Boredom is a sub-optimal mode, he thinks, but it is at least a functional mode compared with the revulsion it conceals, boredom at least connects one end of the day to the other, boredom is doubtless detrimental but it is by definition tolerable, let us all hope for boredom. That is not a good way to start his review, he thinks, it has some bearing on the book but it is not a good introduction to the book. Two is a situation of stasis, he thinks, three is dynamic, three is the catalyst that reveals the harms hidden in two, the harms that mathematics suppressed mathematics reveals, or not mathematics, physics perhaps, or chemistry, more likely. This also is not a good way to start. Well, he thinks, the review is far enough through not to worry any longer about starting it, a bad start is at least a start, that is something, I can adjust the performance using the choke, or perhaps the throttle, I need to find out the difference between these two obstructions, he thinks, these two forms of respiratory impediment, our relationship with engines is a violent one, he thinks, and this thought stalls the review. There is no access to the interior save through performance, he thinks, restarting, there is perhaps only performance, who can know, a middle class couple converse, the words pass between them but also bounce off their surroundings, language is a force-field, he thinks, a sonar, and a conversation is the pattern of disturbance, the pattern of interference, produced by two emitters, or should that be transmitters, of language. In this book, he thinks, Quin reproduces, well actually produces, that disturbance, those two voices, the Ruth voice and the Leon voice, as they run together as one entity, caught on the page, as if there is anything about a novel that is not on the page. In the Ruth-and-Leon sections of the novel, these verbal slurries, that is not the word, are both Ruth’s and Leon’s, caught on the framework of descriptions as bald and precise and mundane as stage directions, they are stage directions in the past tense, so hardly directions, stage descriptions perhaps. We learn that S, a younger, working-class woman who had lived with them, has committed suicide by drowning, Quin’s fate eventually incidentally, she left a note, but they still hope it might have been an accident. Are they guilty? In S’s room they find some tapes she has recorded, and her journals, and these are transcribed, if that is the word, inscribed is more accurate perhaps but we have to play the fiction game so transcribed is the better word, in other sections of the novel, but Ruth and Leon do not find either the absolution nor the indictment they both hope for and fear in these tapes and these journals, the tapes and the journals merely complicate the picture, add other layers of performance, leave more unsaid than said. The more that is unsaid, the greater the weight of what is unsaid, the stronger its gravity, the more distorted the said, the said, even in its utter mundanity, points always at the source of its distortion. As the book progresses, though progresses is not the word, there is no progress in Quin, we read also a tape made by Ruth and a diary written by Leon as, respectively, Leon and Ruth gain access to them, they take access, if that is the way to put it. There is no progress but the tension increases, tension in the past, if that which is in the past can be said to increase, each mundanity is freighted, that is not the word, with the catalytic action of each one upon each other two, a sexual static that builds and cannot discharge but reveals ultimately the fundamental destructive incompatibility not only of Ruth and Leon but of any combination of Ruth and Leon and S, and, perhaps, of any persons whatsoever, if Quin held this misanthropic view, perhaps she did. The instance of sexual violence eventually revealed is no surprise, but its awfulness floods backwards through all that precedes it in the book. Boredom is all that holds the horrible at bay, but the horrible is no less horrible for that.
In this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon, Tokarczuk playfully pulls the tails of intellectual tropes found in Thomas Mann’s great novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, published 100 years before. In both novels a young man finds himself subsumed by an alpine sanitorium and subject to the conversations, foibles and opinions of his fellow refugees from ‘ordinary’ time. In both novels, the outside world (so to call it) changes in threatening ways as the characters are isolated from it, but Tokarczuk manages to splice into hers additional strands of horror and the macabre, and a sustained sense of the ludicrous that makes The Empusium simultaneously both light and deep, both intellectual and indulgent, angry, spooky, and very funny. Recommended!
