LONG ISLAND by Colm Tóibín — reviewed by Stella

An unexpected knock on the door brings an unwelcome stranger conveying news that Eilis can hardly believe. It’s 1976 and Eilis Lacey lives in Long Island with her husband, Tony, and their two teenage children, surrounded by his Italian family. Eilis has found a way to belong in this forthright family and has even eked out a little independence with a part-time office job. Falling into middle age, her marriage is comfortable and predictable. The news that arrives rocks her world to the core and unsettles her, reviving prejudices and doubts in her code of conduct and her expectations of others. Tony has fathered a child, not hers, and the baby when it is born is going to be deposited on the father and his family. Eilis won’t, unsurprisingly, have a bar of it, and decides she needs to get away. Her mother is turning eighty and this is a good enough reason as any to return to Ireland. As Tony, and particularly his mother, make plans for the forthcoming baby, Eilis finds herself cut out of any discussion or decision-making. Returning to her home village of Enniscorthy is hardly the escape she imagined. Nothing has changed. It is as stultifying as ever. The same preoccupations keep the rumour mill turning and the same prejudices about social class and morality persist. It may be 1970 everywhere else but here it could be the 1950s. Judgement, pettiness, and grudges circle under the everyday pleasantries.  Yet despite this, it is here that Eilis will face her greatest challenge — being true to her feelings. Her love for Jim Farrell has been dormant all those years. When we leave Eilis in Brooklyn, she is running away, and in Long Island she is escaping again. Nothing is straightforward. Tóibín has a gift for capturing intimate relationships — their nuances, inconsistencies, and delusions. Under the seemingly benign runs a thread of tension. There is the obvious complication of Nancy, Eilis's former best friend, and her dreams of a better life out of the chip shop with the willing publican Jim. And then the problem of Tony and the children — can Eilis make a new life for herself in America? As the story progresses Eilis, Jim, and Nancy are on a collision course that can not be avoided. Yet Long Island is not merely driven by the captivating plot, it is a commentary on expectation and illusion, where everyone has their private dream, but no one is honest to each other nor themselves. Where social mores hold behaviour in check even in the most intimate moments. Brilliantly written with a deft touch, it is only at the end that the breath you have been holding will be exhaled, but only briefly.

  • We will be discussing Long Island in our online book group, Talking Books, on 9 July. Join us!

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
Book of the Week: KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)

“An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.” — International Booker Prize judges' citation

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer — reviewed by Thomas

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside)

A woman accompanies her cousin and her cousin’s husband to their hunting lodge in Upper Austria and, when they don’t return from a walk to the village that evening, she discovers that she is encapsulated within an impenetrable transparent wall, outside which all humans and animals have been petrified (such as the old man frozen in the act of washing his face under a tap at a visible farmhouse). Thinking herself the only remaining human on earth, the narrator devotes herself to planting potatoes and beans, milking and tending the cow trapped with her inside the wall, tending the bullock the cow gives birth to, building relationships with the dog and a cat and its kittens, laying in supplies of firewood and hay for the winter, and killing the occasional deer or trout for food. Through the minutiae of her mundane yearly work, including her taking the cattle to the alpine pasture for the summer, and in her responses to the impersonal forces of place and climate, the narrator, in a ‘neutral’ prose account that she does not expect anyone to read but writes merely to keep sane, conveys the shifts in her thinking as she makes a new life for herself and comes to terms with her isolation, the freedom she feels from identity, name, face, society and meaning, the relief at no longer feeling the gulf that separated her from other people, the responsibility she feels towards the animals she cares for and that she believes depend upon her for their survival (to the extent that she does not explore the possibility of passing under the wall where the stream passes under), the ecstatic personless oneness with her world she feels the first summer in the alpine meadow, the terrifying emptiness waiting always at the edges of her awareness, and the passing of time carrying her and all she cares about towards extinction. From early in the book the narrator tells us that an awful thing has happened, and this casts its shadow over even the most rapt of her descriptions of the natural world. In the final pages, in no more than a brief paragraph, the narrator describes the sudden appearance of a man who kills first the bullock and then the dog with an axe before she shoots him and throws his body over the escarpment from the alpine meadow. I have not spoilt the book by telling you this. The pervasive feeling of the book is one of dread, within which all our love, our caring and our work can provide a small bubble in which it is just possible to survive as we move from one day to the next.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
Author of the Week: SOPHIE CALLE

Artist Sophie Calle makes intriguing art and beautiful books. I’ve been lucky enough to be a recipient of several Sophie Calle publications and I love them all. This French photographer and writer’s art practice consists of rules-based (Oulipo-style) projects — many controversial, some intimate and quiet — where she follows strangers, stalks ex-lovers, becomes invisible, performs and imposes her camera on abandoned places and unseen people. Sophie Calle investigates identity and intimacy, records the ordinary, and documents public as well as private lives. Her photographs are infused with story, and she disrupts the concepts of autobiography and memories, her own as well as others. If you are keen to start on your Calle journey, the primer, Sophie Calle, is a good place to start. If you are curious, Hotel is wonderful, Blind is deeply moving and stunningly beautiful in text and image, and the True Stories (regularly updated) books captivating. Internationally acclaimed, Sophie Calle has been making work since the 1970s, her most recent show was at the Picasso Museum (walk through in the link below).

