Welcome to winter. Feeling like the days are a bit bleak? Maybe you need a ray of sunshine in your kitchen. Sometimes books arrive in clusters. Just in the door at VOLUME are some lovely sunshine-inducing Mediterranean cookbooks. We think these could bring cheer to your kitchen and your palate.

Portico is Leah Koenig’s excellent survey of Roman Jewish cooking. It’s a love letter to Rome, the flavours and the atmosphere, and Koenig’s recipes expertly reflect this wonderful blend of cultures. So whether you are feeling like something hearty — Stuffed Pasta in Broth (Carcioncini in Brodo), or sweet — Fried Almond Pastries with Orange Syrup (Burik Belluz), there will be something here to please the tastebuds.

Melbourne food writer Ella Mittas takes us on a trip to Greece and Turkey in Ela! Ela! This is local cuisine at its best with a focus on four distinct places: Istanbul, Alacati, Crete and Melbourne. It’s an exploration of Mittas’s own cultural heritage and her cooking adventures working in the mountains and by the sea. Discover Kisir, Briam, and her all-time favourite dessert, Galaktoboureko.

Staying with the theme of cultural roots, there’s a new book from the excellent Georgina Hayden. In Greekish, Hayden brings us everyday recipes with all the vibrance of Greek cuisine and the simplicity of cooking at home. Her recipes are a joy to use and even more joyful to eat. Her previous book, Taverna, is a firm favourite in our household. There are handy V, DF and GF markers for easy reference and the recipes range from snacks — Filo-wrapped Feta with Spiced Honey ; to feasts — Pumpkin and Feta Kataifi Pie; to sweet treats — Baklava Riccotta Semifreddo. Delicious.

Back to Italy, Wild Figs and Fennel, is a beuatifully presented delight. It’s a seasonal culinary journey through the sun-soaked landscapes of Italy sure to please. In the Winter section there’s the always popular Spaghetti Puttanesca, Lemon and Wild Fennel Polpette and the wonderfully named Ricotta Cloudballs. Packed with recipes for everyday and special occasions.

Sebze is a celebration of vegetarian Turkish cooking. Here you will find Kahvati (all day breakfast), Meze and Salata, Sokak Yemekleri (street food) as well as breads, mains, pickles, and sweets. Everything looks and sounds delicious. Winter garden favourites could be Pazih Lebeniye Corbasi (Yoghurt Soup with Chickpeas and Swiss Chard), Pazih, Cevizli Eriste (Eriste Noodles with Chard, Walnuts and Crumbly Cheese), or Firinda Sebzeli Karnabahar Mucveri (it’s a baked cauliflower dish!).

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31 May 2024

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Énard 's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the ‘Zone’), past and present. Énard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 520-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Énard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Énard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them. 

Recently, I was in a reading pit, where the novels I picked up were good or even very good, but not holding my attention. What I needed was something fresh, compelling and altogether distracting. Distracting in that good way; in the ‘I’m not stopping this book until I’m finished’ kind of way. You’ll only get a hmm or a later from me until I close the back cover. I read Kick the Latch in one gulp. Kathryn Scanlan is a genius. From transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, Scanlan has lost nothing of the voice of this woman and her hard life at the track in this moving and fascinating account of the underbelly of racing culture, while simultaneously constructing a novel of tidbits, of scrabble and insight, that jumps alive from the page.  A book of twelve chapters; each chapter a series of succinct episodes which are sharply arranged and rich in texture and character. With titles like ‘Bicycle Jenny’, ‘It Wasn’t His Fault’, ‘I Wouldn’t Barely Break’, ‘Gallon of Blood’, ‘Grandstanding’, ‘A Thousand Pounds of Pressure’ and ‘I Tried To Be a Normal Person’ it’s hard not to be curious.  Every small bit-player has a role to play in revealing the person at the centre, Sonia. Those that help her, break her, and the ones she observes. There are horses, front and centre; and the jockeys that ride well and badly, the owners who cheat and the ones who are okay. There’s the family of track workers who work the circuit, looking out for each other. Sonia, herself, is forthright and compelling. The stories or memories build and bounce off each other. There are times of losing and winning; of destitution and just making a living. There are the horses Sonia trains and the respect that she garners. There is the hard Midwest childhood and the misogyny which spells danger for a young woman determined to kick out on her own. And then there is the fact that this is Scanlan’s novel. It’s a joy to read something that you can’t be sure about. Sonia is a family acquaintance. The interviews were transcribed. Fiction is unreliable, but completely compelling. It’s truthful in a way that often memoir is not. Fiction is a portal and here, as I was submerged into the foreign world of horse trainer, track and the midwest, I was wonderfully distracted in the best possible way.

Start winter with a book still warm from the carton.
Click through to our website for your copies:

Long Island by Colm Tóibín $37

Eilis Lacey is Irish and married to Tony Fiorello. They live in a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, surrounded by Tony's large Italian family. Spring 1976. Eilis is now in her forties with two teenagers. An Irishman knocks on her door and tells her his wife is pregnant with Tony's child. Eilis has choices to make.
”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. —Stella
 "A masterful novel full of longing and regret." —Stuart Douglas
"Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue: this is Toibin at his best." —Robbie Millen, The Times
"Glittering with all of Toibin's intelligence and humane wit." —Colin Barrett

• Read Stella’s review.

• We will be discussing Long Island in our online book group on Tuesday 9 July. Please join us!

Our Strangers by Lydia Davis $45

Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers. This book has taken six months to come back into stock, so we will celebrate it as if it were a new release!
”This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust.” —Ali Smith
”Davis captures words as a hunter might and uses punctuation like a trap. Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail, a most original and daring mind.” —Colm Toibin

• A feat of omission.

• Writing and revision.

• Not worried about fame and glory.

Ela! Ela! To Turkey and Greece, A journey home through food by Ella Mittas $45

A collection of recipes and stories from cook and food writer Ella Mittas. Inspired by her time working in a village in the mountains of Crete and the hot, loud streets of Istanbul, as well as her Greek heritage, they represent a journey of food, culture and belonging. These simple, comforting recipes are a mix of things Ella saw, ate and was taught on her travels, though years of cooking them have made them something more her own. Above all, they represent community — the reason Mittas ever wanted to cook at all.

• Look inside!

• Mittas at home.

In Italy: Venice, Rome, and beyond by Cynthia Zarin $23

Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ – a traveller moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her we see anew the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice, Rome, Assisi and Santa Maria Maggiore vividly to life for the reader.
”These pieces induce a comparable sense of being pleasurably lost, of wanting to live imperfectly in the present tense.” —Observer

• Self-portrait in Venice.

