Read or latest newsletter. Find out about the International Booker Prize short list; about new cooksbooks; and about some graphic novels for young people. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Take one last ride on the People’s Carousel.
11 April 2025
If you haven’t come across Maira Kalman’s work, you’re in for a treat. These seemingly ‘nice’ paintings are loaded with meanings, and double meanings, with irreverence and wit. They can also be morose or mundane, profound and sorrowful; Kalman’s wry humour keeping the darkest emotions at bay. They capture the full gamut of human life and interactions. And within all these complex emotions that Kalman’s picture and text publications provoke, there is a remarkable lightness which is exhilarating, making her books the ones you want to keep close. In Still Life With Remorse: Family Stories Kalman unpicks her own and other family histories. Here are the famous, mercilessly poked at. The Tolstoys’ disfunction, Chekov’s misery, Kafka and Mahler both bilious driven by regret (and family) to create, and here is Cicero regretting everything. But these are mere interludes, along with the musical intervals, to the stories at the heart of this collection of writings and paintings. Here are the empty chairs, the tablecloths, the people gathered, the hallway, the death bed, the flowers in vases and the fruit in bowls, all triggering a memory, all resting not so quietly. Here are the parents, the uncle, the sister. Here is the aging, the forgetting and the not forgiving. Stepping back to the Holocaust, to Tel Aviv, to those that left and to those that were erased. Here are the choices and the impossible sitting around the room still living. Walking through one door and into another place, remorse following. Despite it all, there is a way to step out of one’s shoes and walk free. Still Life With Remorse is, in spite of itself, life, that is, merriment.
Whether you are looking for new ways to cook with staples like potatoes and cabbage, wanting to expand your pantry with ingredients like dried lime, or ready to travel through food to explore new culinary delights, there will be something here to enliven your taste buds, and warm your Autumn days.
Travel across Eastern Europe with some humble vegetables. In Kapusta, Alissa Timoshkina celebrates five key vegetables — cabbage, beetroot, potato, carrot and mushrooms. This is cooking that has affordability, seasonality, sustainability and, above all, great flavor at its heart. The cabbage that stays in the back of the fridge will come to the fore, and new recipes for potatoes are always popular, while the colour and earthy flavours of beetroot can set off any dish. Add in a chapter on pickles and ferments and a dive into dumplings you’ll be well immersed in culinary joys of Eastern Europe.
Maryam Jillani started a food blog in 2017 to highlight the diverse cuisine of Pakistan. Sharing borders with Afghanistan, China, India, and Iran, and a history of migration and trade has ensured an exciting cuisine — abundant in spices with a variety of ingredients and cooking techniques. From home cooking to restaurants and the pleasure of the street stand, Jillani explores the regions from the coast to the highlands giving us a comprehensive survey of Pakistan’s food as well as wonderful story-telling. Packed with recipes from pantry staples to snacks and breads, vegetable, fish and meat dishes, as well as sweets and drinks, this one will fill a gap on your shelves.
"This is the Pakistani cookbook I've been waiting for! A mouthwatering celebration of a beautiful country. These recipes and stories will warm your heart." —Yasmin Khan, author of Zaitoun, Ripe Figs, and The Saffron Tales
If the name Noor Murad sounds familiar, that’s because she’s been involved with the Ottolenghi kitchen and contributed to the ‘Test Kitchen’ books, as well as Flavour and Falastin. In Lugma she draws on her Bahrani family heritage as well as influences from the wider Levantine cooking pot. Bold in flavours, with innovative recipes Noor blends comfort home cooking with fresh ideas perfectly. Here you will find black limes, elaborate rice dishes, abundant herbs, as well as the delights of sour and sweet.
"I adore this book. It's personal, beautifully written — Noor's voice draws you in and holds you there — and the recipes are absolutely glorious." — Diana Henry
In this new Phaidon classic be immersed in the warmth and beauty of the Balearic Islands. Classic Mediterrean ingredients — olive oil, fish, seafood, garlic, tomatoes — combine with practices and recipes passed down through generations. Koehler delves into the food traditions, local markets, and rich cultural history of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera. The result is a cookbook packed with information and over 150 recipes for pleasurable home cooking and eating.
In Pranzo Guy Mirabella delves into his Sicilian heritage. Here you will find the gusto of Italian pastas and sauces, alongside herbs and spices, and ingredients like kolhrabi and prickly pear.
Seasonal and sumptuous, Mirabella conveys his zest for food, art, and life in the pages of Pranzo. Designed with a playful eye, the book is a treat and the recipes infused with nourishment and pleasure.
In Umai: Recipes from a Japanese Home Kitchen you have precision alongside the simple and relaxed. Discover unfussy lunch dishes and favorite family meals. Find recipes that are a joy to make together and to share. Millie Tsukagoshi Lagares guides you through her home kitchen and out onto the streets to experience food is both serene and exhilarating.
From dumplings to fungi to matcha cookies, you will find accessible recipes that will delight and sooth in the making and the eating.