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Kataraina by Becky Manawatu $37
Becky Manawatu's new novel is the much-awaited sequel to award-winning bestseller Āue and is unflinching in its portrayal of the destructive ways people love one another and the ancestral whenua on which they stand. In Āue, eight-year-old Arama was taken by his brother, Taukiri, to live with Kat and Stu at the farm in Kaikoura, setting in train the tragedy that unfolded. Arama's aunty Kat was at the centre of events, but, silenced by abuse, her voice was absent from the story. In this new novel, Kat and her whanau take over the telling. As one, they return to her childhood and the time when she first began to feel the greenness of the swamp in her veins — the swamp that holds her tears and the tears of her tīpuna, the swamp on the land owned by Stu that has been growing since the girl shot the man.
The Empusium: A health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40
In September 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone — or something — seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling in this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon.
”The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.” —Michael Cronin, Irish Times
”A magnificent writer. —Svetlana Alexievich
”A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” —Annie Proulx
”One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.” —The Economist
”Tokarczuk’s latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious – and spooky – web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus
”Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is a richly entertaining, captivating and thought-provoking novel. Despite its acute engagement with The Magic Mountain it’s more Hoffmann than Mann, which works in its favour.”
—David Hayden
Seeing Further by Esther Kinski (translated from German by Caroline Schmidt) $40
While travelling through the Great Alfold, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens upon a dilapidated cinema. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years. Entranced by the mozi, as cinema is known in Hungarian, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by what she calls "a dream in a glass coffin," the preservation of the cinematic experience, "beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people's thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of it reawaking." What follows is a history of place, told by the town's few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema's former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to the cinema in words and pictures.
”Seeing Further is an elegy for the shared space of the cinema and the promise of a collective waking dream, a profound and melancholy meditation on the shift from public to private viewing that is itself a visionary feat. Esther Kinsky’s narrator is both camera and projector, capturing and transmitting haunting images of daily life in the endless expanse of the Hungarian lowlands, where past and present dissolve into one another as people wait for a future that never arrives. It is a novel saturated with loss and mystery, and a profound reckoning with the historical forces and material conditions that have forever altered the terms of how we see.” —Christine Smallwood
"This fixation with ‘the how of seeing’ allows Kinsky to show off her fine-tuned skills as a cultural theorist, with flashes of essayistic brilliance running through the narrative as she tries to tease out the essential, elusive charm of the cinema.” —Lou Selfridge, FRIEZE
”Kinsky delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema.” —Publisher's Weekly
”Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss.” —Kirkus Reviews
”Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality. Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.” —2022 Kleist Prize jury
An Inconvenient Place by Jonathan Little (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell), with photographs by Antoine d’Agata $45
What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these 'inconvenient places' which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality. With the photographer Antoine d'Agata, before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small sub-urban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph when, there is literally nothing to see — or almost nothing?
”Of the three ways of observing – as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come – Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn’t flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia’s visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it’s not because Littell’s visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d’Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.” —James Meek
”In An Inconvenient Place, Jonathan Littell takes us on a journey into the most disturbing of modern human landscapes, from the jumble of horrors that were the ravines of Babyn Yar, into the cellars of Bucha. In chiselled, uncompromising prose, accompanied by haunting photographs by Antoine d’Agata, Littell’s unforgettable account is nothing less than a moral triumph over the willful amnesia imposed on history’s savageries by its perpetrators.” —Jon Lee Anderson
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder $40
Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. Timothy Snyder has been called "the leading interpreter of our dark times." As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism throughout the world. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we're fighting for. Freedom is the great Western commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn't so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes — the habits of mind — that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish.