A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabelle Hirsch $55

The way we remember the past today remains dishearteningly patriarchal: a place where women have always been oppressed by men, from ancient times to the present day. A History of Women in 101 Objects tells a new story of female history, revealing the evolution of the role women have played in society through the quiet power of their everyday items. Much of what we've read about history focuses on the men in power: women's stories are too often hidden or considered unremarkable. But in this collection, Annabelle Hirsch curates a compendium of women and their things, uncovering the thoughts and feelings at the heart of women's daily lives, to offer an intimate and lively alternative history. The objects date from prehistory to today and are assembled chronologically to show the evolution of how women were perceived by others, how they perceived themselves, how they fought for freedom. For example, what do handprints on early cave paintings tell us about the role of women in hunting? What does a mobile phone have to do with femicides? Or Kim Kardashian's diamond ring with Elena Ferrante?
”I love this book — a new feminist history of the world — stirring, provocative and carefully researched.” —Lauren Elkin

• Look inside!

• Her grandmother’s lipstick.

• Not exactly how it happened.

Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville $40

A novel of the life of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmother — a woman Kate feared as a child, and only came to understand in adulthood. Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society's long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
Short-listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
”The writing sparkles with Grenville's gift for transcendently clear imagery. This is a work of history, biography, story and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer and pathway to understanding.” —Guardian

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler $65

Butler confronts the attacks on gender that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed 'anti-gender ideology movements' dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous threat to families, local cultures, civilization — and even 'man' himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to abolish reproductive justice, undermine protections against violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights. But what, exactly, is so disturbing about gender? In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how 'gender' has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and transexclusionary feminists, and the concrete ways in which this phantasm works. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of critical race theory and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonises struggles for equality and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a call to make a broad coalition with all those who struggle for equality and fight injustice.
”Who's Afraid of Gender? calls for gender expression to be recognized as a basic human right, and for radical solidarity across our differences. With masterful analysis of where we've been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge.” —Esquire
”If we want to see the political temperature fall to something that might allow for progress, there are few thinkers better placed to guide us than Butler. Crucially, Butler sets out an ethical vision for how gender freedoms and rights might be better integrated within a collective broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food for everyone everywhere.” —Angela Saini

• Judith Butler thinks you’re over-reacting.

Papyrus: The invention of books in the Ancient world by Irene Vallejo $30

Long before books were mass produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this impressive tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are fascinating stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humourists, Sappho and the empowerment of women's voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world. New edition.
”In this generous, sprawling work Vallejo sets out to provide a panoramic survey of how books shaped not just the ancient world but ours too. While she pays due attention to the physicality of the book, Vallejo is equally interested in what goes on inside its covers. And also, more importantly, what goes on inside a reader when they take up a volume and embark on an imaginative and intellectual dance that might just change their life. As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading. “ —Guardian

• Why it is a mistake to undervalue books.

• Booksellers are saviours.

A Thread of Violence: A story of truth, invention, and murder by Mark O’Connell $33

In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland's Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland's history and the words used to describe the crimes (grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre, and almost unbelievable) have remained in the cultural lexicon as the acronym GUBU. Mark O'Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk.
”Like all great books, A Thread of Violence is the document of a great writer's obsession. Mark O'Connell draws the reader into a deeply engrossing story, and at the same time into a complex investigation of human brutality and of narrative writing itself. This is a superb and unforgettable book.” —Sally Rooney
”Phenomenal. It's very dark, necessarily, but I found it very rich. Macarthur seems as though he's being generous and open, but there's also this manipulative side of him. It's like a chess game between the two of them, which I found really compelling. No contemporary literary mind seems to me more subtle, perceptive or trustworthy. An eerie, philosophically probing book. A Thread of Violence instils the certitude not only that no one else could have written this book, but that no other need ever be written on the subject. It's a marvel of tact, attentiveness, and unclouded moral acuity.” —Guardian

The Curtain and the Wall: A modern journey along Europe’s Cold War border by Timothy Phillips $28

The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, north to south, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. But we cannot consign the tensions and restrictions of the past to history. At a time when Russia is once again making war and when divisions elsewhere in Europe are on the rise, these old fault lines have new resonance. What do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What have they left in their wake? In this book, Timothy Phillips travels the route of the Iron Curtain from deep inside the Arctic Circle to the meeting point of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. He explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense between 1945 and 1989, and where the world's most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. The people he meets bear vivid witness to times of change. There are those who look back on the Cold War with nostalgia and affection. Others despise it, unable to forgive the hard and sometimes lost decades that their families, friends and nations endured. In these historic landscapes lie buried many of the seeds of our world's current disputes - over borders, and about belonging and the meaning of progress.

12 Theses of Attention edited by D. Graham Burnett and Stevie Knauss $20

"True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable." So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, written by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics — one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend. It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously "frack" our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer. The book is illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.

• Look inside!

• Meet the Friends of Attention.

Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe (translated from Japanese by David Boyd) $25

Successful entrepreneur A.A. Abrams is pursuing the enigmatic writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who appears to have the ability to write expertly in the language of any place they go. Abrams sinks endless resources into finding the writer, but Tomoyuki Tomoyuki always manages to stay one step ahead, taking off moments before being pinned down. But how does the elusive author move from one place to the next, from one language to the next? Ingenious and dazzling, Harlequin Butterfly unfurls one puzzle after another, taking us on a mind-bending journey into the imagination.
”The novel is perhaps most provocative as a meditation on language. A satisfying and reflective read” —Asian Review of Books

• Harlequin’s butterfly.

Brave Kāhu and the Pōrangi Magpie by Shelley Burne-Field $20

Poto is the perfect fledgling – the apple of her father's eye and a natural at hunting and flying. Anything a kāhu is supposed to be good at, Poto can do best of all. She can't understand why her sister Whetū gets cross with her – it's not her fault she's good at everything! As for her baby brother Ari, he's so weird and annoying. After their mother is killed by a flock of magpies, Poto and Whetū have to get an injured Ari to safety before a deadly foretold earthquake arrives, unleashing a flood and destroying their home. With the help of the birds and new friends they meet on the way, the hawk siblings journey through the Valley, keeping an eye out for a menacing flock of magpies who are on a mission to take back the Valley for their own. Can they stop Tū the makipai and her flock from ruining the harmony of the Valley? Will aroha win out over hate? And will Poto realise that everyone has something special to offer, even if they can't do everything quite like she does?