”A vibrant exploration of Japanese cuisine with beautiful writing and exciting recipes to nourish the soul.” —Ixta Belfrage
It had got so that he could no longer listen to music. He had used to enjoy listening to music but suddenly or gradually it had become intolerable. He could not bear the repetitions of the small and large segments of music while he was listening to it, and what more was music than repetitions of small and large segments of itself, and he could not bear that the music repeated itself endlessly in his head after had listened to it, or, really, after just hearing it without even listening to it: every snatch became an öhrwurm burrowing into him for days. He could not bear even a few bars of music that he knew, because those few bars, that snatch, that hook, drew up the whole of the intolerable music to torment him, and he could not bear music that he did not know as each new bar struck him as inevitable and he always had the dreadful feeling that he had heard and suffered from this music before, or, rather, that his hearing and suffering from this music, whether he had heard it before or not, was a hearing and suffering that stretched into eternity in both or all directions. Of course, it was not only music that he could no longer tolerate: any kind of stimulation of his senses and any kind of self-replicating thought plunged him into the deepest suffering. He could not decide whether to call this suffering imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome, for he always felt compelled to nullify his experiences with words, but these terms, once he had thought of them, just repeated themselves in his mind and became examples of the phenomenon that they were a weak attempt to describe. Desperate and weak. He was almost at the point that he could not bear to perform the necessary but necessarily repetitive actions that allowed him to function in the world, or what passed as functioning in his case; he could not bear this constant daily getting up, moving about and eventually going to bed at last, each day the same or each day the same with pathetic little variations that merely reinforced the inescapability of the repetition of the whole, the rolling inevitability of the day. He had not yet tired of going to bed. All he wanted to do was turn his brain off. If he was an insomniac he would not last a week, he thought. Now, though, he thought, that I have thought that thought I will probably lie in bed tonight thinking about how intolerable my imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome would be if I was an insomniac and could not turn my brain off, and I will probably think this insomniac thought over and over until I become an insomniac by this repeated thought; thinking about not being an insomniac will make me into an insomniac, he thought. I will not last the week. In Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel The Calculation of Volume (five volumes of which have been written and published in Danish and two so far in English translation by Barbara Haveland), the narrator finds herself endlessly repeating the eighteenth of November, or, rather the eighteenth of November endlessly repeats itself and she seems to be the only person not caught up in this repetition. Is time somehow caught in a loop, and if so why is she aware of this loop, both trapped in it and outside it, fractured from the endlessly repeating matrix of stopped time; or are all moments in fact like this, is there nothing but an infinite set of static and unpassing moments through which our consciousness shoots itself like a rocket, breaking through each day into a new day, a new set of moments strung together merely on our awareness of them, in which case why can’t the narrator move on, what is it that brings her back to restart each day as the same eighteenth of November? She returns home (she has been away). She hides in her house in a room that her husband does not go into that day. She observes her husband, she observes her garden and the weather, she soon knows exactly when the house will creak, a bird will sing, a car will pass: it is the same each day; each day is the same day. She observes and observes and the scale of her observation alters: the infraordinary bristles with significance but significance amounts to nothing in the end. Everything is reset. The narrator tries making contact with her husband but eventually tires of explaining the situation anew every day: he cannot remember what she told him on the previous iteration of this one repeating day. Without memory there is no time. There is no companionship in the narrator’s husband. Only the narrator experiences a progression of time, only she is moving on though only she is aware that nothing else moves on so, maybe, actually, she is the only one who does not move on. What the narrator consumes is not replenished. Everything else is replenished. What the narrator does is not undone. Everything else is undone. She wonders, what is a person’s impact on the world? She wonders, how much experience can you squeeze from or into a single day without losing your capacity for experience? We wonder, when is even a single day too much? Even though his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome was beginning to make every aspect of his life intolerable, every aspect that is except the relinquishment of consciousness that presents itself as sleep, for some reason his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome was not aggravated by reading On the Calculation of Volume, in fact it was slightly emolliated, if that is the word, his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome was soothed a little by an account of total repetition, although perhaps it was not an account of total repetition but an account of liberation from and within the context of total repetition, which might, he thought, be helpful to him in his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome and its accelerating terrifying approach to total repetition, an approach that could soon make life intolerable. Too much hangs on this, but he was ready, he thought, to read Volume 2.
Graphic novels are an excellent way not only into books for children, but also into social issues and history. With excellent illustrations and styles of drawing to please a variety of tastes, we are always on the lookout at VOLUME for graphic novels that will engage young people in the world, in narrative, and in the wonder of the written word and art on the page.
Here’s a selection of recent titles to pique your curiosity:
Song of a Blackbird, from Dutch author and illustrator Maria van Lieshout, is a skillfully told story of famlly history, the trials of surviving World War II in Europe, and an emotional journey for a young woman trying to help her Oma. Armed with only a few photographs of buildings in Amsterdam, Annick (in 2011) must unpick the mystery of her Oma’s childhood to save her life. A two-handed story, the other strand of this story is set in wartime Holland. It’s 1943 and everything is changing for Emma as she embarks on a dangerous mission right under the noses of the Nazi soldiers. Song of a Blackbird has striking two-tone illustrations with splashes of colour complemented by black-and-white historic photographs. This is a powerful story of courage, compassion and resistance.
Taking another episode from history is Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie — another dual-time novel. This time we are in Japan in the 1940s with Amy, a Japanese American girl born in Hawaii, sent to visit her ailing great-grandmother. After Pearl Harbour is bombed Amy is stuck in Japan, where she is conscripted by the military to be a Monitor Girl listening in and translating U.S. radio messages. The other story thread is the one her great-grandmother tells her: the Japanese annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in Okinawa in 1879. Both are stories of survival and hope, and for Amy, identity, the conflict of being both Japanese and American. Christine Norrie’s illustrations capture the confusion and emotion of the situation, and the sharp singular colour palette has great impact.
Young Hag is another wonderful publication from the pen and wit of Isabel Greenberg. This delightful coming-of-age story takes us into history, into the drama of Arthurian legend. Here we will encounter tales of tales of Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, King Arthur, Morgan le Fay, and Lancelot. Here there is a changeling that needs returning to the Otherworld. The Ancient Crone has left a door open. The magic is leaking through. Young Hag, one of the last real witches in Britain, must find her magic to reverse a wrong. But can she do it? With glorious illustrations, an irrepressible heroine, and a wonderful feminist retelling of Arthurian legends, who could resist this book?
Pick a book and watch it bloom. A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Florilegium: The Book of Plants.
NORTHBOUND: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa. Walking from Bluff, at the southern tip of the South Island, to Cape Reinga, at the northern tip of the North Island, award-winning journalist, and author of Southern Nights, Naomi Arnold spent nearly nine months following Te Araroa, fulfilling a 20-year dream. Alone, she traversed mountains, rivers, cities and plains from summer to spring, walking on through days of thick mud, blazing sun, lightning storms, and cold, starlit nights. Along the way she encountered colourful locals and travellers who delight and inspire her. This is an upbeat, fascinating, and inspiring memoir of the joys and pains found in the wilderness, solitude, friendship, and love. Signed copies available while stock lasts.
