowie, Mary Harron and many more, award-winning journalist Dylan Jones breaks down the band's whirlwind of subversion in a narrative rich in drama and detail, with an irresistible narrative pull.
>>’Venus in Furs’ live.
>>’White Light, White Heat’ live, 1968.

The Passenger: Nigeria $37
Since gaining independence from the UK, Nigeria has been in a state of permanent crisis. Dependence on oil is the glue that has kept together a country deeply divided but obsessed with an ideal of ‘national unity’. But this dependence has eroded institutions, compromised socio-economic development, caused corruption, coup d'etats, and environmental disasters. The arrival of democracy in the 90s failed to bring much improvement. It's estimated that over 100 million Nigerians live under the poverty threshold. Violence is widespread: from the Boko Haram terrorists to the armed secessionist movements and the growing scourge of kidnappings. How to live in a country where the state is absent? In these circumstances, Nigerians bring out all their dynamism, entrepreneurial skills, and their inventiveness. As the generation of generals who governed the country for 60 years dies out, and younger citizens refuse to ignore injustice and violence, the hope is born that a new, vibrant generation will take the country's future into their hands. And, as they are accustomed to doing, fix it.
”The Passenger has a strong focus on storytelling, with pages given over to a mix of essays, playlists and sideways glances at subcultures and thorny urban issues.” —MONOCLE
”Half-magazine, half-book. Think of The Passenger as an erudite and literary travel equivalent to National Geographic, with stunning photography and illustration and fascinating writing about place.” —independent.ie
>>Look inside.

Dust: The story of the modern world in a trillion particles by Jay Owens $40
Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next hundred years, human life on swathes of the earth's surface will also end, in a haze of heat, drought and, again, dust. Dust is the legacy of twentieth-century progress and a profound threat to life in the twenty-first. And yet it's something we hardly ever consider — so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought.All of history is recorded in the dust we create: the pollution we make, the fires we start, the chemicals we use, the volcanos that erupt.
”Dust is unmistakably a major book. This is a book with an extraordinary global story to tell, but — and — also with an ethical argument to advance. - Robert Macfarlane

Alias Anna: A true story of outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood and Greg Dawson $20
She wouldn’t be Zhanna. She’d use an alias. A for Anna. A for alive. When the Germans invade Ukraine, Zhanna, a young Jewish girl, must leave behind her friends, her freedom, and her promising musical future at the world’s top conservatory. With no time to say goodbye, Zhanna, her sister Frina, and their entire family are removed from their home by the Nazis and forced on a long, cold, death march. When a guard turns a blind eye, Zhanna flees with nothing more than her musical talent, her beloved sheet music, and her father’s final plea: I don’t care what you do. Just live. An incredible true story told in verse about sisterhood, survival, and music, written in collaboration with Zhanna’s son, Greg Dawson.

Tramping in Aotearoa: New Zealand’s top 45 tracks by Shaun Barnett $50
A revised and improved edition of this outstanding tramping guide. The tramps covered include New Zealand’s great walks, such as the Milford Track, the Routeburn and the Tongariro Northern Circuit, and many other trips from both north and south, such as the Kauearanga Kauri Trail in the Coromandel, the Travers-Sabine Circuit in Nelson Lakes, and the newer Old Ghost Road in Kahurangi and the Paparoa Track. Well illustrated with photographs and maps.
>>Look inside.

If you are looking for a perfect gift for the wine connoisseur or a book to add to your reference library, here is a tasting of new, forthcoming, and interesting titles.

Provocative and irreverent, A Vintner’s Tale is the story of change and innovation in one of New Zealand’s notable industries and an important record of the people who made the world take notice. Written by wine industry veteran Peter Hubscher.

From our southern clime neighbour, a look at the last two decades of Austalian wine making is articulated in Alternative Reality. Max Allen, lecturer in Wine Studies at Melbourne University, award-winning journalist and writer, long-time contributor to Gourmet Traveller Magazine, covers the ground with key people and key moments, along with comprehensive information about more than 150 alternative grape varieties currently grown in Australia and what the wines made from these grapes taste like.

Highly regarded writer Jon Bonné’s lastest book is a tempting and atttractive two volume pleasure. The comprehensive and authoritative The New French Wine takes readers on a tour through every wine region of France, featuring some 800 producers and more than 7,000 wines, plus evocative photography and maps, as well as the incisive narrative and compelling storytelling that has earned Jon Bonné accolades and legions of fans in the wine world.