Maurice and Maralyn: A whale, a shipwreck, a love story by Sophie Elmhirst $45

Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England - and its oil crisis, industrial strikes and inflation — forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On their tiny raft, over the course of days, then months, their love is put to the test. When Maurice begins to withdraw into himself, it falls upon Maralyn to keep them both alive. Their pet turtle helps, as does devising menus for fantasy dinners and dreaming of their next voyage. Filled with danger, spirit and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive — not just at sea, but in life.
”Electrifying. A tender portrait of two unconventional souls blithely defying the conventions of their era and making a break for freedom.” —Fiona Sturges, Guardian
”Easily one of the most captivating works of narrative nonfiction I've ever read.” —Oliver Burkeman

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler $30

When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn't pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA — a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence — has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research. But the stakes are high: the octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence and there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of their advancements. And no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
”A first-rate speculative thriller, by turns fascinating, brutal, powerful, and redemptive.” —Jeff Vandermeer

In Long Island we meet Eilis twenty-five years on from Brooklyn. Upset with Tony and the surprising revelation of a new baby (not hers) , Eilis leaves America and returns to Ireland. In Enniscorthy little has changed, yet Eilis is perturbed; emotionally drawn to her past and what might be her future. Long Island propels you forward with ease, but under the seemingly benign runs a thread of tension. There’s the three-way complication of Eilis, her old friend Nancy and the love interst Jim. And then the problem of Tony and the children — can Eilis make a new life for herself in America? Long Island is not merely driven by its captivating plot, it is a commentary on expectation and illusion, where everyone has a private dream, but no one is honest with each other nor themselves. Colm Tóibín has a gift for capturing intimate relationships — their nuances, inconsistencies, and delusions. 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.

Find out more:

• Why a Sequel?

• Masterclass in Subtlety

• Colm Tóibín on Long Island

• In conversation with Miwa Messer

• See Stella’s review

• Join the discussion in July

A selection of books from our shelves
for any time of the day or night.
Click through to find out more:

At Night All Blood is Black

Night As Day

Untold Night and Day

So Late in the Day

Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night

Day

All Through the Night

Surf By Day, Jam By Night

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our latest newsletter. Read an interview with Thomas about Some Things Wrong. Find our about our Book of the Week. Get yourself the book you’ll read next. Treat yourself from our cookbook sale. Win a night in paradise. Read our reviews. Find out what our cat’s been reading.

24 May 2024

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There is nothing funnier than depression, he thought, at least nothing funnier to me than my own depression. There is nothing more ludicrous than my inability to do even the simplest things, the kind of inability you would ordinarily expect to belong to the most difficult things, but really the simplest things are for me the most difficult, or at least indistinguishable from the most difficult, there is no difference between the simplest and the most difficult, but not in a way that would make the most difficult things achieveable, though really there is no reason why this should not be the case, other than my inability to imagine myself as the person who has achieved even the simplest, let alone the most difficult, things, he thought. There is nothing more ludicrous and perforce nothing funnier than that, he thought. There is a rupture of some kind, he thought, between me and my fortunate place in the world, making one of those self-obsessed, self-indulgent, grandiloquent statements that he found intolerable when others made them and so usually pretended not to hear them, which probably made him appear unsympathetic when he was in fact oversympathetic, which is just as useless. Is there any point in being oversympathetic to the self-revulsion of others, he wondered, no, this is just as pointless as my own self-revulsion, experience is disjoined from reality, neither revulsion is reasonable or appropriate, these revulsions are entirely ludicrous and perforce funny. That there is nothing funnier than my own self-revulsion should make my self-revulsion tolerable, but then it would hardly be self-revulsion and therefore not ludicrous enough to be funny, he thought. If I could find relief in this way from my suffering, he thought, recognising the self-obsession, self-indulgence and grandiloquence of this statement about suffering even as he made it, if I could find relief in this way from my suffering it wouldn’t be suffering and therefore wouldn’t be ludicrous enough to qualify as a relief. There is no relief, which only makes my suffering all the more ludicrous and perforce all the more funny. The more pathetic my suffering, the more inappropriate and ludicrous my suffering, the more self-obsessed and self-indulgent and grandiloquent and entirely pointless and unreasonable my suffering, the more I perforce suffer, and the funnier it is. Nothing funnier, he thought. Is this why I enjoyed this book, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, he wondered, this book he had read almost inadvertently, this book concerning a depressed young woman’s heroic efforts to achieve not very much and the degrees of shortness to which those efforts fall, this book concerning the disjunction between this young woman and her place in the world, this book at once funny and pathetic and, he supposed, terribly sad, written in the first person by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle but, as it says on the front cover, fiction, just like what he is writing now. He could not decide if he was oversympathetic or undersympathetic when he found this supposedly fictional woman’s depression so funny, but, he thought with a ludicrously grandiose thought, the tragic is only more tragic for not existing in the context of a tragedy, and it is this disjunction, he thought, that makes depression so ludicrous. Taking it seriously would increase the disjunction and make it more ludicrous still. 

From the rusting hulks of the industrial era, from China to America, from the bodily functions of blood to the philosophical musings on the allegories of nature and man, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Rust in the 'Object Lessons' series is a fascinating exploration of this chemical process. Fittingly introducing us to his subject through the most obvious — and what comes to mind immediately (for me at least) when we consider rust — Rabaté describes industrial wastelands and the slow decay of iron as it oxidises creating layers of rust. In a country where corrugated iron and steel infrastructure is synonymous with growth and decline, construction and patched sheds, placing ourselves in the world of the American Dust Bowl or the industrial decline of China or the agricultural wastelands of Australia is more a matter of scale than of foreign territory. In these discussions of rust, Rabaté draws on cultural references in literature and film: Paul Hertneky’s memoir Rust Belt Boy, Wang Bing’s documentary Rust, and an Australian novel by Paddy O'Reilly, The Fine Colour of Rust. Where the reader starts with the idea of decay and decline, Rabaté's analysis moves us to see rust also as a saviour, a surprising and not always negative keeper of time. Using the same method, the conversation moves towards the metaphoric, and here again texts illustrate the author’s thinking. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K is explored as a metaphor for renewal and the land giving, through its richness in iron, a plentiful supply of vegetables — the one the main character is most enamoured of being the red-orange (rust-coloured) pumpkin. As we are drawn into this examination of the notion of rust, oxidation, iron — the ideas of nature in flux — the text moves into deeper discussions of the works of several philosophers: Hegel and Ruskin each have chapters devoted to them, lovingly entitled 'Hegel and the Restlessness of Rust' and 'Ruskin: Nothing Blushes like Rust'. These are thoughtful, lively and witty explorations worth re-reading. Alongside these more academic musings are anecdotal tales from the author’s childhood - his pet turtle features with her rust coloured shell, as does his anaemia and the prescribed medicine of fresh horse’s blood. Another writer explored in response to the ideas of rust and decay is Kafka, and his story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, which features rusty scissors and is also an allegory for his views on the politics and machinations of Zionism and its effect upon the Arab communities of Palestine. In the final parts of the book Rabaté extends the conversation of rust to imperfection, to the flaw that makes an object exquisite — the mark of time, nature and artist — in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in the sculptural works of monuments purposely made to alter over time through oxidisation, and in architecture that allows the metal to record time on its facades. The concluding chapter introduces the hopefulness of rust - the discovery of ‘green rust’, an ecological tool that can clean iron-heavy waters and that may lead to technology that will break down waste. Rust is ‘infinitely restless’ in all its guises — physically, emotionally and intellectually — and Rabaté’s musings are infinitely provocative with their eclectic amalgams. Another excellent member of the 'Object Lessons' series. 