”Timothy Snyder is one of our most original and perceptive thinkers, on the history of Europe, on American politics, and now, on freedom. Everyone who cares about freedom — what it means and what it takes to preserve it — should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum
”There's nothing else like On Freedom. This time the acclaimed historian draws not just from global history but his own. The result is a wonderfully provocative and profoundly persuasive book. Snyder leads us away from our misconception that freedom is just the removal of what stands in our way and toward a project of liberty that, through active engagement and commitment to the common good, we can achieve together.” —J. J. Abrams
”A must-read. Timothy Snyder is one of the leading minds of our times. This new book draws from his work as an historian of central Europe, his travelling and moving encounters in Ukraine at war, and his thinking on how democracy, pluralism and wealth inequality will look like in 2076 United States and the world at large.” — Thomas Piketty
”Much like life itself, freedom needs to defined and redefined. On Freedom offers fresh insight into essential aspects of human existence — the values and obligations inherent in every individual's life.” —Ai Weiwei
Great Women Sculptors edited by Lisa Le Feuvre $110
Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day. Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today's rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today's most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.
Playground by Richard Powers $38
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, author of The Overstory. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three thousand- year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure — a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to green light the project or turn the seasteaders away.
”Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive.” —Percival Everett
”An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways — gripping, alarming and uplifting.” —Emma Donoghue
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss $40
A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Sarah Moss, author of The Fell and Summerwater, confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life. Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents' post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, interrogating what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did - and still does - with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind.
”Devastating, funny and full of brilliant insights. This is a brave book, but more than that it is generous. It has made me think about how incredibly porous we all are: to our families, to society, to culture, to each other. That's why this book is important: it asks us to take responsibility for our impact on each other.” —Melissa Harrison
”Defiant in its anger and humour, My Good Bright Wolf is a compulsive and compelling story of how hard it is to break free of the punishing narratives around women's bodies and how easy it is to nearly lose yourself to them. And it is also a story of how words — painful and beautiful, wolf-sharp words — can be a way back.” —Emilie Pine
Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders $37
The Burke and Hare 'anatomy murders' of 1828 terrify Edinburgh, until Burke is hanged and Hare disappears. Over a decade later, in the early days of New Zealand colonial settlement, a whaler washes up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. He calls himself Ōkiwi Brown, sets up a pub with a nasty reputation and finds himself a woman who had been abandoned on his beach. Nearby, children sing dark nursery rhymes of murder. One afternoon Ōkiwi is visited by a pair of ex-soldiers, a bo'sun looking for a fight, and itinerant worker William Leckie with his young daughter Mary. When a body is discovered on the beach, it could be that a drunken man has drowned. But it could be that the gathered witnesses know something more. From the author of Jerningham and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant.
Nature’s Ghosts: The world we lost and how to get it back by Sophie Yeo $62
For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world. Our activities have permanently altered the environment — for good and for bad. In Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries. Uncovering the stories of the people who have helped to shape the landscape, she seeks out their footprints even where it seems there are none to be found. And she explores the timeworn knowledge that can help to fix our broken relationship with the earth. Along the way, Sophie encounters the environmental detectives — archaeological, cultural and ecological — reconstructing, in stunning detail, the landscapes we have lost. Today, the natural world is more vulnerable than ever; the footprints of humanity heavier than they have ever been. But, as this urgent book argues, from the ghosts of the past, we may learn how to build a more wild and ancient future.
Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies by Lyell Cresswell $50
During lockdown, Lyell Cresswell wrote this far from conventional autobiography. Each chapter begins with an increasingly fanciful — and very colourful — account of an exciting life. Under the cover of this playful narrative, he smuggles in deeply considered ideas about music, and about what it means to be a composer - a person who is both philosopher and storyteller. These ideas are accompanied by beautiful and exuberant pen and ink drawings — some for graphic scores, others for his own pleasure. He says, ‘When we look at art, we look for something deep and private. If we find what we're looking for we realise that no attempt to put it into words is adequate.” His music was like the man himself: emotional, uncompromising, richly textured, often quite noisy - and wonderful.