The story of a photograph: Stella’s stack of Sophie Calle publications photographed in the late evening in low light with handmade objects. Jug made by Thomas’s grandfather Alexander Bannerman Ingram. Jug is dated November 1961. Runner gifted to us by our friend and excellent weaver Meg Nakagawa.

Find out more >>>

*Unfortunately, we can’t hold all her books in stock. Fortunately, we can order any of these and get them to you within 2-4 weeks.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
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 of Hotel 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
TRUE STORIES and MY ALL by Sophie Calle — reviewed by Thomas

Any idea that we have of ourselves, and it is difficult to avoid forming an an idea of ourselves even though we have nothing but functional reasons to do so, not that functional reasons for this, or for anything else for that matter, are not sufficient, or, in fact, the only possible, reasons, is a fiction, depending on what we understand as a fiction, constructed around, or, more accurately, by, the evidence, so to call it, that presents itself, or is sought, in the phenomenon known generally as memory. How does the past, given that it is convenient for us to consider, for the purposes of this rumination at least, that there is an actual progression through states of what, for want of a better word, we might call, lazily, the universe, or, lazily and sloppily, reality, or vaguely but pedantically, if it is possible to be vague and pedantic simultaneously, actuality, persist into the present in order to provide us with sufficient evidence, the word used cautiously but inverted commas resisted, for these fictions that pass, for us and/or for others, as identities, personalities and other such trappings and conveniences, that enable, or enable the illusion of, or the belief in, our agency as entities at once immersed in and in opposition to the other agglutinations of our existence, so to call them, vaguely, those entities that are not us but which are necessary for us to define ourselves against by the relations of action or perception? It is precisely to avoid such nested clauses and to save excessive wear to the comma keys on our computer keyboards that by convention we eschew the pedantic compulsion, if we can, to apply the rigours of uncertainty to the basic functional fictions such as that of the persistence of entities through time, despite whatever changes to these entities occur. Indeed we seem seldom to be uncertain of the persistence of an entity despite such changes, often more seldom the greater or more transforming these changes, as with the changes expressed by the entities we think of as ourselves, given that we have the idea of ourselves as entities. In any case, given that we deceive ourselves and others merely for the sake of functional convenience, which is only reprehensible in an abstract sense, if indeed reprehensibility can be anything other than abstract, we construct our fictions around the evidence of moments, thought of as in the past, persisting as images, in whatever way we may think of images, the meaning of a word tailored always to the demands of its application, to the present. Photographs, despite whatever other meanings we may impute upon them, seem to demand from us a response such as that expected by a moment of the past persisting to the present, very like, in many ways, the images and fragments from which the fictions, the not untrue fictions, or at least the not necessarily untrue fictions, or what we perhaps may term our functionally true fictions, we think of as our memories. Sophie Calle’s excellent True Stories is a series of images related to what we are encouraged to think of, and have no reason not to think of, as her life, images with, to me at least, and, presumably, also to Calle, and, reasonably, perhaps, to most people, the resonance and texture of the fragments to which we pin, or from which we construct, the memories so described and undercut above. Each is accompanied by a brief memory-text by Calle, which gives the resonance of the image a responding or corresponding context in the story of her life. These texts, funny, sad, tragic, empowering, unsparing of herself and others, or merely straightforward, if such a thing is possible, describe, in the most efficient manner, what we may think of as the character of Calle. The images and the texts have equal weight, and the rigours of the process of recording are sufficiently evident to induce in the reader/viewer of this book the complementary rigours of reception that make the project of awareness concomitant to existence so rewarding. 

 

In the same way that photography is a crime against time, My All, a retrospective survey of photographer Sophie Calle’s various projects over her thirty-year career, is a crime against retrospective surveys, and for pretty much the same reasons. Calle eschews the magisterial tendencies of retrospective surveys by producing one comprised of 110 loose postcards, thus violating both any expected sequentiality (the cards can be arranged in any order, defeating any attempt at narration or development) and any expected omnitudity (the cards can be send or left out or lost or pinned up with no obvious detriment to the remainder). In doing so, she makes this collection into a project of its own. Almost all of Calle’s work has consisted of constraint-determined experiments (i.e. games) playing with the properties of the photograph as an instant wrenched out of time but so strongly implying a narrative that one will be created by the viewer of the image from their own charged mental fields (‘imagination’, in its literal sense). The divergence between the two contexts of the image tells us also something of the operations of memory, which similarly separates instants from the continuums that induced them and builds narratives to support them using disparate, unreliable and often inappropriate materials. All photographs are challenges to narrative and memory, and Calle is remarkable in the subtlety and in which she uses her camera to record and provoke at the edges of the acceptable and the expected. She is often particularly interested in the biographical power of images, and in the place of objects in bridging (or widening) the disjunction between time and the memory of time, between what is seen and what is hidden, between the public/shared and private/personal spheres. Always interested in transgressing limits as a way of understanding the mechanisms of those limits, Calle’s playful rigours move the viewer in and out of contexts and reveal in us motivations and responses that we had perhaps hitherto not suspected. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
NEW RELEASES (22.3.24)

The following books have arrived this week and are awaiting your attention. Click through to place your orders and we will have them in your hands very soon!