Out of the carton and into your hands!
Click through for your copies:

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson $38

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years, and a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, annotated and corrected by the author. Anne Carson is famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word ‘idea’, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong’.”

• Look inside.

• Unjoined-up thinking.

Hard by the Cloud House by Peter Walker $40

The legend of Pouakai, a.k.a. the extinct Haast's Eagle, takes Peter Walker on a journey from an 1860s Canterbury sheep run to a deep cave near Karamea as he learns the story of the mighty hunter that inhabited a peak in the foothills of the Southern Alps. Was it the same creature as The Rukh of Arabic legends? And, if so, was that evidence that in the twelfth century Arabic and Chinese explorers ventured as far as the South Pacific, saw Pouakai, and traded with Maori? From Kai Tahu's fatal encounter with colonisation to the glories of tenth century Baghdad and ceremonies at the great Tahitian marae Taputapuatea, Hard by the Cloud House is a heady, powerful, speculative, seductive mix of history, memoir, science and myth.

• Show us the bird.

Counterfutures #15 edited by Neil Vallelly $25

COUNTERFUTURES is a multidisciplinary journal of Left research, thought, and alternatives, with a focus on Aotearoa. The essays, articles, interviews and reviews are urgent, thoughtful, and vital. This issue includes: An interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Bifardi on ‘Futurism without a future’, and on using psychoanalysis to comprehend political events today; A review of Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, which situates it within a revision of the South Island myth that has occupied a privileged place in settler aesthetic traditions; An assessment of the 2023 New Zealand General Election by Metiria Turei, Sue Bradford, and Jack Foster, and its implications for left politics in Aotearoa; An exploration by Neil Vallelly of the entwined relationship btween democracy and violence, as revealed in the current Israeli siege of Gaza; An analysis of the ‘religious right’ and its involvement in politics in Aotearoa, by Isabella Gregory; An overview of contesting Treaty histories, by Emma Gattey; Essays on the growing importance of a nationally co-ordinated union movement, the possibilities of inclusive debt forgiveness, and on the meeting of theory and the lived experience of sex workers in Aotearoa.

• Previous issues are available on the Counterfutures website.

Splinters by Leslie Jamison $40

In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life — her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope — and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.
”Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title — a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life. This memoir is a masterclass.” —Maggie Smith

• More than a divorce memoir.

• A different kind of love story.

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman $70

"What do women hold? The home and the family. And the children and the food. The friendships. The work. The work of the world. And the work of being human. The memories. And the troubles. And the sorrows and the triumphs. And the love." Women Holding Things features Kalman’s signature bright, bold images accompanied by thoughtful and intimate anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations. Many of the subjects draw from her own personal history, and most of the paintings are portraits of women, both ordinary and famous, including Virginia Woolf, Sally Hemings, Hortense Cezanne, Gertrude Stein, as well as Kalman's family members and other real-life people. These women hold a range of objects, from the mundane — balloons, a cup, a whisk, a chicken, a hat — to the abstract — dreams and disappointments, sorrow and regret, joy and love. Kalman considers the many things that fit physically and metaphorically between women's hands: We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of the women's lives — their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain. Ultimately, she reveals that many of the things we hold dear — as well as those that burden or haunt us — remain constant and connect us from generation to generation.

• Look inside!

• Even more look inside!

Greekish: Everyday recipes with Greek roots by Georgina Hayden $60

Georgina Hayden’s Taverna: Recipes from a Cypriot kitchen is one of our favourite cookbooks at home, so we can’t wait to start using her easy-to-us but entirely delicious new book, Greekish, which contains 120 dynamic recipes springing from her Cypriot Greek heritage and into the everyday. Standout recipes include: Fried sesame cheese bites to serve up as an irresistible snack;Tuna, egg and caper salad to make an easy lunch; Sticky aubergine and pomegranate tart for a crowd-pleasing centrepiece; Spanakopita jacket potatoes as a twist on the weeknight classic; One-pot pastisio for an easy meal everyone will love; Kebabs delivering the ultimate barbecue; Baklava cheesecake as a show-stopping dessert. There are easy breakfasts, small dishes and snacks, salads, desserts and even whole sections of recipes inspired by the iconic spanakopita and baklava.

• Look inside!

• Portokalopita!

H is for Hope by Elizabeth Kolbert and Wesley Allsbrook $40

Climate change resists narrative and yet we must see clearly what's happening in our world. Millions of lives are at stake, and upwards of a million species. We must act. In H Is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the history, and future, of climate change from A, for Svante Arrhenius, who created the world's first climate model in 1894, to Z, for Net Zero. Along the way she looks at Greta Thunberg's 'blah blah blah' speech, flies an all-electric plane, experiments with the effects of extreme temperatures on the human body, and struggles with the deep uncertainty of the future. Complemented by Wesley Allsbrook's gorgeous, colour illustrations, H Is for Hope offers an inspiring, worrying and, above all, hopeful vision for how we can still save our planet.

• Look inside!

• Climate change, A to Z.

Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich $33

On the longest night of a Berlin winter two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia.
A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. Neither speak. As silence weighs heavy between them, decades of Ukrainian and Russian history resurface, from Yiddish jokes, Kyiv's DIY queer parties and the hidden messages in Russian pop music, to resistance in Odessa, raids in Moscow clubs and the death of their friend. As the requiem inside the narrator's head expands within the darkness of the room, she asks the all-important question: what does it mean to have hope?
”Yelena Moskovich is a true original, a literary titan, an innovator, her prose is both poetry and punk, political without any obviousness to it, pure, demented in the best possible way, and always brilliant..” —Jenni Fagan

• Other books by Yelena Moskovich.

• Read Stella’s review of Virtuoso.

Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai $30

Nine of Franz Kafka's most memorable tales are here given fresh life with dazzling graphic renderings by the brother-and-sister manga creators Nishioka Kyodai. With their distinctive, surreal style of illustration, they have reimagined the fantastic, the imperceptible and the bizarre in Kafka's work, creating a hauntingly powerful visual world. These stories of enigmatic figures and uncanny transformations are stripped to their core, offering profound new understandings. Includes The Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and A Country Doctor.

• Look inside!