Kahurangi: The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson by Dave Hansford $80
Kahurangi is a celebration of the biodiversity of Kahurangi National Park, Northwest Nelson and Golden Bay. Energised by ancient, complex geology and a multitude of habitats, from vast beech stands to lush coastal rainforest, from sprawling ramparts of karst and marble to extensive wetlands and estuaries, this region holds the greatest variety of plants and animals in the country. Hansford argues for the urgent protection of these precious areas
Geckos and Skinks: The remarkable lizards of Aotearoa by Anna Yeoman $60
One of the least known, and subsequently least celebrated parts of Aotearoa's native wildlife surely are our lizards. The reason is simple - our geckos and skinks are shy, secretive creatures, rarely seen except by seasoned observers. They are remarkable creatures found in a huge range of habitats, from rocky islets on the Fiordland coast, through all our forests and shrublands and up to the high mountains. While identification guides have been written Geckos and Skinks is the first book to tell stories about these creatures, how and where they live, and how they breed. But crucially, this book is a fascinating insight into the myriad conservation efforts that are ongoing in New Zealand, for our geckos and skinks are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and predation from pests. Heavily illustrated with beautiful photographs, this book shines a light on our remarkable lizards, and exposes a world that deserves to be far better known.
Marina Abramović Turned Herself into Art and Wasn’t Sorry. by Fausto Gilberti $30
Marina Abramovic is an artist who uses her body to perform in unexpected and unusual ways that make an audiences think. She once sat back-to-back with her partner and had their hair tied together for over 17 hours. Another time, museum visitors watch her scrub 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day. This innovative book tells an inspiring story about the pioneering performance artist who is also the first female artist to hold a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This celebration for young readers of one of the most important contemporary woman artists of our time features striking black-and-white and red illustrations printed in Pantones throughout, together with a reproduction of the artist's work and a brief biography at the back of the book. In this innovative volume, Marina Abramovic and her cutting-edge work are brought to life for young readers like never before.
A selection of books from our shelves.
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Read our latest newsletter and find out (among other things) the books short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
20 Septmeber 2024
WINNER: Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024
WINNER: The Stella Prize 2024
WINNER: The James Tait Black Prize – Fiction 2024
WINNER: University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
WINNER: ALS Gold Medal 2024
SHORTLISTED: The Dublin Literary Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – People’s Choice Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Indigenous Writers’ Prize 2024
SHORTLISTED: Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
SHORTLISTED: Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2024
LONGLISTED: Voss Literary Prize 2024
‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
This multi-award winning novel has been described as ambitious, accomplished, astonishing, a wonder of twenty-first century fiction, fiercely political, fiercely and gloriously funny, uncompromising, a genre-defiant epic, monumental, urgent, dazzling, exhilarating, polyphonic, and a formidable act of imaginative synthesis.
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
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With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang $40
Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.
With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract modern artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
”In Agnes Martin's grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights ("My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience"), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence.” —Elisa Gabbert
”Victoria Chang's lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines-stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness.” —Tao Lin
Lublin by Manya Wilkinson $35
On the road to Lublin, plagued by birds that whistle like a Cossack's sword, three young lads from Mezritsh brave drought, visions, bad shoes, Russian soldiers, cohorts of abandoned women, burnt porridge, dead dogs, haemorrhoids, incessant sneezing, constipation, and bad jokes in order to seek their fortune. Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren’t so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches.
”A true boy's own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.” —Preti Taneja
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett $38
As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time drug-dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll — Cillian's teenage brother — in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins and goaded by his dead mother's dog, Dev is drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.
”Strange and beautiful. A book to live inside.” —Sally Rooney
”A gift of true storytelling. Barrett's talent burns up the page.” —Anne Enright
”So consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison.” —Guardian
Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg (translated from Italian by Beryl Stockman) $28
Two novellas chronicling domestic life, isolation and the passing of time. Architect Carmine and translator Ivana were once lovers. Their child died and their relationship ended but now, decades on, both with marriages and children of their own, they are friends. During a bout of pneumonia, Carmine – uneasy in his life of aspiration and materialism – begins to look back over opportunities missed and choices made. Set against postwar social breakdown, the melancholic, quietly dazzling Family elegantly examines the human condition and what brings happiness to a life. Borghesia is a delicate evocation of one life and the relationships that constrain and define it. In both novellas, underneath a subtle, stripped-down prose and a rich cast of characters, runs a seam of unhappiness and isolation, as Natalia Ginzburg explores the allure of memories and the complexity of family and relationships.
“Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.” —Rachel Cusk
”Ginzburg's beautiful words have such solidarity. I read her with joy and amazement.” —Tessa Hadley
”I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style — her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.” —Maggie Nelson
X-Ray (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Nicole Lobdell $23
X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity. In X-ray, Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors we make out of them, and why, despite our fears, we're still fascinated with them. In doing so, she draws from a variety of fields, including the history of medicine, science and technology studies, literature, art, material culture, film, comics, gender studies, architecture, and industrial design.
Mediterra: Recipes from the islands and shores of the Mediterranean by Ben Tish $60
More than a hundred mouth-watering Mediterranean dishes from Spain to Syria and everywhere in between — one delicious cuisine gives way to the next. From Spain and Italy, through Greece and Turkey and down to North Africa, the region is rich with deeply delicious food. With seven-spice falafel from Lebanon, gyros from Greece, classic tiramisu from Italy, and grilled smoky sardines from Crete, the full flavors of the region are on glorious display for recipes that work across diets and seasons. But while each country has its own unique dishes and distinct cultures, there is a distinct Mediterranean signature that brings them all together: hot summers, dry winters, coastal briny winds, alfresco eating, street markets, sacrosanct meal times, and bringing the best out of as many local seasonal ingredients as possible.
”Ben takes us across the Mediterranean and then back to his table. From Italy to Tunisia, Croatia to Morocco, capturing the heart of Mediterranean cooking. Simple, seasonal, and heartfelt. Count me in, Ben. “ —Yotam Ottolenghi
”Not only is Ben's Mediterra a beautiful book, but it is so well researched, with mouth-watering, accessible recipes.” —Georgina Hayden
”You probably think you don't need another book about Mediterranean food, but you need this one. I leaf through Ben's books thinking 'I want to make that, and that, and that!'. His food is rich, intense and alive.” — Diana Henry
Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning by Eli Burnstein, illustrated by Liana Fink $40
What's the difference between mazes and labyrinths? Proverbs and adages? Clementines and tangerines? Join author Eli Burnstein on a hairsplitter's odyssey into the world of the ultra-subtle with Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, this humorous dictionary takes a neurotic, brain-tickling plunge into the infinite (and infinitesimal) nuances that make up our world. There is no distinction between precision and pedantry, after all.
The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the politics of work by Jason Read $40
In a world of declining wages, working conditions, and instability, the response for many has been to work harder, increasing hours and finding various ways to hustle in a gig economy. What drives our attachment to work? To paraphrase a question from Spinoza, "Why do people fight for their exploitation as if it was liberation?" The Double Shift turns towards the intersection of Marx and Spinoza in order to examine the nature of our affective, ideological, and strategic attachment to work. Through an examination of contemporary capitalism and popular culture it argues that the current moment can be defined as one of "negative solidarity." The hardship and difficulty of work is seen not as the basis for alienation and calls for its transformation but rather an identification with the difficulties and hardships of work. This distortion of the work ethic leads to a celebration of capitalists as job creators and suspicion towards anyone who is not seen as a "real worker." The Double Shift argues for a transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.
”Drawing on Marx, Spinoza, and popular film, Jason Read builds an illuminating analysis that not only astutely captures, but also helps to make sense of, our double experience of wage work as a locus of freedom and compulsion, hope and fear, self-actualization and self-impoverishment, love and hate. This book is a must read for students of contemporary capitalism.” —Kathi Weeks
Te Pukapuka ka Kore e Pānuihia by Tim Tipene, illustrated by Nicoletta Sarri, translated by Kanapu Rangitauira $23
The boy at the centre of Tim Tipene's striking new story doesn't like reading, until one day he picks up The Book that Wouldn't Read. Suddenly the book takes on a life of its own, with sentences moving up and down, words changing colour and disappearing, and strange characters that get the reader jumping around, even burping — and before he knows it, he's finished the book. “What should I read next?”
Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison $40
Harlan Ellison's work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as those discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time. Includes: '“Repent Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman’ (Hugo Award winner); ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ (Bram Stoker Award winner); ‘Mefisto in Onyx’ (Bram Stoker Award winner); ‘Jeffty Is Five’ (British Fantasy Award winner); ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’ (Edgar Allan Poe Award winner).
”In his stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison has always been a sociological writer and an affirmed liberal and freethinker. Most of all, we sense outrage and anger — as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.” —Stephen King
Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene by Lauren Fuge $45
From the beginning, humans have been wanderers. Our feet carried us out of Africa and propelled us to far-flung corners of the world, often through incredible feats of innovation and imagination. These explorations yielded great rewards: land and resources, food and knowledge. But in every landscape we have explored, we have become a force of change. Our appetites have pushed planetary systems to breaking point — yet still we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new forests to fell. Fuge takes the reader on a journey from the dramatic fjords of the Pacific Northwest to the shifting coastlines of Norway, from the ancient geology of outback Australia to the outer reaches of the known universe, and asks: what drives our urge to explore? How has it changed our relationship with the planet? And, in the face of imminent environmental collapse, can we find in our voyaging history the tools to reimagine our future?
Will You Care If I Die? by Nicolas Lunabba $40
In a world where children murder children, and where Swedish gun violence is the worst in Europe, Nicolas Lunabba’s job as a social organiser with Malmö’s underclass requires firm boundaries and emotional detachment. But all that changes when he meets Elijah — an unruly teenage boy of mixed heritage whose perilous future reminds Nicolas of his own troubled past amongst the marginalised people who live on the fringes of every society. Allowing Elijah into his home and then into his heart, Nicolas crosses one of his own red lines. With the odds stacked against them, and completely unprepared for the journey he and Elijah now set off on together, can Nicolas keep Elijah safe from harm and steer him towards a better future? Written as a letter to Elijah, Will You Care If I Die? is a disarmingly direct memoir about social class, race, friendship and unexpected love in the context of social polarisation and the rise of the far right.
Poetry Play Kit: Games to get your poems started by Joseph Coelho $25
Make poetry fun with Joseph Coelho: This activity kit is packed with games and activities - discover all kinds of ways to start writing poems. A compendium of literacy games and activities: Create endless poetic combinations with over 300 word cards! Spin the spinner for linguistic techniques and use the game and activity cards to start your poems off. Edutainment for children aged 6-9: Inspire your child's love of language and give them the tools they need to express themselves and succeed in school - and in life! Learning through play: Developed with the help of kids, parents and teachers, this kit contains 320 word cards, 15 double-sided game and activity cards, 28 rhyming dominoes, a poetry spinner and a rules and inspiration booklet.