The Earth Is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino (translated from Italian by Shaun Whiteside) $38

The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive (yet its rumbles are heard). Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons  the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside. The pervading mood of nostalgia and melancholy works in stark contrast with the inevitability of the impending catastrophe of the landslide that threatens to obliterate their world forever.  Beautifully written.
”What people: so vibrant and vital, if ghosts can be described as such. What a place: precarious yet utterly certain in Carmen Pellegrino’s vivid, poetic rendering. And what a book: melancholy, elegant, original and in its own particular way, totally seductive.” —Wendy Erskine

 

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searls) $30

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
”He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue. What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have — anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death — such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of a universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn't matter if it is drama, poetry or prose — it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness.” —Anders Olsson, Nobel committee
"He has a surgeon's ability to use the scalpel and to cut into the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments from life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterward. The results are sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark, and fearful that Kafka himself would have been frightened." —Aftenposten

 

The End of August by Yu Miri (translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles) $55

In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-Cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. With the help of powerful Korean shamans, she summons the spirit of Lee Woo-Cheol only to be immersed in the memories of her grandfather, his brother, Lee Woo-Gun, and their neighbour, a young teen who was tricked into becoming a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers. A meditative dance of generations, The End of August is a semi-autobiographical investigation into nationhood and family - what you are born into and what is imposed. Yu Miri's distinct prose, rhythmically translated by Morgan Giles, explores the minutiae of generational trauma, shedding light on the postwar migration of Koreans to Japan.
“One thing Yu can do is write. She is simultaneously a social outcast and a literary star, a dark, brooding presence on the bookshelves. A creative genius.” —The New York Times
“Morgan Giles's translation of Yu Miri's The End of August reads at a breathlessly swift pace despite, or because of, the painstakingly meticulous care put into every word and line. Yu's rich storytelling never loses its pace as Giles relays her depiction of the resilience of the Korean nation through the tragic consequences of colonialism that reverberate to this day.” —Anton Hur

 

My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown $38

Stella Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom. Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.  In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career. Innovative and involving, My Brilliant Sister is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives.
”A creative triumph.” —The Guardian
”A rich, playful meditation on art, domesticity, wildness and the struggle to be understood — I loved it.’ —Emily Perkins

 

The Tailor Shop at the Intersection illustrated and written by Ahn Jaesun (translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell) $40

“Why do Westerners wear leashes around their necks?” When Deokgu opens a brand new tailor shop in town in the early 20th century, all of Seoul is skeptical of his Western styles. Who would want to wear such funny-looking suits? But Deokgu remains devoted to his craft, and it's not long before the shop begins to flourish, becoming a beloved fixture in the community. The Tailor Shop at the Intersection follows three generations of tailors weaving themselves and their business into the fabric of their community in a rapidly changing Seoul, and stress the irreplaceable value of individuality, creativity, and care. “A single suit contains the lives of the person who makes it and the person who wears it.”

 

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakeley $39

All over the world, democracy is in crisis. Liberal political systems are straining under the pressure imposed by authoritarian strong men undermining institutions, the rule of law and the international system that governs relations between countries. Obvious examples include Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, but these issues stretch around the world from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines. People see this liberal collapse stemming from 'populist' leaders, working class voters and rogue states. But what if the threat to liberal democracy does not come from the outside, but from within? Liberal democracy and free market capitalism always go hand in hand but it is capitalism that is responsible for the crisis of liberalism. In the modern world, democracy and competition have been replaced with oligarchy and monopoly. What we are left with is corporatocracy — societies governed by a tight-knit cartel of big monopolies, financiers, states and international institutions. From technology to food, healthcare to capital, the decisions made by senior execs at the top of the world's most powerful corporations increasingly determine the conditions of life for everyone else. In Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley takes on the world's most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crisis are a result of our capitalist system. And she shows how it is too full of contradictions for it to even be 'fixed' instead, it must be replaced.
”A galvanising takedown of neoliberalism's ‘free market’ logic, one rooted as much in history as it is in current events. Blakeley's argument is well researched, clear and devastating. Most important of all, she charts a path forward based in hope, democracy and liberation.“ —Naomi Klein
”Brilliantly exposes the lie at the heart of capitalism — that there is no alternative — and systematically demolishes the myths that bolster its power. Rigorous and forensic, this ultimately hopeful book hands us the keys to redesign our own destiny. Another world is possible — and Grace Blakeley expertly charts the roadmap to reach it.” —Caroline Lucas
”Grace Blakeley shows how it is the logic of ultra-monopoly capitalism, rather than greed of the elite or money politics, that is at the root of our socio-economic problems. Using sharp theoretical arguments and instructive real life examples, she tells us that only greater collectivism and a democracy that goes beyond the ballot box will allow us to create a system that can restrain that logic and make society better. Read this book if you want to make fundamental changes to the world.” —Ha-Joon Chang

 

The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata (translated from Japanese by Haydn Trowell) $40

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters — born to the same father but different mothers — struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father's first child — haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together — seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from this superb writer.
”It is impossible to understand the soul of Japan without reading Yasunari Kawabata. Snow Country is his greatest hit, a beautiful novel that both reflected and shaped Japanese culture, but The Rainbow — translated into English for the first time — is Kawabata's missing classic. The Rainbow is where modern Japan begins - a nation born again in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, and in its bitter-sweet tale of two sisters is also the story of a nation struggling to find a way to live in the rubble and ruins. As always with Japan's greatest novelist, his themes — the bonds of family, wounds that will never heal , love that endures and loser boyfriends — are painfully universal. A book for anyone who loves Japan, or great story-telling, or both. Dazzling, brilliant, unmissable.” —Tony Parsons