Humanise: A maker’s guide to building our world by Thomas Heatherwick $38

A story about humanity told through the lens of our buildings. Our world is losing its humanity. Too many developers care more about their shareholders than society. Too many politicians care more about power than the people who vote for them. And too many cities feel soulless and depressing, with buildings designed for business, not for us. So where do we find hope? Thomas Heatherwick has an alternative. By changing the world around us, we can improve our health, restore our happiness, and save our planet. The time has come to put human emotion back at the heart of the design process. Drawing on thirty years of making bold, beautiful buildings, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Heatherwick brings together vivid stories and hundreds of beautiful images into a remarkable visual compendium.
”Humanise is a masterwork.  It's quietly furious, impassioned, rigorous and forensic in all the right doses.  It leaves me very hopeful indeed about how things could go from here.” —Alain de Botton

• Look inside!

• Against the blandemic.

• A bit of optimism.

An African History of Africa: From the dawn of humanity to independence by Zeinab Badawi $40

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.For too long, Africa's history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa's spectacular history - from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story. The result is a gripping new account of Africa — an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

• The book began as a television series.

The Book of All Loves by Agustín Fernández Mallo (translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead) $33

Blending fiction and essay, poetry and philosophy, Agustin Fernandez Mallo's The Book of All Loves is a startling, expansive work of imaginative agility, one that makes the case for hope in the midst of a disintegrating present. In the wakeof the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into philosophy, geology, physics, linguistics. Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. As they roam the city, strange occurrences accumulate, signalling that the world around them is heading towards a point of no return. 
”There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you'll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolano another. Agustin Fernandez Mallo has become one, too.” —Chris Power
”The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.” —Mathias Enard

• Atypical talk.

Swimming Pool (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Piotr Florczyk $23

As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture. Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.
”Having spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it's more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad.” —Rada Owen

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

• It seems OK to me.

Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh $43

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of ‘disintermediation’: cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the  economic imperative to intensify circulation when production  stagnates. ‘Flow’ is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality and big ideas instead.

• Why is our culture so obsessed with individual experience?

• A waxing of affect.

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler $55

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers — Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich — lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music, scores that carry forward the echoes of lost time.

The Apprentice Witnesser by Bren MacDibble $20

That's what my photos are. Little moments. All the good moments, the kind moments, the moments of care and love that, if you add them all together, make a life sweet. Bastienne Scull is a young orphan who lives with the local Witnesser of Miracles, Lodyma Darsey, who investigates 'miraculous events' and spins them into stories she tells at the night markets. After Lodyma's husband and elder son died of a sickness that continues to sweep the land, she sent her teenage son Osmin into the hills to live with the mountain men. That was ten years ago, and Lodyma doesn't know if he's alive or dead. And she's taken Bastienne as an apprentice to fill the void of her lost family. One day, two young boys arrive in town asking Lodyma to go on a mysterious mission to a monastery. And when Lodyma and Bastienne arrive, what they discover will change their lives.
”A classic MacDibble: young Basti is a delight as she searches for her strength and a family in a post-apocalyptic world, leaving us with a glimmer of hope for her future and our own.” —Wendy Orr
”Bren MacDibble has become well-known for her unique and heartfelt adventure novels. She is particularly astute at writing timely and inventive stories exploring the impacts of climate change. There are plenty of twists for younger readers who enjoy a good dash of marvel and intrigue with their adventure stories. MacDibble's use of language is unparalleled, and she illustrates hope and resilience through her characters.” —Books & Publishing  

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton $28

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other? New (cheaper) edition.
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." —Eleanor Catton

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

Waste

Ruin and Other Stories

Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life

Rust

Ruin and Renewal

Ruin and Tranquillity

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

A Short History of Decay

COUNTERFUTURES is a multidisciplinary journal of Left research, thought, and alternatives, with a focus on Aotearoa. The essays, articles, interviews and reviews are urgent, thoughtful, and vital. This issue includes:

• An interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Bifardi on ‘Futurism without a future’, and on using psychoanalysis to comprehend political events today.

• A review of Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, which situates it within a revision of the South Island myth that has occupied a privileged place in settler aesthetic traditions.

• An assessment of the 2023 New Zealand General Election by Metiria Turei, Sue Bradford, and Jack Foster, and its implications for left politics in Aotearoa.

• An exploration by Neil Vallelly of the entwined relationship between democracy and violence, as revealed in the current Israeli siege of Gaza.

• An analysis of the ‘religious right’ and its involvement in politics in Aotearoa, by Isabella Gregory.

• An overview of contesting Treaty histories, by Emma Gattey.

• Essays on the growing importance of a nationally co-ordinated union movement; the possibilities of inclusive debt forgiveness; the meeting of theory and the lived experience of sex workers in Aotearoa.

• Previous issues are available on the Counterfutures website.

“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

• Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• The turbulence of history.

• Returning to East Berlin.

• “I need to get you out of my head.”

• Writing in the ruins.

• Spying, lying, and eros.

• Reading and rereading.

• Blind spots in shared memory.

• In translation.

• Other books listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• Read our reviews of several others of Erpenbeck’s books.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS!

Read our latest newsletter and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Learn about the winners in the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Grab the newest new releases. Go in the draw for a relaxing stay in Paradise. Ding dong for books!

17 May 2024

• Subscribe to receive our newsletters in your inbox!