In Adventures of Rose Wine in Provence discover the history of rosé — known for its gorgeous spectrum of pale pink colors, its aromatic and fruity flavor, and its growing success. Travel through Provence along the Rosé Road, from St. Tropez to St. Barts and beyond; enjoy stories and portraits alongside stunning photographs of Provence's magnificent shores and chateaus and to the places where rosé is celebrated from the luxurious Hotel Eden Rock to historic Club 55.

For something ecclectic and erudite, knowledgable wine writer Neal Martin has produced a singular book, The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide 1870-2020 . “..brillaint…addictively dip-in-able…already an indispensable classic reference book." - Victoria Moore, The Telegraph

Staying with bordeaux, this guide to 35 wineries is a must. Bordeaux 1855 is comprehensive and lavishly illustrated and includes detailed maps. Perfect for wine aficionados planning a trip to France as well as wine-loving armchair travelers.

Interested in history and cultural consideration vis-a-vis wine? Then these will appeal:

Rod Phillip’s French Wine is a history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. “It's a book to read for its unstoppable torrent of fascinating and often surprising details." —Andrew Jefford, Decanter

In Wine: A Cultural History  art historian John Varriano ranges across literature and art, religion and rituals, celebrations and social occassions, medicine and the wine industry, to explore the cultural impact of the both beloved and critiqued beverage.

A recent addition to the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series is Meg Bernhard’s Wine. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Benhard meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.

Click through on the links to find out more about these new and recent wine titles. Order via our website volumebooks.online or simply email us with your requests.

A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

Solar Bones

Langrishe, Go Down

The Gospel of Orla

Trespasses

A Ghost in the Throat

The Singularities

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne - Selected Stories

The Wren, The Wren

Browse Irish fiction and books about Ireland.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our #346th NEWSLETTER. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending, and prepare yourself for Te Wiki o te Reo Māori.

8 September 2023

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A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

My Work by Olga Ravn (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $48
After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms — fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters — to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature. From the author of the International Booker-shortlisted The Employees.
”This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it?” —Kate Zambreno
”My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive.” —Heather O’Neill
>>Eighth beginning.
>>Read our reviews of The Employees.

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright $37
”Carmel had been alone all her life. She had been alone since she was twelve years old. The baby knew all this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been.” Nell — funny, brave and so much loved — is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love — spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter — sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
”The Wren, The Wren is a magnificent novel. Anne Enright's stylistic brilliance seems to put the reader directly in touch with her characters and the rich territory of their lives.” —Sally Rooney
”Gritty, sad, sly, riotous. Gem-packed language that fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker. A must-read.” —Margaret Atwood

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes (translated from Italian by Anne Goldstein) $37
Out running errands, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. Hiding it from her husband and children, she begins to record and scrutinise her life, writing of the daily domestic routine, her children's struggles in love and minor rifts in her marriage. Gradually, the solid structure of her family life crumbles away, and Valeria discovers the dissatisfaction that has been lurking behind her devotion to her family for years. What part has the notebook played in the changes which it records? Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered classic of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri.
”Mind blown...this book is the female Stoner!” —Mia Levitin
”One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
>>Transgressive power.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs $33
It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
”Sometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect. Makes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken.” —The Guardian
”The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.” —Preti Taneja
”Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.” —Kathryn Scanlan

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks $37
When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman's child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences. Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it. Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention. The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question — just because you can do something, does it mean you should?
”This is a genuinely thought-provoking piece of fiction. You could devour it in a day and be wholly transported into the near future, then set it back down, dazed but enlightened, in the present day where you will see the world anew in all its wonders and frailties.” —The Times
”A stunning novel: profoundly moving, deeply unsettling, thought-provoking and prescient but also a wonderful and life-affirming love story.” —James Holland
”Once I had started I literally could not stop. It really is his greatest novel yet, and of course beautifully written in that wonderful, understated style.” —Antony Beevor

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer $28
This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman's life — told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease. Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia's past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform. Guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia's youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia's body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day. Longlisted for the Booker Prize. Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize. Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
”An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language.” —Daisy Johnson

Korean Home Cooking: 100 authentic everyday recipes, from Bulgogi to Bibimbap by Jina Jung $55
Elegantly simple, big on flavour and strong on comfort, these family favourites with step-by-step instructions make an ideal introduction to Korean cooking at your place. Combining several small dishes allows for a constant flow of people at the table, and a bright array of colours and flavours. Start with traditional, simple and tasty family recipes such as Kimchi Fried Rice, Bibimbap and Pork Bulgolgi, and stay for the opportunity to learn new skills, like fermenting your own pickles, and creating classic stews, soups and your own Korean barbecue.
>>Look inside!