The International Booker Prize celebrates works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English. You will find all of these books very well written and translated, deeply interesting, and satisfyingly horizon-broadening.
Read what the judges have to say about each of this year’s short-listed books and then click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson
What the judges said: ”Anne Serre’s short novel is the deeply romantic telling of a platonic love story between the narrator and his complicated childhood friend, Fanny; a story so beautifully realised — and translated so sensitively by Mark Hutchinson — that the pair become part of the life of the reader. A perfectly balanced book, slender in size but bearing significant weight all the way through, A Leopard-Skin Hat is testament to the ways in which we continue to hold the people we love in our memories, with respect and dignity, after they die.”
On the Calculation of Volume: I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
What the judges said: “On the Calculation of Volume I takes a potentially familiar narrative trope — a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day — and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator. This book presses its mood, its singular time signature and its philosophical depth into the reader. You feel you are in it, which is sometimes unnerving, sometimes soothing, and this effect lingers long after the book is finished.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda
What the judges said: “Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird tells the story of humanity’s evolution on an epic scale that spans as far into the future as the human imagination could possibly allow. In each of its chapters, separated by eons but gracefully unified under the crystalline clarity of Asa Yoneda’s seemingly timeless translation, a variegated cast of posthuman characters each interrogate what it means to be not an individual or a nation but an entire species, that unit of being we currently and urgently struggle so much to grasp, much to the cost to the planet we live on and our own survival.”
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes
What the judges said: “An astute, discomfiting, cringe-making and often laugh-out-loud funny portrait of everyday privilege and modern aspirations, following an expat couple in Berlin. Tom and Anna are defined by their material lives, working their way through a tick-list of clichés readers will recognise in themselves and experience as a dig in the ribs. Compassionate as well as cynical, the book – in an exquisite, precise and perfectly executed translation from Italian by Sophie Hughes – holds up a mirror up to the way so many people aspire to and are let down by today’s off-the-shelf measures of success. A startlingly refreshing read.”
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson
What the judges said: “Following the disastrous deaths of 27 people, when a dinghy capsises while crossing the Channel, the book’s narrator — who works for the French authorities and who had refused to send a rescue team — attempts to justify the indefensible and clear her conscience. In a world where heinous actions often have no consequence, where humanity’s moral code appears fragile, where governments can condemn whole swathes of society to poverty or erasure, Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit — and whether we could all do better. A gut-punch of a novel.”
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
What the judges said: ”In a dozen stories – written across three decades – Banu Mushtaq, a major voice within progressive Kannada literature – portrays the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.”
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4 April 2025
“Art is always an overreaction,” writes Yoko Tawada in her lithe and compact novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky); this statement being in itself an overstatement, as all statements are overstatements. Did we not learn at school, he pondered, that every overreaction provokes an equal and opposite overreaction, that the impact of each overstatement causes another overstatement to leap out at the end of the line, and so forth back and forth until the Newton’s cradle of the mind is finally still if it ever can be still. Does any movement towards certainty destroy the very certainty towards which it moves? Is that for which we reach inevitably destroyed by the reaching? This is no way to start a review, he thought; in his search for clarity he has produced a wash of vague sensations barely distinguishable from life itself, so to call it, a fractality of precisions more complicated than disorder; what is literature for, after all, if not to make life more wieldable, or our thinking about it more wieldable at least? No such luck. If the words for things can be used as substitutes for things, they are subject to linguistic forces and relations to which the things themselves are not subject. There’s an illness in all of this, a linguistic illness, or an illness of consciousness, that blurs, ultimately, or penultimately, or by something preceding the penultimate by one or several or many steps, the distinctions between words and their objects and between words and other words, a blurring that allows for or entails the febrile reconfiguration of language into new forms, he was going to write new and less useful forms, but the utility of language is no measure of its other functions (its other pathologies, he almost wrote). The narrator of Tawada’s novel refers to himself as ‘the patient’ and refers to himself in the third person (“third person is a form of salvation” (as we know)) and gives an account of the stayings-in and goings-out that are constrained by the vagaries of his illness and the vagaries of the illness of the world at large, if these are not one and the same: “The patient leaves the house as seldom as possible, and every time he is forced to go out, he first checks to see if the coast is clear. The coast is seldom clear, hardly ever.” If he ever does go out. He meets and befriends one Leo-Eric Fu, who shares with Patrik (Patrik is the name attached by others to the one who calls himself the patient; the patient's name as he approaches the collective world (plausibly a kind of healing (“A person who can continue to distance himself from home, one step farther each day, is no longer a patient.”))) a love and knowledge of the work of Paul Celan, a poet who made from German, a language broken by the trauma of hosting the Holocaust, a new language of beauty and possibility made entirely of the marked, traumatised and broken pieces of that language, and with whose work this novel is a form of conversation (please note that it is not necessary to the appreciation of the novel to be familiar with the other pole of that conversation, though the novel may lead a reader towards that pole). For the patient it is, we assume from the deliberately inconclusive evidence, the trauma of the Covid 19 pandemic that has broken language, either because of the collective circumstances in which he finds himself or also because he himself is actually in addition to metaphorically ill. I am not unfamiliar, he thought, as he attempted to continue with what was intended as a review but was suffering from an illness which made it both not really a review and very hard to sustain, with the linguistic deliria induced by fever, with the disintegrative and recombinatory compulsions that reveal something about language and are in fact structurally inherent in language but usually suppressed for reasons of utility or ‘health’. Any illness will remake language, given the chance to spread. In the delirium of the novel, the patient’s illness (“an autoimmune disorder of the mind”) attacks the distinctions between the binaries it posits: isolation/connection, illness/health, internal/external, uncertainty/comprehension, experience/identity; and attacks all borders generally: those between persons individually and those set between groups and nations. There are no contradictions. “People say I'm sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.” The forms of thought that gave rise to the illness, whatever it is, are broken and remade: “I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge. These are the fields in which I'll find my role.” It is possible, even probable, he thought, that the entire book takes place within the patient’s head, if such a place exists (“What if Leo-Eric isn't really sitting here and this is all just taking place in my imagination?”), although, towards the end, the Patrik-impulse begins to gain a little ground from the patient-impulse, and the possibility that the idea of Patrik and also the ideas of Patrik could exist in the minds of others begins at last to emerge. Language, ravaged by trauma and isolation, begins to adopt new forms. Is this healing? Illness, we begin to see, is entangled in time: “The present is a constant deferment.”