 

Where the Lost Ones Go by Akemi Dawn Bowman $20

Eliot is grieving Babung, her paternal grandmother who just died, and she feels like she's the only one. She's less than excited to move to her new house, which smells like lemons and deception, and is searching for a sign, any sign, that ghosts are real. Because if ghosts are real, it means she can find a way back to Babung. When Eliot chases the promise of paranormal activity to the presumably haunted Honeyfield Hall, she finds her proof of spirits. But these ghosts are losing their memory, stuck between this world and the next, waiting to cross over. With the help of Hazel, the granddaughter of Honeyfield's owner (and Eliot's new crush), she attempts to uncover the mystery behind Honeyfield Hall and the ghosts residing within. And as Eliot fits the pieces together, she may just be able to help the spirits remember their pasts, and hold on to her grandmother's memory.
"Full of heart and captivating from start to finish, Where the Lost Ones Go takes the sharp pieces of grief and molds them into a story full of warm, radiant love. With both the fantastical elements and profoundness of a Miyazaki film, it's a story that'll stick with me for a long time." —Lyla Lee

 

The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz $47

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain — and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away. Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic. An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way.
"At once an elegy and an exhortation." —Elizabeth Kolbert

 

Chugga Tugga Tugboat by Sally Sutton and Sarah Wilkins $21

What a lot of jobs a tugboat has to do in a busy city port! Will it ever get some time off? Spend the day at the port with a very busy tugboat in this colourful picture book, perfect for preschoolers fascinated with boats and ships. Chugga tugga tugboat, chugging out to sea, Can't you, won't you, play with me? No, I'm too busy with this tanker. Splish splosh, wish wash, TOOT TOOT TOOT! Chugga tugga tugboat, chugging out to sea, Can't you, won't you, play with me? No, I'm too busy with this cruise ship. Splish splosh, wish wash, TOOT TOOT TOOT! Appealing illustrations by Sarah Wilkins.

 

Relic (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Ed Simon $25

Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren't just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance. From Abraham Lincoln's death mask to Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse, Emily Dickinson's envelopes to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick, relics are the objects which the faithful understand as being more than just objects. Material things of sacred importance, relics are indicative of a culture's deepest values.

 

Cabarets of Death: Death, Dance and Dining in Early Twentieth-Century Paris by Mel Gordon and Joanna Ebenstein $48

From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in the Montmartre district of Paris captivated tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven and Nothingness.  Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays, performances with flashes of nudity, and grotesque optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and shocking amusements in the city.  Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.

 

Classic Cookbooks: 1000-piece puzzle by Richard Baker $42

Classic Cookbooks 1000 Piece Puzzle features 42 paintings of beloved classic cookbooks, ranging from the iconic, like The Joy of Cooking, The French Chef Cookbook, and The Edna Lewis Cookbook, to quirkier classics like Fabulous Fondues and Love and Knishes. Each cookbook cover featured in this puzzle is intentionally painted to capture the telltale signs of wear from years of use in the kitchen. Whether you're a home cook, chef, bibliophile, or puzzle fanatic, you will love piecing your way through decades of cookbook classics and chatting with family or friends about your favorite recipes as you assemble. From Tatsuji Tada's Japanese Recipes, to Meera Sodha's East to Irfan Orga's Turkish Cooking and Elsie Masterton's Blueberry Hill Cookbook, you are sure to find a few of your favorite kitchen resources depicted in this charming and engaging puzzle. This 1000-piece puzzle features high-quality pieces that assemble to 64 x 50 cm, accompanied by a folded, oversize insert of the puzzle image for easy reference. Very enjoyable.

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS —2024 short lists

16 excellent books have been short-listed for this year’s OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS.

Find out what the judges have to say, and click through to secure your copies:

 

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing) $38

The tragedies of war and prevailing social attitudes are viewed with an unflinching but contemporary eye as Stephen Daisley’s lean, agile prose depicts faceted perspectives on masculinity, fraternity, violence, art, nationhood and queer love in this story about twin brothers fighting in WW2. With its brisk and uncompromising accounts of military action, and deep sensitivity to the plights of its characters, A Better Place is by turns savage and tender, absurd and wry.

 

Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka Univeristy Press) $35

Three giants hurtle through the cosmos in a spacecraft called Audition powered by the sound of their speech. If they are silent, their bodies continue to grow. Often confronting and claustrophobic, but always compelling, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space and what role stories play in mediating truth. A mind-melting, brutalist novel, skillfully told in a collage of science fiction, social realism, and romantic comedy.

 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $38

When Mira Bunting, the force behind guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood, meets her match in American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, the stage is set for a tightly plotted and richly imagined psychological thriller. Eleanor Catton’s page-turner gleams with intelligence, hitting the sweet spot between smart and accessible. And like an adrenalised blockbuster grafted on to Shakespearian rootstock, it accelerates towards an epic conclusion that leaves readers’ heads spinning.

 

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury) $25

After marrying the older, wealthier Trevor, Teresa Holder has transformed herself into upper-class Therese Thorn, complete with her own homeware business. But when rumours of corruption gather around one of Trevor’s property developments, the fallout is swift, and Therese begins to reevaluate her privileged world. Emily Perkins weaves multiple plotlines and characters with impressive dexterity. Punchy, sophisticated and frequently funny, Lioness is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity.