The World According to Colour: A cultural history by James Fox $32
The world comes to us in colour.  But colour lives as much in our imaginations as it does in our surroundings, as this book reveals. Each chapter immerses the reader in a single colour, drawing together stories from the histories of art and humanity to illuminate the meanings it has been given over the eras and around the globe. Showing how artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, explorers and inventors have both shaped and been shaped by these myriad meanings, Fox reveals how, through colour, we can better understand their cultures, as well as our own.

Control: The dark history and troubling present of eugenics by Adam Rutherford $30
Control is a book about what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls "a defining idea of the twentieth century." Inspired by Darwin's ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for moulding the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years — from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques — have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Eugenics has "a short history, but a long past," Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the audiobook explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to sculpt society through reproductive control. Chilling and perceptive. Now in paperback.

Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky by Rebecca Lim $20
What if you were forced to set sail for a country that didn't want you, to meet a father you couldn't remember? Thirteen-year-old Fu, his younger sister, Pei, and their mother live in a small rural community in Southern China that is already enduring famine conditions when it is collectivised as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward campaign that ultimately led to economic disaster, widespread famine and millions of deaths. After tragedy strikes, and threatened with separation, Fu and Pei set out on a perilous journey across countries and oceans to find their father, who left for Australia almost a decade earlier. With nothing to guide them but a photograph and some letters in a language they cannot read, they must draw on all their courage and tenacity just to survive - and perhaps forge a better life for themselves.

Termush by Sven Holm (translated from Danish by Sylvia Clayton)

A stay in a luxury hotel at the end of the world may be something to look forward to …or not. Faber Editions have reissued Sven Holm’s 1967 dystopia Termush: fascinating and horrific in equal measure. Fascinating for its queasy prescience as we move into a period of uncertainty — wildfires, flooding, melting ice sheets, drone warfare, heightened surveillance... and the list of dysfunction goes on. You better have a book to hand. And horrifying, for the human reaction to disaster. One, the residents have been paying for this safety in the event of a cataclysmic event — an insurance scheme for the wealthiest — fair if you can afford it. And two, as the edges of their paradise become more porous, the responses to the threat from outside are increasingly fragmented. Termush is an edgy exploration into the mind of one resident and their discomfort at the turn of events, as well as a philosophical examination of societal structures, ethics, and the politics of survival. Holm treads lightly in the shoes of our protagonist as he navigates the days at the resort. He heads down to the dining room to eat, strikes up a romantic friendship with his neighbour, observes the workings of the inner circle of the committee and the bureaucratic nature of the management, and accepts the rules and the presence of the security detail without stepping out of line. Yet he is disturbed by the volatility of the situation and the impact on humanity. Despite his inner reflections and obvious misgivings, he does little, or can do little, to make a difference to the final outcome, except ask questions of his fellows and himself. There are some delightful musings in this novella. The voice in the radio. Who does it belong to? Why is it soothing? Is it a recording from before? Or is the owner of this voice somewhere in the building? As the narrator feels increasingly disoriented, he is sure the pauses of the radio announcer get longer and his breathing more belaboured. As the chaos from outside the hotel’s perimeter digs its way in, literally (there are breaches and visitors begin to stumble in) and figuratively (the minds of the hotel residents are not all of one accord, and some are finding the worm of despair unconquerable), our observant academic is spending more time in his room, lying down. The dream of a safe haven is only as good as the controls that keep one asleep. Written in 1967, Holm was envisioning a nuclear disaster. There are descriptions of a landscape upside down; of dust and poison rain, of plants being washed down and birds falling from the sky (scooped away by security before they are noticed), of Geiger counters and shelters — all captured by the observant academic almost like an exercise in curiosity. The artificial landscape of the resort is bizarre, wedged somewhere between naivety and horror. Holm’s text is surprisingly quirky for a reflection on destruction and control. And the last word goes to writer Salena Godden for this quotable comment — "Like someone from the future screaming to us".

This week we are featuring the exemplary small press LOLLI EDITIONS, who are publishing translated fiction that breaches our preconceptions and enlarges our literary horizons. Around a stable of some of the most interesting new Danish writers, Lolli have gathered an array of cutting-edge fiction, sharply translated, in beautiful editions. Recommended!

• Reading parochially would be too much to bear.

• Different languages open up different things in the mind.

• Lolli in conversation.

• About the books’ design.

• Indie publishing mavericks.