I was beguiled initially by the cover of this book, then the title, then the recommendation by Megan Hunter (author of The End We Start From), and after that the description. Forty women in an underground bunker with no clear understanding of their captivity. Why are they there? What was their life before? And as the years pass, what purpose do the guards, or those who employ the guards, have for them? The narrator of this story is a young woman—captured as a very young child—who knows no past: her life is the bunker. The women she lives with tolerate her but have little to do with her and hardly converse with her. She is not one of them. They have murky memories of being wives, mothers, sisters, workers. They know something catastrophic happened but can not remember what. The Child (nameless) is seen as other, not like them, not from the same place as them. The Child has been passing the days and the years in acceptance, knowing nothing else, but her burgeoning sexuality and her awareness of life beyond the cage (she starts to watch the guards, one young man in particular), limited as it is to this stark underground environment, also triggers an awakeness. She begins to think, to wonder and ask questions. As she counts the time by listening to her heartbeats and wins the trust of a woman in the group, The Child’s observations, not clouded by memories, are pure and exacting. We, as readers, are no closer to understanding the dilemma the women find themselves in, and like them are mystified by the situation. Our view is only that of The Child and what she gleans from the women—their past lives that are words that have little meaning to her, whether that is nature (a flower), culture (music) or social structures (work, relationships)—this world known as Earth is a foreign landscape to her. When the sirens go off one day, the guards abandon their positions and leave. Fortunately for the women, this happens just as they have opened the hatch for food delivery. The young woman climbs through and retrieves a set of keys that have been dropped in the panic. The women are free, but what awaits them is in many ways is another prison. Following the steps to the surface takes them to a barren plain with nothing else in sight. What is this place? Is it Earth? And where are the other people? Will they find their families or partners or other humans? The guards have disappeared within minutes—we never are given any clues to where they have gone—have they vapourised? Have they left in swift and silent aircraft? The women gather supplies, of which there are plenty, and begin to walk. I Who Have Never Known Men is a feminist dystopia in the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale or The Book of the Unnamed Midwife but is more silent, more internal, and both frustrating and compelling. I found myself completely captivated by the mystery of this place and the certainty of the young woman. The exploration of humanity and its ability to hope and love within what we would consider a bleak environment, and the magnitude of one woman to gather these women to her and cherish them as they age is exceedingly tender. The introduction by Sophie MacKintosh, which I recommend reading after rather than before, adds another layer of meaning to the novel. I Who Have Never Known Men is haunting and memorable—a philosophical treatise on what it is to be alone and to be lonely, and what freedom truly is.
Escape into a book! A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? A young woman arrives in Melbourne in 1986 to research the work of Virginia Woolf, and finds her life reshaped in unexpected ways both by her studies and by her experiences.
“Michelle de Kretser is a genius — one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There’s no writer I’d rather read.” —V.V. Ganeshananthan, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction
"Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book." —Ali Smith
Any of these books could go straight to the top of your reading pile. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber $38
Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work-a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way — from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album. As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves. Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonising search for meaning through art. This book delivers many of the reading pleasures of Thomas Bernhard.
"Lesser Ruins is a near perfect document of what it is to procrastinate, spun out in Haber's signature absurdist, looping, intellectually ecstatic style." —Emily Temple, Literary Hub
"Haber's novel is fluent and compelling, often rhapsodic, with a cumulative power to its repetitions." —Hal Jensen, Times Literary Supplement
Twigs and Stones by Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop $30
Snake and Lizard live together in a burrow in the desert. They are such good friends that Lizard decides to display their names above the burrow entrance. But three small words can cause trouble between friends. They must decide whose name should appear first. Then Lizard makes an unfortunate spelling mistake—he thinks it’s very funny but Snake is not laughing. Snake finds some spelling of her own that will teach Lizard a lesson! The friends eventually find a way to put the argument behind them in this funny picture book that holds a mirror to our human flaws and reminds us that names and nicknames must be used with care.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits by Hiromi Ito (translated from Japanese by Jon L. Pitt) $40
A series of intertwined poetic essays written by Japanese poet Hiromi Ito — part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants. Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one’s life through the logic of flora. Ito’s graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.
"Ito's vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections on what it means to be a human moving through the environment. Jon Pitt's translation gracefully conveys Ito's engaged yet casual tone while allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it's not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph in this book is a joy to read." —Kathryn Hemmann
"These ambient poems about the flora of the California desert and Kumamoto, Japan are philosophical meditations on the peculiarity of human storytelling and naming practices.. Ito's poems suggest that the ways we humans look at plants contain information about how we produce both selves and others as well as narratives about death and transformation." —Angela Hume
Plasmas by Céline Minard (translated from French by Annabel L. Kim) $35
The stories in Plasmas dive into a post-human, more-than-human world where life as we know it has been replaced by life as it goes on. Acrobats glide through the air attached to biotech devices, an archivist presents scenes from Earth after interstellar colonization to her students, and scientists in Siberia play god with a manmade beast. Written as a series of vignettes into futures near and far, Plasmas dives into questions of legacy, memory, the body, and technology through striking prose from one of France's leading sci-fi writers. Equally comfortable in the worlds of Donna Haraway and Vladimir Nabokov, Plasmas is stunning in both philosophical and literary depth.