 

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

 

At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press) $25

With a polymath’s ear and a photographer’s eye, Megan Kitching creates sharp, complex pictures of the landscapes and lifescapes of Aotearoa. Many of her best poems focus on unruly coastal zones as points of contact, where history is always being made and remade, but she doesn’t ignore the human domain with its ‘petty hungers or awkward flutters’. Importantly, her work insists on the fact that difficult social and political questions cannot be separated from aesthetic ones.

 

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing) $30

Grace Yee’s sequence narrates a family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s with a striking aesthetic. We navigate swerves in personae, extratextuality, illustrations, Cantonese-Taishanese phrases and English translations provided on the back pages. Yee skillfully bends genres and displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. An invigorating read with its tapestry of scenes, characters, food, and language, Chinese Fish contributes a new archival poetics to the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora.

 

Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $30

This intriguing verse novel leads us at a walking pace – sometimes tumbling and scraping – across country and suburb, and volatile seasons. There are pivots in perspective and a rich sense of deep time as we encounter nature, injury and recovery, and a settler farming legacy. Bill Nelson’s writing has a sonic quality, protean line breaks, and surprise story threads. The final section with its hint of the New Zealand gothic, is gripping.

 

Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) (Dead Bird Books)

These poems buzz with energy: intellectual, linguistic, literary. Sharply conceived, engaged in conversation and debate across poetry, place, history, and language, Isla Huia’s work brings unexpected material into productive collision. English and te reo Māori meet this way, as do lines and echoes from older poets with present concerns. Huia has an inspired ear and engaged eye, and her poems’ sonic range and sense of adventure combine with a crafter’s care on the page.

 

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

 

Don Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press) $90

In this wonderfully rich and honest portrait of the artist Don Binney, Gregory O’Brien is never an unquestioning cheerleader for his subject. So while readers see and appreciate his famous works and learn about his interest in both geology and royalty, they also discover his sometimes prickly and sardonic personality. Binney neither liked nor identified with the description ‘bird man’, but hear the name Don Binney and his soaring solo birds come instantly to mind.

 

Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide by Liv Sisson (Penguin Random House) $45

Liv Sisson’s fungi field guide is a joyous combination of information and advice that is totally practical, potentially lifesaving and deliciously quirky. If you don’t know a black landscaping morel from a death cap or a stinky squid from a dog vomit, look no further. Fungi might not move but they are notoriously hard to photograph, so full credit to Paula Vigus and the other photographers for making the mostly tiny subject matter look enticing, and even monumental.

 

Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) $70

From its irresistibly tactile cover to the end note from the Webb estate that the humble Marilynn would have been honoured by the book, this is a magnificent publication. Creating a book from an exhibition has many fishhooks, but the writers, contributors and designer have produced a book that shines. Webb’s life story and her artistic practice are told in both te reo Māori and English, and her art is lovingly and accurately reproduced on the page.

 

Rugby League in New Zeaqland: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books) $60

One of Ryan Bodman’s many achievements with this, his first book, is the fact that you don’t have to know or even be interested in rugby league to enjoy it. He presents us with a genuinely fascinating social history which includes identity, women in sport, gangs, politics and community pride in their teams. The photographs taken on and off the field are an absolute treasure-trove of a record of the sport.

 

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

 

An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books) $50

Damon Salesa’s collection of essays re-frames our understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific. A seminal work, An Indigenous Ocean asserts Pacific agency and therefore its ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others. Salesa brings together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose, resulting in a masterful book that will endure for generations.

 

Laughing in the Dark: A Memoir by Barbara Else (Penguin Random House) $40

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Barbara Else reflects on her writing career and its impact on her life. Else’s narrative is both resolute and nuanced, artful and authentic. A story that perhaps could only be told decades after the death of her first husband, Jim Neale – the archetypal patriarchal man in the 1960s and 1970s – Else also explores how toxic masculinity took its toll on him while examining when she herself needed to be held to account.

 

Ngātokimatawhaorua: Biography of a Waka by Jeff Evans (Massey University Press) $50

Beginning with an expedition into the Puketi forest alongside master waka builder Rānui Maupakanga, Jeff Evans takes us on a vivid journey of discovery as he tells tell the story of the majestic waka taua Ngātokimatawhaorua, a vessel that is both a source of pride and a symbol of wayfaring prowess. Evans’ biography showcases both the whakapapa of the waka, including the influence of Te Puea Hērangi, and its role in the renaissance of voyaging and whakairo (carving) traditions.

 

There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir by Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) (Penguin Random House) $35

Engaging, eloquent and occasionally confronting, Emma Wehipeihana’s [Emma Espiner’s] memoir is comprised of a series of powerful essays about her journey as a Māori woman through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts the racism she and others experience and highlights the structural inequalities in New Zealand’s health system. This book brims with candour, pathos, and wry humour.

 
VOLUME BooksBook lists
THE THINKING CAROUSEL

TAKE YOUR MIND FOR A SPIN

Just enter the code THINK when checking out for an insane 30% off this selection of books on Philosophy, Psychology, and other books on the mind and its activities.

(The carousel stops turning on 27 March, so jump on now!)