• Shaping the reading experience.

• The dinner party reloaded.

• Read our reviews of:
  — The Employees by Olga Ravn
  — Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith
  — Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing
  — The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius (translated from Danish by Jennfier Russell)

“The disasters that befall you are always different from the ones you imagine,” states a character in one of the stories in Ursula Scavenius’s riveting and unsettling collection The Dolls, a collection suffused with unidentifiable or unquantifiable threats, threats that leave the narrators transfixed by the mundane details of lives distorted by unbearable forces that they cannot comprehend or name. It is hard to make a case that 'real life', so to call it, operates any differently. Is it the case that the unbearable arises from the mundane, that the unbearable is inherent in the mundane but suppressed to make the mundane bearable, or, rather, is it that by suppressing the unbearable we are left with the mundane, the only evidence we have, perhaps, of the forces set against us? Is the mundane therefore the surest point of access to the unbearable? Is the most unbearable closest to the most mundane? The potentising restraint of Scavenius’s prose, the withholding of all but the most resonant details, gives great power to that which is excluded, to that which it is impossible to include. Just as the universe is, supposedly, comprised mostly of dark matter, which we cannot sense and for which the only evidence is the effect it has upon that portion of the universe that we can sense, so too literature is most effective when attending to the effects upon the mundane of forces that cannot otherwise be directly or adequately addressed. The total, comprised primarily of dark matter, cannot be expressed. Any idea of 'the total' comes at the expense of the parts, by the suppression of some parts and the magnification of other parts. Any idea of 'the total' is a distortion of that which it purports to represent. A ‘story’, a ‘development’, likewise, is a totalitarian concept. Naturalism is a totalitarian concept. Scavenius has Kafka’s gift of being able to allow her details to resonate in the spaces that surround them, echoing in spaces that cannot otherwise be delineated, intimating the complex forces seething beneath her deceptively simple prose. Her characters move about in worlds strangely sloped, the familiar becoming unfamiliar and revealed as evidence of the unbearable. Time slips, the past is seen to be a threat, even an idyllic past is a threat because it contains the circumstances out of which the problematic present arose. “Birds chirp in the bushes outside. I laugh, realising it’s only a memory.” Every detail, every occurrence is a point of pressure, a point at which the mundane is assailed by dark matter. In the title story, ‘The Dolls’, the arrival of some refugees reveals the fascistic potential latent in the local community, including in the narrator’s father, and the distorting effect of that force upon thought and language: “There is no way to prove whether the scream was real, someone on the radio says. … It sounds real, but these days anything could be propaganda.” The force of the unbearable is always felt first upon language. 

A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

A Māori Word a Day

Sleeps Standing - Moteū

Rōmeo rāua ko Hurieta (Romeo and Juliet)

Te Rā: The Māori Sail

Te Koroua me te Moana

Puripāha: Te Pane Kaewa

Ko Te Hiakai Tangata

Te Pakanga a Ngāti Rānaki me Te Ranga-Tipua

Browse Te reo Māori books for children and adults

These Swedish Solbullar, or ‘Sun Buns’ are just one of our innumerable favourites from THE NORDIC BAKING BOOK by Magnus Nilsson. The sweet cardamom buns are filled with vanilla cream and rolled in granulated sugar. Perfect with coffee.

This wonderful book contains recipes for hundreds of Scandinavian cakes, breads, pastries and biscuits, with regional variations and Nilsson’s personable and illuminating commentary. It is an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pleasures.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS!

Read our 345th NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending, about some wonderful new books, and about an exciting way to add some excellent fiction from Aotearoa to your shelves.

1 September 2023 (the first day of Spring!)

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The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer

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, the thought thinks itself, 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 to find what is livable, he thinks.

• Your copy.

Books of the Week. This week we are featuring two very good books published to mark the Katherine Mansfield centenary: 
1. In All Sorts of Lives, Clare Harman re-examines the life of Katherine Mansfield through the lenses of ten of her stories, written at different stages in her trajectory, and reveals a writer and a person driven to remake both literature and the ways in which she might exist in the world.
2. In Katherine Mansfield's Europe: Station to Station, Redmer Yska, guided by Mansfield's journals and letters, traces her restless journey in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left throughout Europe. 

Apply the code “100” when checking out for 20% off either or both of these excellent books. Promotion ends 5 September.

• The trembling beauty of life.

• A Modernist's Modernist. 

• Glorious.

• Eating and reading. 

• Still dividing opinion. 

• All aboard!

• Where to start with K.M.