"Plasmas is a cubist painting: representing reality, while simultaneously shattering our perception of it." —The Harvard Gazette
"Plasmas is six stories that, as an archipelago-vaguely disquieting, wonderfully styled-constitutes a unique literary planet, if not a constellation of heretofore unclassified matter, forming an unprecedented unknown." —Le Monde
One Boat by Jonathan Buckley $39
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast — the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly — her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John's; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
”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 Spanish Mediterranean Islands Cookbook by Jeff Koehler $70
Explore the diverse cuisine of Spain's Balearic Islands - Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera — through 155 authentic home cooking recipes. Located off the Spanish Mediterranean coast, the Balearic Islands are renowned for their natural beauty, yet their cuisine has been largely underappreciated. This evocative recipe collection transports readers to the family kitchens, cafes, and markets of the archipelago, revealing a distinct culinary heritage shaped by the region's geography. The islands' most beloved dishes celebrate local produce, familiar Mediterranean ingredients — olive oil and garlic, rice and fresh fish — and resourceful cooking methods passed down for generations. From Menorcan-Style Stuffed Eggplant, Baked Fish with Spinach and Swiss Chard, Black Rice with Cuttlefish and Artichokes, and Pork with Wild Mushrooms to Baked Figs, Almond Cookies, and Formentera's most famous dessert, Fresh Cheesecake with Mint, the book's recipes include both sweet and savoury classics. Alongside the bounty of dishes, acclaimed author Jeff Koehler presents short essays highlighting culinary traditions, such as weekly village markets and St Martin's Day festivities; local ingredients, including cured sausages and tomato preserves; and essential techniques, such as preparing a perfect sofregit.
Boodle Boodle Boodle by Geoff Stahl $28
The Clean's 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa and defined what became known as the ‘Dunedin Sound’ At the time, The Clean were seen as ambassadors for a burgeoning independent music culture in Aotearoa, drawing on the DIY spirit of punk and post-punk centred around Dunedin. Geoff Stahl considers the influence and legacy of the EP and band on indie music in New Zealand and elsewhere. Examining the myth of the ‘Dunedin Sound’ associated with The Clean, the EP, and Flying Nun Records, he details how this myth emerged, its repudiation by many of the artists it presumes to cover, and its complicated persistence in the contemporary New Zealand imaginary.
Song of a Blackbird Maria van Lieshout $30
Emma is a young student about to be drawn into what will become the biggest bank heist in European history: swapping 50 million guilders' worth of forged treasury bonds for real ones — right under the noses of the Nazis. Emma's life — and the lives of thousands, including a little girl named Hanna — hangs in the balance. Almost seventy years later, Annick discovers something surprising about her family. Her grandmother needs a bone marrow donor but none of her relatives is a match. In fact, they are not even related. Desperate to find a living blood relative, Annick dives into the past, aided by her grandmother's only childhood possession, five copper etchings, and the name of their maker: Emma Bergsma. In this stranger-than-fiction graphic novel, Maria van Lieshout weaves a tale about family, courage and the power of art. Beautifully done.
”So heart-rending and familiar, and so brilliantly, unforgettably different.” —Morris Gleitzman
”Song of a Blackbird illustrates, with great tenderness, how the past lives within us. This is essential, illuminating reading.” —R. J. Palacio
The Crisis of Narration by Byung-chul Han $31
Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling shouts out loudly but narratives no longer have their binding force. Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community — the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling. The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our age.
"Like a Sartre for the age of screens, Han puts words to our prevailing condition of not-quite-hopeless digital despair." —The New Yorker
A History of the World in Six Plagues: How contagion, class and captivity shape us — From Cholera to Covid-19 by Edna Bonhomme $40
Edna Bonhomme traces the long history of viral outbreaks under conditions of social confinement-the plantation system, colonial camps, imprisonment, quarantine, factories-and reveals how these enclosed spaces fuel epidemics. This is a book about the complicated histories of movement and stagnation, and about the time we live in, with a focus on the racialised history of several key epidemics from the impact of cholera on the plantation economy to HIV/AIDS outbreaks in US prisons.
”An expansive portraiture of how colonialism and confinement have influenced our understanding of illness and humanity. Thankfully, due to the author's talent and sheer strength in combining personal narrative with history, this book is also tender as it tackles some of the most stigmatised subjects of our time.” —Morgan Jerkins
Twist by Colum McCann $37
Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea- the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world's information across the ocean floor — and what happens when they break. So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver — and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele. As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer — and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding on the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in. Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him.
”McCann may follow Coppola upriver and Conrad to the heart of darkness but the concerns of his novel are contemporary and urgent and utterly compelling. This is an ambitious novel, note perfect, wild but controlled, with its deft apparatus mapping our most mysterious 21st century malaise — the great loneliness of the connected world.” —Kevin Barry
The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra $45
an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications. Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world - the 'darker peoples', in W. E. B Du Bois's words — the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation — freedom from the white man's world. The World after Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century — the West's triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the darker peoples' frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world's balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world's population. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration.
”In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity.” —Rashid Khalidi
”This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the centre of this book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza.” —Hisham Matar
Wife by Charlotte Mendelson $38
When Zoe Stamper, specialist in Ancient Greek Tragedy, meets fellow academic Dr Penny Cartwright at a faculty event, she seems impossibly glamorous. After all, Zoe is several rungs down the academic pecking order, and a nervous ingenue as far as Penny's sophisticated circle is concerned. But Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues. Once Penny confesses all to her live-in lover, Penny and Zoe move in together and their happiness seems assured. But there is something else Penny needs as badly in her life as Zoe's adoration, and thus the beginning of their affair might also have signalled its end.