He had read the book so there was no reason why he should not by now have also written the review. He had, however, not written the review and he was, for some reason, feeling disinclined to start writing the review, even though the review had to be finished soon, in fact the sooner the better, to go out in the newsletter, preferably before dinner, and he could feel this urgency sitting like a physical pressure, even though he could not quite locate where upon his body this seemingly physical pressure was applied, or was applying itself. Presumably if he was affected by a seemingly physical pressure it would be experienced physically, or seem to be, which is the same thing, his body was all he had, so maybe this physical pressure was applying itself, or being applied to, his head, or his back, or his stomach, he could certainly feel what could be the cumulative effects of such pressure in each of those locations, or in all of those locations, he could not decide which, though he also could not decide whether what he felt in those physical locations was the effect of the seemingly physical pressure to write the review of Rufus Marigold, a pressure that was not actually physical but only seemingly physical in that it was experienced physically and his body was all he had, or of some other seemingly physical but not actually physical pressure, and here he had to stop himself from considering the various candidates for causing this seemingly physical but not actually physical pressure, and he thought there might be quite a few, better not to go there, or, indeed, of some actually physical pressure applying itself or being applied to those locations in his body, and here again there were various candidates for the cause of this, gravity not least among them. This always happened to him. Some minor detail or aspect of the so-called exterior world, or some comment or nuance by someone in the so-called exterior world, or some observation made by him, usually involuntarily, of the so-called exterior world, or of a person therein, would trigger a plausibly endless chain of monologue, either endlessly discursive or endlessly reiterative, in the so-called interior world, achieving nothing but underlining the apparent separation, or separateness, if there is a distinction to be made, of the so-called exterior world and the so-called interior world, causing the two to, if he could indulge the metaphor, rotate in opposite directions and lose touch. Once a thought has been thought it cannot be unthought, but does it need to be rethought and rethought? Rufus Marigold, the eponymous protagonist, if protagonist is not too generous a word, of the graphic novel Rufus Marigold, has a somewhat similar problem, he thought. Anything that Rufus Marigold cares about immediately triggers (can a trigger be anything other than immediate? he wondered. Can there be such a thing as a slow trigger? A delayed trigger?) in him a monologue to the effect that he is repellent, useless and a failure, or perhaps, sometimes, not so much that he is repellent, useless and a failure as that others will inevitably regard him as repellent, useless and a failure whether he is repellent, useless and a failure or not. Once this thought has been thought it cannot be unthought and Rufus will make the worst of any available situation that could make him seem, at least to himself and, if possible, to others, repellent, useless and a failure. Rufus sees himself as a chimpanzee, but nobody around him seems to see him as a chimpanzee. The separation of Rufus’s internal and external worlds, so to call them, is unbridgeable in either direction. Anxiety casts forward and overwrites desires with fears, but anxiety at least indicates the presence of desires, and therefore of hopes. Desires cannot be disappointed nor hopes dashed if desires and hopes do not exist, after all, and anxiety is, for all else that it is that we would rather it was not, an indication of something that its sufferer values. Anxiety identifies what is valuable and attempts to sully it or to put it beyond the sufferer’s grasp, but anxiety at least finds value. Anxiety is a capable ailment, though it feels incapable; it is active, though it seems to devastate action. He was a little nostalgic for anxiety, he thought, for its alternative is despair. Nothing written confidently was ever worth reading, he conjectured, not that there was any danger of that in his case, so, if only he could make himself anxious, he thought, he could at least write the review of Rufus Marigold that he needed to write, even though anyone who read it would immediately either recognise it to be vapid and ill-written or, failing that, fail to perceive anything in it that was not vapid and ill-written, or at least not entirely so, or, at best, he would continue to believe that anyone who read it had immediately recognised it as vapid and ill-written whether they had in fact found it vapid and ill-written or not. Same difference. At least the job would be done. At least Rufus Marigold had had the intensely funny and tragic graphic novel he had drawn about his anxiety published, by New Zealand’s Earth’s End Publishing, no less, even if he had agreed to someone called Ross Murray having his name put on it. Or perhaps, he thought, this ‘Ross Murray’ is just a persona invented by Rufus Marigold to deflect attention away from the nubs of his anxiety, to represent him in the so-called exterior world, to help him, at a safe remove, to function. That could be a useful tool, he thought, staring at the blank screen where his review of the book would have appeared if it had been going to appear. If I could access my anxiety I would use that. 

Grace keeps centred with martial arts. Jeet Kune Do is her lifesaver, but will it be enough to get her through the summer? Can the words of Bruce Lee hold the world steady when everything is about to change? Grace is eighteen, working cleaning motel rooms, hoping she can save enough to go to uni, worried about her Mum, and watching out for her Gran. She’s a teen with more responsibility than most, and when her childhood friend, Charlie, jumps out of a suitcase (literally!) unexpectedly in front of her, life’s going to get a little more chaotic. Fall back a few years. Charlie and Grace met when they were five and were inseparable. Grace, a small Asian overprotected child, and Charlie, with his achondroplasia, are drawn to each other instantly and share a curiosity for the world and a fierce loyalty to each other. When Charlie’s academic mother gets a posting overseas, Grace feels abandoned, and has never forgiven Charlie for not keeping in touch. Now he’s back, their friendship is rekindled and it’s not what either of them expected. If this was the most complex issue in Grace’s life, no problem. But there are greater mysteries. Frustrated by her mother’s refusal to tell her anything substantial about her birth in Taiwan or her father who died, Grace is determined to find out more. A DNA test comes back with a surprising result, but her Mum’s in a precarious state, especially after Gran dies. Grace wants to confront her, but doesn’t want to tip her over the edge. Mandy Hager’s Gracehopper is brilliant; she writes about PTSD, bullying, relationships, drugs, trauma, and difference with sensitivity and honesty. Grace and Charlie are complex and compelling characters, who you can’t help but like. This is a novel for older teens about love, acceptance and forgiveness. Highly recommended.

Click through to our website for your copies of these new books!

The Vast Extent: On seeing and not seeing further by Lavinia Greenlaw $50

An ingenious constellation of ‘exploded essays’ about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Ranging across caves, seasickness, early photography, boredom, wonder, mountains, mice, the body and its shadow, from the Arctic at midwinter to a shingle spit in Norfolk at midsummer, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before or what helps us to see more clearly or persuades us to see what's not there. Art, science, vision and memory inform one another in this original and illuminating work.

• Look inside.

• Caves, sleep, absence of light.

• How do we make sense of what we see?

Ans Westra: A life in photography by Paul Moon $50

In a career that spanned six decades, the Dutch-Kiwi photographer Ans Westra (1936–2023) made it her life’s work to capture the growth of a nation through hundreds of thousands of images. Her photographic catalogue is now widely thought of as a photo album of Aotearoa New Zealand. This richly illustrated biography interrogates her remarkable — and at times controversial — practice, and a life that always put photography first.

• Look inside.

Verdigris by Michele Mari (translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore) $35

At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however, doesn't come from a book — it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colourful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography — a quest that leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means merely a horticultural threat. And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
”A gripping, beguiling, occasionally discomfiting, and utterly fascinating tour de force.” —Kirkus

• Read the first chapter!

Orbital by Samantha Harvey $40

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
”Beautiful in every aspect.” —Sarah Moss
”One of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time.” —Mark Haddon

• Space pastoral.

• Try orbiting.

The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston $38

As foot and mouth disease spreads across the hills of Cumbria, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke, Steve Elliman and William Herne, two neighbouring farmers, join forces to reverse their fortunes by rustling livestock from the south. With the struggles of the land never far away, Steve's only distraction is his growing fascination with William's wife, Helen. When their mountain home comes under the sway of a ruthless outsider, it is left to Steve to save himself and what's left of their farming community, in a savage conflict that threatens an ancient way of life. A reimagining of the American Western for the fells of northern England, Scott Preston's thrilling debut tells of men and women battered by circumstance, struggling to make lives for themselves in an unyielding land. Lyrical, cinematic, visceral and steeped in local folklore, The Borrowed Hills is an epic tale of a forgotten Britain.
”Preston's blistering tale of land and violence is written in his distinctive Cumbrian voice, a vernacular stripped to its bones that encompasses stark prose and sudden startling flashes of poetry. The result is half Tarantino and half pitch-black northern realism that slides under the skin and lodges deep. A sucker-punch of a novel, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty.” —Guardian
”Scott Preston lifts the veil from the picture-postcard beauty of Britain's Cumbrian fells to expose an atmosphere of festering despair in the lives of two farmers who lose everything when their sheep are destroyed by the government in order to contain an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease. When they take desperate measures to rebuild their shattered world, what happens feels tragically inevitable. The Borrowed Hills is a story of anger and violence, devotion, love, and back-breaking hard work, told with dark, dead-pan humour and a rough kind of poetry.” —Carys Davies