• Read the stories!

• Mansfield and Me. 

• Home and away.

• No sort of life. 

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai by Michaela Keeble with Kerehi Grace, illustrated by Tokerau Brown

Thomas read me a story today. It was lively. The text sprang off the page. The colour palette and illustrations were bright and full of movement. It was surprising. Unexpected questions arose. And each page was a delightfully diverse interaction with a mind of its own. It was Aotearoa in its language, small details, images, and topical concerns. It made me smile, and agree. It was authentically child-centric. This picture book is written by the author and her child. The connections between family, friendships, mythology, and history, meld and bounce off each other in the way a child’s mind works — jumping around with energy and certainty juxtaposed with questions and curious doubts. I love this. It’s fresh, full of humour, important questions, and honesty. Bravo Gecko Press. Ka rawe tenei! And this daring and delightful treasure is Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai.

New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai by Michaela Keeble with Kerehi Grace, illustrated by Tokerau Brown $30
”My name is Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai. You can call me Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai.” In this completely outstanding and hugely enjoyable picture book, Paku Manu Ariki talks directly to the reader, drawing on the stories that spin around him—his father’s mātauranga, his mother’s politics, his many pet birds, and his best friend who is taller, even though he’s younger. The book is born from the experience of growing up in a strong Māori whānau in a country and wider world that offers a conflicting version of what is right and of value. Paku Manu Ariki is trying to understand his role in his family, community and the larger world. His preoccupation is who is the boss—his nanna at the marae, his older siblings, or any number of atua? His steadfast dad, his Pākehā mum, the ‘leader of the free world’, or Paku Manu Ariki himself? Paku Manu bumps up against authority, trying to reconcile the kind and just rules of nanna and the unjust power of leaders he sees every day on the TV. Thoughtful, funny and confronting, Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai is about the hustle for belonging, and our place in the epic spiral of space, time and culture.
>>The author introduces the book.
>>Look inside!
>>Other curiously god books from Gecko Press.

Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li $35
A new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of contemporary life. A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li's stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces — death, violence, estrangement — come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Li is an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know.
”Li is extraordinary — a storyteller of the first order. She inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel.” —Junot Diaz
>>Read the title story.

Melancholy I—II by Jon Fosse (translated from Norwegian by Damion Searles and Grethe Kvernes) $40
Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig’s mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady’s daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig’s fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann’s apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter – a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness.
”Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.” —New York Times
>>As if punished.
>>Introduce yourself to Lars Hertervig.
>>It writes itself.

The Forgotten Prophet: Tāmati Te Ito and his Kaingārara Movement by Jefffrey Sissons $50
Tāmati Te Ito Ngāmoke led the prophetic Kaingārara movement in Taranaki from 1856. Te Ito was revered by tribal leaders as a prophetic tohunga matakite; but others, including many settlers and officials, viewed him as an ‘imposter’, a ‘fanatic’. Despite his influence and leadership, Te Ito’s historical importance remains largely unrecognised today. By the time war broke out in 1860, Te Ito and his followers had established a school and a court system in Taranaki. Striving for the ‘fulfilment of the divine order’, the Kaingārara movement initiated the ‘Taranaki iconoclasm’, discarding tapu objects associated with atua (ancestral spirits, which often took the form of reptiles) into massive bonfires. Te Ito was a visionary adviser to Te Ātiawa chief Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke, and played a crucial role in the conflicted region, both before and after the wars of the 1860s. Initially perceived as a rival to the Parihaka leaders, Tohu Kākahi and Te Whiti o Rongomai, he eventually joined the Parihaka community.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life by Anna Funder $40
Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own. When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why — and how — was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer — and what it is to be a wife.
"Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments — historical and cultural — of the twentieth century.” —Geraldine Brooks

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman $30
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.
”Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It’s much more interesting than that – a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman’s younger self…It’s a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.” —Anthony Quinn, Observer
>>I don’t just want you to love me.
>>It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

Ngā Kupu Wero edited by Witi Ihimaera $37
From over 60 Maori writers, Nga Kupu Wero brings together essays, articles, commentary and creative nonfiction on the political, cultural and social issues that challenge us today. From colonisation to identity, from creativity to matauranga Maori, this anthology explores the power of the word.