”A devastating treat of a novel: funny, furious, dark and delicious.” —Sarah Waters
”It takes the most ferocious intelligence, skill and a deep reservoir of sadness to write a novel as funny as this. I adored it.” —Meg Mason
Too Late to Awaken: What lies ahead when there is no future? by Slavoj Žižek $30
We hear all the time that it's five minutes to global doomsday, so now is our last chance to avert disaster. But what if the only way to prevent a catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened - that we're already five minutes past zero hour? Why do we seem unable to avert our course to self-destruction? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek deliver his most forceful, hopeful account of our discontents yet. Surveying the interlocking crises we currently face — global warming, war, famine, disease — he points us towards the radical, emancipatory politics that we need in order to halt our drift towards disaster.
Read our 424th newsletter
28 March 2025
“Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon affections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. The heart, incorruptible crystal.” Fleur Jaeggy’s unforgettable short novel, named after the ship upon which the narrator, aged fifteen, and her estranged father (unreachable, “aloof from himself”) spend an unprecedented and unrepeated fourteen-day cruise in the Greek Islands with members of the Swiss guild to which the father belongs, is a catalogue of mental retreat, relinquishment, estrangement, loss, and turning away: enervations towards a non-existence either hurried or postponed but inevitable to all. Jaeggy’s short sentences each have the precision of a stiletto: each stabs and surprises, making tiny wounds, each with a drop of glistening blood. When the narrator looks at her father Johannes’s diary, “written by a man precise in his absence,” her description of it could be of her own narration: “It is proof. It is the confirmation of an existence. Brief phrases. Without comment. Like answers to a questionnaire. There are no impressions, feelings. Life is simplified, almost as if it were not there.” Jaeggy writes with absolute, clinical precision but narrow focus, as if viewing the world down a tube, to great effect. Johannes, for example, is described as having “Pale, gelid eyes. Unnatural. Like a fairy tale about ice. Wintry eyes. With a glimmer of romantic caprice. The irises of such a clear, faded green that they made you feel uneasy. It is almost as if they lack the consistency of a gaze. As if they were an anomaly, generations old.” The account of the Greek cruise forms the core of the novel, but it is preceded, intercut and followed by memories of childhood and of subsequent events (mostly the deaths of almost everyone mentioned), all related closely in the present tense, but non-sequential, resulting in a sense of time not dissimilar to that experienced when repeatedly tripping over an unseen obstacle. Most of the book is narrated in the first person but the narrator achieves a degree of detachment from incidents that threaten “the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation” by relating them in the third person, referring to herself as “Johannes’s daughter”: the death of Orsola (the maternal grandmother with whom she lived after her parents’ divorce, her mother’s effective disappearance, her father’s sudden poverty and his effective exile from her life) and the violent sexual experiences she receives from two of the sailors: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. But she does it all the same. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes’s daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again.” The narrator writes her memories not so much to remember as to forget, to relinquish. Words turn experience into story, which interposes itself between experience and whoever is oppressed by it. As Jaeggy writes, “people imagine words in order to narrate the world and to substitute it.”
Oliver Wormwood is struggling to find a Trade. His five older sisters are all amazing. One is a mage, another a lawkeeper, Willow is a ranger, another a blacksmith and the first-born an explorer. All roles his father admires. Oliver isn’t great at any of them. The Calling day is not going well, and the last option presents itself with the late arrival of the librarian. Oliver’s life is about to change. It’s not the most daring Trade. Or so he thinks…. Day one in the Library, the head librarian drops dead in mid-sentence, there are cats that appear from nowhere, and the books seem to have a life of their own! This job may not be as dull as Oliver thought! And in fact a bit more dangerous than anticipated. But can he survive the day!
There are strange comings and goings, complicated enquiries, and much to learn about the returns system, the bookworms (large and hungry) who come out at night, the bats, and the hoovering books! Luckily, Oliver isn’t completely on his own. There’s a girl called Agatha who lives in the library and knows her way around, willing to give Oliver a helping hand. Yet there’s something odd about her. One moment she’s there right beside him, and at other times nowhere to be seen. There are also the cats, all with their distinct personalities and, as Oliver finds out, usefulness. One is a great guard cat, another adept at being ferocious (handy for beasts that accidently come out of books, and a pesky firedrake!), while others are great company. Even as Oliver settles into his daily tasks, things are far from plain sailing. There are thieves sneaking through the aisles, powerful books to protect, and other books that need to be handled very carefully. In this library what it says on the cover really does count; — Death by a Thousand Papercuts, anyone?
When several murders happen in or near the library, it’s time for Oliver to put his mind to the task, and solve the mystery. But who can he trust? Is the murderer in his midst? Where does Agatha dissappear to? Who is the stranger Simeon Golightly and what is he looking for? Why are some of Oliver’s sisters popping in to see him at the library? Just being friendly, or is there something else afoot? Or has a magical creature escaped its covers and gone on the rampage?
This is a highly enjoyable, amusing tale with plenty of twists and turns, with an excellent cast of brilliant characters, both human and animal. Oliver is the best friend for anyone who has ever doubted themselves, as he discovers talents he least expected and that being yourself is a good thing. If you like a book set in a library with cats, daring escapades, and magical books, The 113th Assistant Librarian will be perfect!
This is a significantly affecting work, comprised of mundane details noticed so clearly and described so precisely that they resonate and ‘clean out’ a reader’s perceptive and literary faculties. In 300 seven-line prose poems, von Sturmer opens his — and our — awareness to the particulars of both his surroundings and his memory, exploring insights beyond the reach of the rational mind that press at us from the quotidian world, drawing no distinctions between the beautiful, and awkward, and the absurd.