Hunter in Huskvarna by Sara Stridsberg (translated from Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner) $28

A young woman becomes obsessed with her psychoanalyst's daughter. A police officer's mistress clandestinely cares for his dying wife. A boy goes missing from the Swedish town of Huskvarna after he was last seen walking with a wolf. From the inside of a dead whale's belly, to an industrial town emptied out after its factory's closure, to a Texan prison where a young man visits his sister's murderer on death row, Stridsberg approaches both the strange and the mundane with a fairy-tale sensibility that lights our world anew.
Time runs through this collection like water, variously ebbing, flowing and rippling beneath the shimmering surface of Stridsberg's prose. These genre-spanning stories are held together by a sense of longing: for escape from the narrow margins of a prescribed life, for a past which promises an undiscovered future, for a place or a person that feels like home.
”There's a dreamy quality to these death-stalked tales from Swedish author Stridsberg, which marry old-world mysteriousness to modern sensibilities.” —Daily Mail

• Compellingly strange and sinister.

Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt $65

Today the work of Alberto Giacometti is world-famous and his sculptures sell for record-breaking prices. But from his early days as an unknown outsider to the end of a dramatic international career, Giacometti lived in the same hovel of a studio in Paris. Arriving in Paris from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with artists and writers — from Picasso, Breton and Dali to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett — but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the city's unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the cafe-terraces buzzing with ideas and gossip. In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, who spent thirty years documenting the Parisian art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew, charts the course of the artist's life and work. From falling in and out with the Surrealists to years of artistic anguish, from devotion to his mother to intense friendships, tragic love affairs and a fraught marriage, this is an intimate portrait of an artist in exceptional times.
”Marvellous, intimate and insightful. It reads like a novel by Samuel Beckett.” —Paul Theroux

• Look inside.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian memoir by Raja Shehadeh $25

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights. Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably. This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship. Now in paperback.
”It's a mark of Shehadeh's brilliance that this latest revisiting is full of surprises: it's even in tone, but jet-fuelled by implicit emotion; there's no conventional suspense, but it is absolutely gripping.” —Rachel Aspden

• After six months of war.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray $26

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car dealership is going under, and while his wife is frantically selling off her jewellery on eBay, he's busy building an apocalypse-proof bunker in the woods. Meanwhile their teenage daughter is veering off the rails, in thrall to a toxic friendship, and her little brother is falling into the black hole of the internet... Where did it all go wrong? The present is in crisis but the causes lie deep in the past. How long can this unhappy family wait before they have to face the truth? And if the story has already been written, is there still time to find a happy ending? Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. New, cheaper, smaller edition.
”It can't be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray's brilliant novel, about a rural Irish clan, posits the author as Dublin's answer to Jonathan Franzen. A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting oozes pathos while being very funny to boot. Murray's observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page — every line, it sometimes seems — abuzz with fresh and funny insights. At its core this is a novel concerned with the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They're all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish.” —Anthony Cummins, Observer

• Find out more.

First Things: A memoir by Harry Ricketts $35

In First Things, poet Harry Ricketts chronicles his early life through the lens of ‘firsts’: those moments that can hold their detail and potency across a lifetime. Set mostly in Hong Kong and Oxford, these bright fragments include the places, people, writers, encounters and obsessions that have shaped Ricketts’ world, from his first friends and rivals to his first time being caned by a teacher and his first time dropping acid. There are other, more enigmatic firsts here too, like the first time he realised what really mattered, and the first time he began doubting God. Who really were we, back then? Which parts of ourselves get to be remembered and carried along with us, and which parts are gone forever? In First Things, the gaps in between shine as brightly as the memories themselves.

Alexandria: The city that changed the world by Islam Issa $60

A city drawn in sand. Inspired by the tales of Homer and his own ambitions of empire, Alexander the Great sketched the idea of a city onto the sparsely populated Egyptian coastline. He did not live to see Alexandria built, but his vision of a sparkling metropolis that celebrated learning and diversity was swiftly realised and still stands today. Situated on the cusp of Africa, Europe and Asia, great civilisations met in Alexandria. Together, Greeks and Egyptians, Romans and Jews created a global knowledge capital of enormous influence: the inventive collaboration of its citizens shaped modern philosophy, science, religion and more. In pitched battles, later empires, from the Arabs and Ottomans to the French and British, laid claim to the city but its independent spirit endures. In this sweeping biography of the great city, Islam Issa takes us on a journey across millennia, rich in big ideas, brutal tragedies and distinctive characters, from Cleopatra to Napoleon. From its humble origins to dizzy heights and present-day strife, Alexandria tells the gripping story of a city that has shaped our modern world.
”In Islam Issa's monumental and vividly imagined new tale of the city, Alexandria comes to life. Issa's Alexandria arrives at 2011's Arab Spring having covered more than two millennia in just over 400 pages — no mean feat. But his real success is the book's sense of personality. It ends with Issa walking through the modern city that now stands on the ancient site, passing its markets and Art Deco cinemas. He writes about the present as vividly as the storied past. This book is a fitting tribute to a city that has survived, changed and grown for so many centuries.” —Francesca Peacock, Daily Telegraph

Sociopath: A memoir by Patric Gagne $40

“Your friends would probably describe me as nice. But guess what? I can't stand your friends. I'm a liar. I'm a thief. I'm highly manipulative. I don't care what other people think. I'm capable of almost anything.” Sociopath: A Memoir is at once a mesmerising tale of a life lived on the edge of the law, a redemptive love story and a moving account of one woman's battle to create a place for herself and the 5% of the population who are also — like her — sociopaths. Ever since she was a small child, Patric Gagne knew she was different. Although she felt intense love for her family and her best friend, David, these connections were never enough to make her be 'good', or to reduce her feelings of apathy and frustration. As she grew older, her behaviour escalated from petty theft through to breaking and entering, stalking, and worse. As an adult, Patric realized that she was a sociopath. Although she instantly connected with the official descriptions of sociopathy, she also knew they didn't tell the full story: she had a plan for her life, had nurtured close relationships and was doing her best (most of the time) to avoid harming others. As her darker impulses warred against her attempts to live a settled, loving life with her partner, Patric began to wonder — was there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And could she find it before her own behaviour went a step too far? Interesting.