VOLUME Books
OUR PHILOSOPHER by Gert Hofmann — reviewed by Thomas

Our Philosopher by Gert Hofmann (translated from German by Eric Mace-Tessler)

“One understands only what one expects, says Father.” Through the perspective of a young boy in a small town, Gert Hofmann’s pitch-perfect novel tells of the gradual, sure and awful destruction of a Professor Veilchenfeld, who comes to live in the town after (we deduce) his expulsion from a university. Hofmann is careful to limit the narrative to what the boy knows, learns and asks, and the answers he gets from his parents — answers progressively unable to encompass or explain the situation. Although the novel does not contain the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Nazi’, but narrates the abuses heaped upon Veilchenfeld directly as the actions of persons upon another person — Hofmann provides no buffer of abstraction or identity to Veilchenfeld’s heart-rending fate (the abusers, after all, are the ones motivated by identity) — the novel, evidently set in the years preceding World War 2, gives subtle and devastating insight into how an attrition of civility in German society in the 1930s prepared it to both tolerate and perpetrate the Holocaust. The change in society is seen as a loss, a narrowing, a degradation, a stupifaction; the abusers themselves seem helpless and perplexed even at the height of their abuse. Fascism is the opposite of thought. For others, what cannot be accepted is erased from awareness. “What one does not absolutely have to know, one can also live without knowing,” says Father. What begins as some surreptitious stone-throwing and more general avoidance escalates over the three-year period of the book into community-approved violence and brazen cruelty. As Hofmann shows well, degradation also degrades the degrader, for which the degrader hates their victim still more and therefore subjects them to yet greater degradation — thereby degrading themselves still more and hating the victim still more in a cycle that quickly becomes extreme. Veilchenfeld applies to leave Germany but has his passport torn up and his citizenship revoked by an official at the town hall. Ultimately, his abjection cannot be borne; he hides in his apartment, despairs, loses the will to live, awaits his ‘relocation’. Eventually even the narrator’s father, Veilchenfeld’s doctor, sees Veilchenfeld’s death as the only solution. For the degraded degraders, though, there is no such simple release from the degradation they have wrought, only further escalation. “Reality is a gruesome rumour,” says Father. Towards the end of the book the townsfolk hold, for the first time ever, a unifying and nationalistic ‘traditional folk festival’, with the children grouped into different cohorts supposedly emblematic of the town’s traditions (though nobody actually recognises the supposed woodsman’s costume the narrator is issued to wear). This ludicrous festival is an innovation, a lie, emotive quicksand; all Fascism is retrospective fantasy, fraudulent nostalgia, a mental weakness, a sentimental longing to return to an imagined but non-existent collective past. Hofmann was the age of the narrator in the period described and was concerned when he wrote the book at the ongoing relevance of what happened then. History is a good teacher, Herr Veilchenfeld says, but, time and again, we are proven to be very poor students. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
NEW RELEASES (15.3.24)

Out of the carton and into your hands!
Choose from this selection of books that have just arrived at VOLUME:

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken $35

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over asks how much of yourself can you lose before you are lost…and then what happens? The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known — where she loved and was loved. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest. A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times. Joint winner of The Novel Prize.
”Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.” — Alexandra Kleeman
”Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then — with prose as elegant as it is spooked — tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut.” —Sabrina Orah Mark

 

The Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches) $37

A provocative autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both colonised and coloniser. Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father's infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship. Blending personal, historical and fictional modes, Undiscovered tells of a search for identity beyond the old stories of patriarchs and plunder. Incisive and fiercely irreverent, it builds to a powerful call for decolonisation.
”Wiener has rescued an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent, with her trademark intelligence and irreverent humor. Her prose, sober and forward, is fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting.” —Valeria Luiselli
”Reading Undiscovered, I wondered what so captivated me about this novel. Was it Gabriela's innate ability to plunder all sorts of convention? Her persistent exploration of our deepest despairs-the weight and falsehoods of the stories and imperatives we inherit? All this, but Undiscovered is also spurred on by a yet more profound and radical strength: the spirit of fury. Powerful and searing, this novel snaps, bucks, heals, and snaps again.” —Samanta Schweblin
”Undiscovered's beautiful blend of fiction and personal feeling on everything from sex, to death, to Peru's traumatic history to France's heritage-colonial industry could not be more contemporary, vital and important, or expressed in more dynamic and immersive prose.” —Preti Taneja

 

Tell by Jonathan Buckley $38

“I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You'll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it?” Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people's. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy, and the co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize.
”Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale…. The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge — no splash heard, just the fading ripples of ‘why’.” — Tom Rachman, New York Times
”Buckley's fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.” —Michel Faber, The Guardian
”Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.” —Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

 

The Unsettled: Small stories of colonisation by Richard Shaw $40

After Richard Shaw published his acclaimed memoir The Forgotten Coast in 2021, he made contact with Pakeha with long settler histories who were coming to grips with the truth of their respective families' 'pioneer stories'. They were questioning the foundation of aggressive acts of colonisation and land confiscation on which those stories had been constructed. The Unsettled weaves those stories with Shaw's own and features New Zealanders who are trying to figure out how to live well with their own pasts, their presents and their possible futures. They may be unsettled, but they are doing something about it. It is an indispensable companion for the journey towards understanding the complex and difficult history of the New Zealand Wars and their ongoing aftermath.
'“Heartfelt, poetic; a pleasure to read." —RachelBuchanan, The Spinoff
"A fresh and exciting approach to the history of Aotearoa.” —Paul Diamond

 

Kin: Family in the 21st century by Kim Kamenev $43

The shape of family has changed in the 21st century. While the nuclear family still exists, many more types of kinship surround us.Kin is an investigation into what influences us to have children and the new ways that have made parenthood possible. It delves into the experiences of couples without children, single parents by choice and rainbow families, and investigates the impacts of adoption, sperm donation, IVF and surrogacy, and the potential for a future of designer babies. Assisted reproductive technology has developed quickly, and the ways in which we think and speak about its implications — both legally and ethically — need to catch up.