“This substantial publication with its witty and paradoxical title is a meditative poetry journal, artfully constructed to present what amounts to a series of mirabilia: anecdotes that might arouse astonishment or wonder in a spiritual sense. Richard von Sturmer’s poems seek illumination from the ordinary everyday world. Drawing partly on Buddhist teachings, life itself is here seen as miraculous. There's a dancing intelligence at work, highly alert, self aware, and fearless.” —judges’ citation, 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
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The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $40
In the summer of 2020, as Germany slowly emerges from lockdown, a young Japanese woman studying in Göttingen waits at the train station to meet an old friend. Nomiya died a decade earlier in the Tōhoku tsunami, but he has suddenly returned without any explanation. The reunited friends share a past that's a world away from the tranquillity of Göttingen. Yet Nomiya's spectral presence destabilises something in the city: mysterious guests appear, eerie discoveries are made in the forest and, as the past becomes increasingly vivid, the threads of time threaten to unravel. With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is an astounding exploration of the strange orbits of memory and the haunting presence of the past. [Paperback]
"A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief." —Jessica Au
”This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed.” —Yoko Ogawa
”Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence.” —Yoko Tawada
Central Otago Couture: The Eden Hore Collection by Jane Malthus and Claire Regnault, with photographs by Derek Henderson $70
In 1975, a makeshift museum opened on a farm in the tussocked hills of the Maniototo region of Central Otago. The main feature of this new attraction was the more than 220 high-end fashion garments on display. It has been called one of the most significant collections of its kind in Australasia. And it was housed in an old tractor shed. It had been amassed by J Eden Hore, a successful but quietly spoken high-country farmer — a man of many contrasts. He embodied and boldly defied the stereotype of the ' Southern Man' , confidently forging his own idiosyncratic path through life. Central Otago Couture tells the compelling story of his string of eccentric and memorable obsessions, from Miss New Zealand shows to a menagerie of animals, at the centre of which was his collection of over 270 high-fashion garments. The collection' s continued existence, acquired by the Central Otago District Council, honours and recognises the skills of New Zealand creatives and designers of the 1970s and 1980s, and represents a unique slice of couture fashion not found anywhere else in the country. To this end, fashion photographer Derek Henderson has captured these extraordinary garments in the empty majesty of the Central Otago landscapes that Eden Hore loved, bringing these stories to life for a new generation. [Hardback]
Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado $48
A mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment. The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament. With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado's theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our actions: transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, 'electronic heroin', digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado's most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward. [Paperback with French flaps]
"How lucky we are to have Paul Preciado as companion and interpreter of all we've just been through, with a global pandemic — luckier still is the gift of his revolutionary optimism, which runs through his thorough, gritty analysis of our current predicament. If you're tired of ricocheting between neofascists and doomer dudes, here comes Dysphoria Mundi to recast our situation as ‘the most beautiful (or devastating) collective adventure we have ever embarked on’, and give us new strategies and inspiration to reconceptualise — and stay on — the ride." —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
"Paul Preciado's singular genius is for writing vividly within the immediacy of everyday life, and then also unraveling from there the deeper historical forces that shape those moments. In Dysphoria Mundi we learn how the invisible traces of a virus thread bodies and societies together, lacing us into shifting regimes of power and commodification. Preciadio has that rare ability to lead the reader through familiar situations to unexpected conceptual insight. An essential thinker for the contemporary world." —McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
”This monumental work brings the commitments of the bibliophile to bear on a time and a world now irreversibly out of joint. Drawing on theories of language, mind, technology, immunology to retell a story of this world, Preciado's work more firmly shatters the binaries responsible for the destruction of love and futurity." —Judith Butler
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (translated from French by Helen Stevenson) $43
In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix's fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes. [Paperback]
”Following the disastrous deaths of 27 people, when a dinghy capsizes while crossing the Channel, the book’s narrator — who works for the French authorities and who had refused to send a rescue team — attempts to justify the indefensible and clear her conscience. In a world where heinous actions often have no consequence, where humanity’s moral code appears fragile, where governments can condemn whole swathes of society to poverty or erasure, Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit – and whether we could all do better. A gut-punch of a novel. “ —judges’ citation, International Booker Prize 2025
There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (translated from French by Laëtitia Saint-Loubert and Karen Fleetwood) $42
The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own. This is La Reunion in the 1980s: high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. One little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents' reign of terror and turns to school for salvation. Rich in the history of the island's customs and superstitions, and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirize the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you. [Paperback]
“A rollicking, sardonic picaresque set on the French outpost of La Réunion in the. 1980s. The novel has important things to say about colonialism and society, but it’s also tremendous fun — darkly funny, acerbic, energetic. There’s scarcely a dull moment on the page, and the translation is remarkably slick.” —judges’ citation, Republic of Consciousness Prize 2025
”A tour-de-force as volcanic as the little island of La Reunion, a tiny sliver of France marooned in the Indian Ocean, ‘a heap of rubble on the edge of the world’. The narrator of Gaëlle Bélem's novel, a little girl no-one wanted, the unloved daughter of the Dessaintes, is determined to be someone, to tell the story of her family, and through them the story of an island founded on slavery, poverty, cruelty and superstition with a caustic wit and a keen eye. It is a tragi-comedy worthy of Zola, candid and unflinching, yet shot through with humour and poignancy and even a glimmer of hope. Belem's novel is a joyous discovery and in Laetitia Saint-Loubert and Karen Fleetwood she has found translators alert to the nuances of French and Creole and to the poetry threaded through this startling debut.” —Frank Wynne
Pox Romana: The plague that shook the Roman world by Colin Elliott $70
In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history's first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall. In Pox Romana, historian Colin Elliott offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of this pivotal moment in Roman history. Did a single disease — its origins and diagnosis still a mystery — bring Rome to its knees? Carefully examining all the available evidence, Elliott shows that Rome's problems were more insidious. Years before the pandemic, the thin veneer of Roman peace and prosperity had begun to crack: the economy was sluggish, the military found itself bogged down in the Balkans and the Middle East, food insecurity led to riots and mass migration, and persecution of Christians intensified. The pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of a doomed Empire. Arguing that the disease was both cause and effect of Rome's fall, Elliott describes the plague's ‘pre-existing conditions’ (Rome's multiple economic, social, and environmental susceptibilities); recounts the history of the outbreak itself through the experiences of physician, victim, and political operator; and explores postpandemic crises. The pandemic's most transformative power, Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived. [Hardback]