A New Way to Bake: Re-imagined recipes for plant-based cakes, bakes and desserts by Philip Khoury $60
In A New Way to Bake, Philip transforms the traditional building blocks of baking by using only natural, plant-based ingredients. A New Way to Bake uncovers a brief history of baking before setting out the Plantry, where the main ingredients and their functions are explained. Full of delicious bakes, from Apple Pie to Banana Bread, to Lamingtons and Tiramisù, there are sweet treats for any occasion. Recipes are broken down into digestible steps, with explanations as to why steps are important, and tips along the way too. Plus, there are even QR codes to videos and other resources help navigate through the recipes. Baking has hitherto often been a challenge for those who don’t want to use eggs and butter — no longer!
>>Look inside.
>>Vrioche!

Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn $45
How can we think ourselves back in time? Julia Blackburn has always collected things that hold stories about the past, especially the very distant past — mammoth bones, little shells that happen to be two million years old, a flint shaped as a weapon long ago. Time Song brings many such stories together as it tells of the creation, the existence and the loss of a country now called Doggerland, a huge and fertile area that once connected the entire east coast of England with mainland Europe, until it was finally submerged by rising sea levels around 5000 BC. Blackburn mixes fragments from her own life with a series of eighteen 'songs' and all sorts of stories about the places and the people she meets in her quest to get closer to an understanding of Doggerland. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilised in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man who seems to be about to wake from a dream, even though he has lain in a peat bog since the start of the Iron Age. Now in paperback.
>>The old time, the deep time.
>>Look inside.

The Visitors by Jane Harrison $37
On a steamy, hot day in January 1788, seven Aboriginal men, Elders representing the nearby clans, gather at Warrane. Several newly arrived ships are in the harbour. The men meet to discuss their response to these Visitors. All day, they talk, argue, debate. Where are the Visitors from? What do they want? Might they just warra warra wai back to where they came from? Should they be welcomed? Or should they be made to leave? The decision of the men must be unanimous — and will have far-reaching implications for all. Throughout the day the weather is strange, with mammatus clouds, unbearable heat, and a pending thunderstorm. Somewhere, trouble is brewing.
”A remarkable achievement of First Nations storytelling. We live in a time when truths need to be told and heard — this is a generous offering, a story that challenges and ultimately rewards us.” —Tony Birch
”A work of soaring imagination and breathtaking ambition. Jane Harrison upends all our black-and-white assumptions about what happened on that fateful January day in 1788 when eleven tall ships sailed into a safe blue harbour that people already called home. Surprisingly funny, cheeky and tragic by turns, this remarkable novel is bold, brave and unforgettable.” —Clare Wright
>>Harrison has written a play of the same idea.

Preventable: How a pandemic changed the world, and how to stop the next one by Devi Sridhar $37
Combining science, politics, ethics and economics, this definitive book dissects the global structures that determine our fate, and reveals the deep-seated economic and social inequalities at their heart. Will we never learn?
“The sensational story of how a disaster was turned into a catastrophe, with the clarity, precision and humanity that you would expect from one of the most important voices of reason of the COVID era. A brutally compelling reminder that if voices like Devi's had been listened to, so many more could have lived.” —Owen Jones

I never imagined that I would be a great fan of pies, but Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s pastry is perfect every time (ditto her focaccia bread recipes) — just the right proportions and clear instructions for getting the right texture for your dough. In Ostro, the Leek and Potato Pie is now a regular dish (and it doesn’t matter what cheese you have — I have used cheddar, feta, a combo of parmesan, and others, and it’s always delicious and well-received). This photo essay features a recipe from her second book, A Year of Simple Family Food.

The pumpkin pie is surprisingly light — with a flakey buttery pastry —  and tasty (herbs and spices, as well as filling). And it looks excellent — that wonderful orange glow. Simple and budget-conscious ingredients. For this version, I reduced the butter content without losing any integrity in the pastry (it fluffed up beautifully as it cooked) and used walnuts in place of pinenuts. The earthy flavour of these nuts was a perfect accompaniment to the pumpkin. The garden hasn’t delivered the free-sprouting mint yet, so the herb choice for last night was oregano — a gift of a very large sprig that just keeps giving — which has added aromatic depth to our winter dishes this year. Not sure whether you want to make a pie from scratch? We highly recommend Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cookbooks. Her recipes have revolutionised our savoury pastry making.

Listen to a story from I, Object:

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Image: Stella Chrysostomou.

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Tsunami

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Sweet Time

The Tenderness of Stones

Ducks

On Tyranny

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Use the code “100” for 20% off either or both of these excellent books published to mark the KATHERINE MANSFIELD centenary. Click through to find out more:

ALL SORTS OF LIVES: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman

KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S EUROPE: Station to Station by Redmer Yska

(You might also be interested in these other books by or about K.M.)

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