 

The Beautiful Afternoon by Airini Beautrais $38

In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are. Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife , Beautrais’s lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political. Throughout these wide-ranging essays her vigilant critique of entrenched patriarchal control turns anger to resistance, as a woman finds a way out of its grip, back to herself and the world.

 

Te Ata o Tū: The Shadow of Tumatauenga edited by Matiu Baker, Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice $70

The wars of 1845–72 were described by James Belich as “bitter and bloody struggles, as important to New Zealand as were the Civil Wars to England and the United States”. The conflict’s themes of land and sovereignty continue to resonate today. This richly illustrated book, developed in partnership with iwi, delves into Te Papa’s Mātauranga Māori, History and Art collections to explore taonga and artefacts intimately connected with the key events and players associated with the New Zealand Wars, sparking conversation and debate and shedding new light on our troubled colonial past. Contributing essays from Basil Keane, Arini Loader, Danny Keenan, Jade Kake, Mike Ross, Paul Meredith, Monty Soutar, Puawai Cairns, and Ria Hall.

 

Ngātokimatawhaorua: The biography of a waka by Jeff Evans $50

Ngātokimatawhaorua, the longest waka taua to be built in modern times, is a national taonga and resides at the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi. The inspiration for its construction came from Te Puea Harangi's dream to build seven waka for the 1940 centennial commemorations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. But it was to be many decades before the true power of this mighty waka taua was realised. The story of Ngātokimatawhaorua, and those who carved and crewed it, is a fascinating window into te ao Maori and the revival of carving and voyaging traditions in Aotearoa.

 

When I Open the Shop by romesh dissanayake $35

In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely. Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes — as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa — it takes flight into surrealism. A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community.
”It’s an exhilarating read, the general vibe of the novel akin to chancing on a frozen lake and deciding then and there to get your skates on. But there’s unpredictability in the firmness of the ice and fascinating things lurk underneath; those figure-eight loops demand rigorous attention to craft.” —Angelique Kasmara
”When I open the shop is a novel about loss, exile and dislocation, in which time, space, and memory become a beautiful, fluid thing. It is very funny, angry and constantly pleasurable and moving in the way it depicts people opening space for themselves, and finding comfort, in spite of everything.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam
”This is a beautiful and compelling work. The language is magnificent on a sentence-by-sentence level, but I think that the structure is an incredibly adept act of decolonisation.” —Pip Adam

 

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel $40

'I breathed in stories, as soon as I breathed in air. Sometimes I think I wasn't born, but I just came out of an ink blot.' As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England - and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop - and, published for the first time, her Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life. From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the ‘Wolf Hall Trilogy’, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words, 'messages from people I used to be.'
”A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature.” —Margaret Atwood

 

The End of Eden: Wild nature in the age of climate breakdown by Adam Welz $47

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain — and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away. Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic. An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanises us to act in defence of the natural world before it's too late.

 

Our Philosopher by Gert Hofmann (translated from German by Eric Mace-Tessler) $40

“O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her.” Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderly professor Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police ‘don’t interfere in such minor matters’. What happens to Veilchenfeld is recounted by the young son of the doctor who attends the professor. The boy observes, listens in to his parents’ conversations, and asks for ice creams. He cannot know the true import of the events he witnesses. First published in Germany 1986 and now translated into English as Veilchenfeld / Our Philosopher, this mmorable book is a salutary masterpiece about the destructive effects of persecution not only for the victims, but for the community as a whole.
”One of the best holocaust novels in postwar German literature.” —Milena Ganeva
”The past in Gert Hofmann’s books is not dead. Indeed, it is not even past.” —Lutz Hagestad

 

Sweet France: The 100 best recipes from the greatest French pastry chefs by François Blanc $65

France has a rich history of sweet traditions and talented pâtissiers, and with Sweet France, discover 100 recipes for irresistible cakes and pastries. The very clearly laid-out book includes the essentials, classics revisited, pastries, signature cakes, cookies, and other bite-size treats. Indulge yourself with canelés de Bordeaux, gâteau Basque, traditional fraisier cake, chocolate éclairs, and the legendary Saint-Honoré. Inside, you’ll find recipes for every level of proficiency to try at home, including the favorite creations of Cédric Grolet, Yann Couvreur, Pierre Hermé, Philippe Conticini, and a host of other big names and up-and-coming talents in contemporary French pâtisserie.

 

Mole Is Not Alone by Maya Tatsukawa $38

Mole is invited to a party, which is very worrisome. What if the party is too rowdy for Mole? What if Mole doesn't know anyone there? What if Mole is just too shy to make friends? Mole worries through the tunnels, around Snake's burrow, under the forest, past Bear's den, and all the way to Rabbit's door. But despite all those worries, maybe Mole can find a quiet way to make friends . . .