”Enlightening. Elliott expertly draws on trace evidence such as census records, real estate contracts, and paleoclimate research to make his case. It's an informative history that serves to encourage better pandemic preparedness today." —Publishers Weekly
Mother Naked by Glen James Brown $38
The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city's most powerful men. Mother Naked is his name, and the story he's come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome 'walking ghost' some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier. But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith - and the murders - have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery — of class, religion, art and ale — the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine. Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham's Cathedral rolls, 'Modyr Nakett' was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins, in a fury of imaginative recuperation. [Paperback]
”Exhilarating, freewheeling, brilliantly plotted and politically scathing, Mother Naked is a tour de force of language and style, and absolutely a novel for our times.” —Preti Taneja
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary) $35
In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers. [Paperback]
”Reservoir Bitches is a blisteringly urgent collection of interconnected stories about contemporary Mexican women. It absolutely bangs from the first page to the last. It’s extremely funny but deadly serious and we loved the energy and flair of the dual translators’ approach. It packs an enormous political and linguistic punch but is also subtle, revelatory and moving about the ways in which these women hustle, innovate, survive or don’t, in a world of labyrinthine dangers. This book weaves the riotous testimony of the living and the dead to create an expletive-rich feminist blast of Mexican literature. “ —judges’ citation, International Booker Prize 2025
How to Leave the World by Marouane Bakhti (translated from French by Lara Vergnaud) $40
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer. [Paperback]
One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad $38
As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and more, and watching the slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. This powerful book is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means — as a citizen of the US, as a father — to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. [Paperback]
”This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world.” —Richard Flanagan
”It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book.” —Naomi Klein
The Fermentation Kitchen: Recipes and techniques for kimchi, kombucha, koji, and more by Sam Cooper $48
Explore a wide range of authentic and adapted techniques from across cultures and continents and harness bacteria, yeast, and fungus to create a variety of ferments to add flavour to dishes, boost gut health, and give perishable produce a new lease of life. Reconnect with these natural processes and learn to incorporate ferments into your everyday cooking with guides to flavour, texture and aroma alongside recipe ideas serving as inspiration. [Hardback]
”Definitely the best koji book in the world written in English by far!” —Haruko Uchishiba, founder of The Koji Fermentaria
Cities Made Differently by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky $40
Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently. What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika's then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit — because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true. With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see. On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be-and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are. [Paperback]
An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the prison, Restoring a house, Rebuilding myself by Yvonne Jewkes $48
Should architecture be used for punishment? How might the spaces we inhabit nurture or damage us? How can we begin to start over after the worst has happened? Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes grapples with these questions every day as the world's leading expert on rehabilitative prison design; she also faces them in her personal life when her partner of 25 years leaves her in the middle of a nightmare renovation project and then lockdown sees her trapped there. Used to fighting the punitive prison system to create spaces that encourage reflection, healing, even hope for those incarcerated, she must learn to be similarly compassionate to herself, as she considers what might help someone at the lowest point in their life to rebuild. There are 11.5 million prisoners worldwide, and most of them will eventually be released back into society. Yvonne asks, 'Who would you rather have living next door to you? Or sitting on the train next to your daughter? Someone who has been treated with decency in an environment that has helped to heal them and instilled hope for their future? Or someone who has effectively been caged and dehumanised for years?' Challenging our expectations of what prisons are for, she takes us along their corridors, into cells, communal spaces, visitors' areas, and staffrooms, to the architects' studios where they are designed, and even into her own home, to show us the importance of an architecture of hope in the face of despair. [Hardback]
”A book full of insights to illuminate the way we look at architecture. Jewkes's beautiful descriptions not only evoke the feel of the air in a space, but also reveal the moral significance of its design. So refreshingly distinctive from other types of prison books — a beautiful meditation on the universal need for sanctuary, what it means when it is taken away from us, and the courage it takes to reclaim it.” —Andy West
”Yvonne Jewkes takes a vital question — what are prisons for? — and turns it into a much wider and beautifully written reflection on the meaning of home. Her book is full of hard-won authority and expertise conveyed in tenderly human ways.” —Joe Moran
Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert fell down the rabbit hole and came up with the universe by Ken Krimstein $55
A fascinating and superbly executed graphic biography. During the year that Prague was home to both Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka from 1911-1912, the trajectory of the two men's lives wove together in uncanny ways — as did their shared desire to tackle the world's biggest questions in Europe's strangest city. In stunning words and pictures, Einstein in Kafkaland reveals the untold story of how their worlds wove together in a cosmic battle for new kinds of truth. For Einstein, his lost year in Prague became a critical bridge set him on the path to what many consider the greatest scientific discovery of all time, his General Theory of Relativity. And for Kafka, this charmed year was a bridge to writing his first masterpiece, ‘The Judgment’. Based on diaries, lectures, letters, and papers from this period amid a planet electrifying itself into modernity, Einstein in Kafkaland brings to life the emergence of a new world where art and science come together in ways we still grapple with today. [Hardback]
"Clever, charming, amusing, and just plain brilliant. Ken Krimstein is the most inventive graphic biographer on the planet-and certainly the only one who could explain both Einstein and Kafka. A page turner on gravity and relativity!" —Kai Bird
Squares and Other Shapes with Joseph Albers $25
This book uses the vivid artworks of Josef Albers to guide small children through a wide range of geometrics, one artwork per page, beginning with squares and returning to them as a familiar refrain throughout. The variations between the vibrant shapes adds to the book’s visual richness, and the accompanying text provides an engaging commentary that will encourage discussion. Josef Albers was a leading pioneer of 20th-century Modernism, best known for his ‘Homages to the Square’ paintings and his publication Interaction of Colour. Albers was a teacher, a writer, a painter, and a theorist. In this attractive book, his art is used to teach shapes, one of the most important concepts for young children to learn. [Board book]