Air Conditioning (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Hsuan L. Hsu $23

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception or the sensory perception of temperature is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management. Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody — its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.
”A cool blast of discomforting brilliance, Air Conditioning examines the conditioning of our indoor and interior climates of work, domesticity, and consumption. It is not inward looking to the sealed boxes and bubbles of air-conditioned detachment, but focused on the complex exchanges and inequalities involved in sustaining comfortable places, cooled bodies and technologies by making other places, and other (often poor and racialised) lives, uncomfortable and unliveable. Hsu's book hums, ventilating ideas in an insistent, vital tone to show how this ordinary object, submerged within walls and behind vents, has mattered so much to us.” —Peter Adey, Royal Holloway University of London

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum (translated from Korean by Shanna Tan) $37

Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju — they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.

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

Commute

Rufus Marigold

I Must Be Dreaming

On Tyranny

The Shiatsung Project

The Russian Detective

And for children and teens:

Tsunami

The Inkberg Enigma

Who Owns the Clouds?

Sylvia and the Birds

Sophie’s World

Te Pakanga a Ngāti Rānaki me Te Ranga-Tipua

• Browse graphic novels.

• Browse graphic novels for children and teens. 

Some superb books have been recognised in this year’s awards, from a strong year of Aotearoa publishing. Read the judges’ comments below, and click through to our website for your copies.

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Publishing) $25

A searing and urgent novel crackling with tension and intelligence, Lioness starts with a hiss and ends with a roar as protagonist Therese’s dawning awareness and growing rage reveals itself. At first glance this is a psychological thriller about a privileged wealthy family and its unravelling. Look closer and it is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity. Emily Perkins deftly wrangles a large cast of characters in vivid technicolour, giving each their moment in the sun, while dexterously weaving together multiple plotlines. Her acute observations and razor-sharp wit decimate the tropes of mid-life in moments of pure prose brilliance, leaving the reader gasping for more. Disturbing, deep, smart, and funny as hell, Lioness is unforgettable.

• Read Stella’s review.

• Find out more about the book.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing) $30

Grace Yee’s is a striking aesthetic – it blurs genres, it dances around the page, it crosses languages by fusing Cantonese-Taishanese and English, both official and unofficial. Her craft is remarkable. She moves between old newspaper cuttings, advertisements, letters, recipes, cultural theory, and dialogue. Creating a new archival poetics for the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora, the sequence narrates a Hong Kong family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s, interrogating ideas of citizenship and national identity. It displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Don Binney — Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University press) $90

Even as an experienced biographer, Gregory O’Brien has achieved a near impossible task in Don Binney: Flight Path. He has encapsulated the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. O’Brien’s respect for Binney includes acknowledging that he could be both charming and curmudgeonly, and as a result he offers a complete picture of this complex and creative man. Equally compelling are the book’s faithfully reproduced artworks, exemplifying the best in design, layout and reproduction. From the cover onwards, the images of the paintings take us to the place where Binney observed the land and the birds, capturing the qualities of whenua that meant so much to him.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

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

In An Indigenous Ocean, Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa weaves together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose to reframe our understanding of New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific. This scholarly but highly accessible collection of essays carves out space for indigenous voices to tell their own narratives. Grounded in a deep understanding of Pacific history and cultures, Salesa addresses the contemporary social, political, economic, regional and international issues faced by Pacific nations. This seminal work asserts the Pacific’s ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others, and will maintain its relevance for generations.

MŪRAU O TE TUHI – MĀORI LANGUAGE AWARD

Te Rautakitahi o Tūhoe ki Ōrākau by Tā Pou Temara (Ngāi Tūhoe) (Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, Auckland University Press) $40

He motuhenga marika tēnei pukapuka inā hoki ko tāu e pānui ana ko ngā kupu tuku iho a ngā tūpuna ake o te kaituhi i rongo rā i ngā kōrero a ētehi o te rautakitahi a Tūhoe i haere rā ki te tinei i te ahi ki tawhiti, koia te pakanga rongonui o Ōrākau. Hihiri ana a Hinengaro i a Tā Pou Temara e taki ana i ngā kōrero tuku iho, me te aha he mea kōrero ki te reo o Tūhoe koinei te reo i tupu ai ia. Tuituia ana e ia ōna ake whakaaro puta noa i te pukapuka kia noho mai ko tētehi pukapuka kounga nei mā te hunga e pīkoko ki te reo me te kaihītori ā-kāinga e kai ngākau ana i ngā kōrero o Ngā Riri Whenua o Aotearoa.
This book is truly unique, in that what you read are the narratives which have been handed down to the author through his grandparents, who heard the accounts from that very brave band of Te Urewera and Ngāi Tūhoe who travelled to extinguish the fires from afar at the famous Battle of Ōrākau. Tā Pou Temara enriches us with not only their stories but also a retelling of their narratives in the language of Tūhoe, the language he grew up in. He weaves his own thoughts through the book, which makes it a valuable read for both lovers of the Māori language and at-home-historians interested in the New Zealand Land Wars.

MĀTĀTUHI FUNDATION BEST FIRST BOOK AWARDS

HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION

Ruin, And other stories by Emma Hislop (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $35

Each story in this powerful collection exhibits an artful control of situation, character, and language to examine the fallout of painful events which largely occur offstage. Emma Hislop’s portrayals are perceptive, providing the women in her stories the space to grapple with disquieting questions that lack easy answers, while the insistent humanity of her characterisations suggests cause for hope. There is not a spare word in these refined and compelling stories, which introduce a striking new voice to our literature.

E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

There’s a Cure for This by Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) (Penguin Books) $35

Emma Wehipeihana’s engaging, eloquent, witty and sometimes confronting memoir is an extremely impressive first book. It is structured as a series of powerful essays about her journey as a wahine Māori through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts with candour and wry humour the racism she and other Māori experience, and she highlights, in an infinitely readable way, the structural inequalities in the health system.

JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY

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

At the Point of Seeing is one of the most accomplished debuts readers are likely to encounter. The collection uses structure to amplify meaning, and its luxuriant lexicon and sometimes knotty syntax are always invigorating rather than confusing. But this book is never a mere exercise in building poems mechanically. Megan Kitching’s poems are warm-blooded, compassionate, and inquiring. They take the reader into an Aotearoa landscape and a moral universe that they will want to explore over and over again.

JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Rugby League in New Zealand: A people’s history by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books) $60

You don’t have to have seen a rugby league game, or even like sport, to be enchanted by Ryan Bodman’s debut book. This is a meticulously researched and engagingly written social history, packed full of stories about what rugby league has meant not just to the players and their supporters, but also to entire communities. The photographs – showing crowd support, action shots, smiling children, and female players – give us a fascinating insight into the story of the sport, whether on the margins or in the mainstream.

• The other short-listed books.

• The other long-listed books.