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
Shy, Brave or Thoughtful? — Stella reviews three new children's books

For the shy, and the brave and the thoughtful. Let’s start with the shy…

Mole has been invited to Rabbit’s Moon Harvest Party. It’s a dilemma. Mole wants to go, but what if they don’t know anyone apart from Rabbit? Mole knows Rabbit likes cream puffs, but what if no one else does? Mole decides they will go. They make the cream puffs, wrap them up and tie the gift box of goodies with a beautiful yellow bow. Mole starts on the journey underground, not very sure they will get there. Maybe it would be better to just go home and try again another time. Mole makes a deal with themself: if they get past sleeping Snake, they will carry on. Snake sleeps and Mole is both pleased and apprehensive all at once. Maybe I should go home, Mole thinks. I wish I had stayed home exclaims Mole as they continue along the tunnels. In spite of the desire to turn back, and the endless deliberation, Mole finds themself popping up from underground at Rabbit’s place. Apprehensively, with the gift clutched in their paws, they venture above ground. But wait, there's someone else there! Hiding in the bushes. A someone just as shy as Mole. This is the cutest picture book I’ve come across recently. It’s sweet, without being saccharine, and delightfully illustrated. The depictions of the characters’ personalities are spot on; from the wonderfully shy Mole, to timid Skunk, clever Rabbit, and the more adventurous animal friends. There’s a charming picture of the walk to Rabbit’s house. Here is Raccoon pushing a cake on a cart, followed by Chipmunk playing a tune, Bear clutching some tasty drink, Fox with a fresh baguette, and rounding off the line, Hedgehog with a bunch of balloons. Below them, you can’t see Mole, but there’s some distinctly Mole-ish mumblings popping up in speech bubbles. And if you look carefully, you might spy Skunk. Maya Tatsukawa’s illustrations are joyful, brimming with humour and delightful detail. Check the books in Mole’s home — Moomins by the bed, the History of Burrows and Tunnels 101 on the reference shelf, to mention just a few. Mole is Not Alone is a lovely story about being unsure, of trying new things, and most of all, about being comfortable with who you are. The illustrations and the text fit together well and work seamlessly to give depth of understanding with subtlety and quiet humour.

 

And now a complete contrast. Things in the Basement is the latest graphic novel for kids from Ben Hatke. Milo has twin siblings, the household is busy, and the babies are crying. One of them is missing a pink sock and Milo has been sent to the laundry to find it. The laundry is in the basement. The pink sock is there somewhere, along with something else. Or many something elses! In Milo’s search for the pink sock, he will find stairs that keep going down, much further down than in any ordinary house, secret doors, trapdoors, strange cracks in the walls, rooms that open on to other rooms, and a world that is both fascinating and strange, and a little bit terrifying. Milo’s determined to get the sock back, so in spite of his fear he ventures forth. Not all things in the Basement World are foe, there are friends to help as well. Hatke’s murky colour palette adds to the feeling of imminent danger and contrasts nicely with the shining torches, glimpses of pink wool and humorous moments. The curious, if nervous, Milo is our guide through this underworld and don’t worry he’ll get you back to the world above with a pink sock, of sorts. This is aimed at 7 years up, but not for the faint-hearted. It’s wonderfully imaginative and magical, and an excellent graphic novel for those that like their stories with a spooky edge.

 

And as thinking is a wonderful pastime, here is the latest from the excellent pen of Shinsuke Yoshitake. Here, our protagonist, Akira, wonders about growing up — “When I’m big..,” ; is frustrated by having to rely on others — parents; and imagines themselves being super competent! Well, doesn’t everyone? In I Can Open It For You, we have screwed up faces, too tight jars, packages that won’t release their yummy food contents, tantrums and just plain old frustration. When you’re too little to manage, you have to ask for help. But when you grow up, you’ll be running about in demand: open this, that and everything else. Akira imagines all the things he will be able to open — jars, packets, houses, the earth, purses, suitcases, bottles and animal cages — when he’s bigger. Luckily, while he’s small, there’s always someone to help and show Akira all the wonderful ways to open boxes, packets, windows to views and a box with a new pet. A book about growing up, being open to new experiences and finding out together. Funny, thoughtful and enjoyable for small children who will instantly relate to Akira’s dilemma, and enjoy the experience of opening a book together.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella, Children's books
Book of the Week: THUNDERCLAP by Laura Cumming

In Thunderclap: A Memoir of Life and Art and Sudden Death, art critic Laura Cumming connects the lives of herself, her painter father, and the artists of the Dutch golden age. An outstanding book, this week it won the highly regarded Writers’ Prize (formerly the Folio Prize) non-fiction category, is long-listed for the Women’s Prize, and has garnered dazzling reviews:

  • “This is an extraordinary book, full of beauty and feeling and immediacy and depth (and impressive detective work)...Thunderclap is a work of genius.” —India Knight

  • “Cumming is a word-painter ... When something fascinates Laura Cumming, she makes sure, with her beguiling prose, that we too are caught up in her fascination.” —The Times

  • “Cumming writes with the sureness of carefully laid paint. This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind – there are no footnotes or references to sources beyond her own feelings and intuition. It is an emotionally informed approach to art. “ —Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

“We see with everything that we are.” On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’ and barely a dozen known paintings. For the explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Thunderclap takes the reader from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London; from Fabritius's goldfinch on its perch to de Hooch's blue and white tile and the smallest seed in a loaf by Vermeer. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. For the explosion of the title speaks not only to the precariousness of our existence, but also to the power of painting: the sudden revelations of sight.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week