A selection of bounding delights from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Right now I am reading Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium (you can pre-order now — due very soon!) and so far a big thumbs-up. I’ll be reviewing this on Monday for RNZ Nine to Noon. In anticipation of the new novel, I’ve been revisiting the excellent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Janina ("don’t like my first name, so please don’t address me by it") Duszejko is in her sixties and lives in a remote Polish village. An ex-engineer, she teaches children English at the local school on a very part-time basis and is the caretaker of the holiday homes closed up for the winter. It’s mid-winter and Duszejko is busy with her horoscopes, translating William Blake with her friend Dizzy, clearing snow, fixing leaks, and keeping an eye on the forest animals. She has names for her neighbours, names which reflect their character: Big Foot for the weasel of a man with big feet who traps animals cruelly, Oddball for her large-statured yet very particular closest neighbour, Black Coat for his son - the local detective, Good News for the woman who runs the charity shop, and so on. She has a close affinity with nature and with the animals that live around her - she calls the deer the Young Ladies, and her dogs (who have recently disappeared) are referred to as her Little Girls. Drawing on Blake’s philosophy of nature, voicing her beliefs in the ideal equitable relationship between human and animal (a philosophy that many of her hunting neighbours have no time for), and using astrology - the alignments and ascendencies of planets and stars and birth dates to predict outcomes for her community, Duszejko has firm opinions, which she has no qualms about sharing, on how people should behave, on traditional Polish culture, and on the importance of nature to the health (intellectual and emotional) of human psyche. Overlay this with a series of murders and you have a very compelling novel. Mrs Duszejko starts investigating, drawing together facts and suppositions based upon birth dates and star signs. The first to tumble is Big Foot, choking on a deer bone. As more hunters fall, Duszejko is convinced that this is the revenge of the animals, that they have risen up against the human hunters who pursue them mercilessly. As the net tightens, the villagers become increasingly paranoid, and rumours of corruption and bribery are rife. This is a blackly comic novel which investigates pressing ideas about the nature of traditions, cultural stereotypes and the role of the outsider, the hypocrisy of the church and other institutions of authority, and the impact of development on ecological structures. As Duszejko gets closer to the truth, her Ailments (never fully explained) become increasingly severe and her accusations extreme. Ostracised by her community she is considered a 'mad' woman. Yet it is her insistence that will lead to a revelation that will shock everyone, including her few loyal friends. Throughout the novel there are references to Blake’s writings: each chapter starts with a quoted verse, and the title of the book comes directly from Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’. Olga Tokarczuk’s second book to appear in translation is an intriguing and feisty exploration of fate and free will, of cultural politics and personal endeavours, of injustice and ultimate revenge.
“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses.” Upon entering the room of her apartment that had been inhabited by her maid, the narrator is frightened by a large cockroach emerging from the wardrobe and shuts the door upon it. This act of violence creates a bond of association between the two, a bond which language-based thought is not able to withstand, and, as the narrator looks into the face of the cockroach and at the white paste that oozes from its fatal wound, she becomes indistinguishable from the cockroach and indeed from all life, she becomes what she terms 'neutral', not individuated by the spurious but 'useful' concepts of identity and time. "Until the moment of seeing the roach I'd always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn't get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona." Her mental disintegration is both a symptom of and an escape from life traumas that are barely hinted at (an abortion, a lost lover), and her experience with the cockroach entails a relinquishment of everything she had thought of as herself. The ecstatic and the horrific cannot be distinguished from one another. Only thinking and the use of language can keep this reality at bay. "I was abandoning my human organisation — to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality." But, of course, the relation of her experience is in itself a feat of language: perhaps it is through the failure of language to reach further that the edges of experience that the shape of experience may be conveyed. "Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. ... The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language." After slowing time down with great austerity in the first two thirds of the novel, Lispector has her narrator progress into a delirium of religious and metaphorical ravings, which, for me, demonstrates how 'profundity' (as so precisely and compellingly delineated in the first part) has no certain point of delineation from madness (though I am not entirely sure that this was the author's intention (and I must say that the novel lost my unreserved admiration at this point)). The novel, and the narrator's identification with the cockroach, culminates in the narrator taking into her mouth, as a kind of communion, some of the crushed insect's innards.
Which of these six excellent books will be awarded the Booker Prize this year?
Read them all, and let us know what you think!
JAMES by Percival Everett
What the judges said: “A masterful, revisionist work that immerses the reader in the brutality of slavery, juxtaposed with a movingly persistent humanity. Through lyrical, richly textured prose, Everett crafts a captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn, that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency, James stands as a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation.
ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey
What the judges said: “Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.”
CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner
What the judges said: “Sadie Smith – not her real name – is an FBI agent turned spy-for-hire, whose latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France. She’s an extraordinary creation: sharp-minded, iron-willed, accustomed to moving fast and breaking things. As she investigates the group, she hacks into emails from their guru, a shadowy eccentric who has withdrawn from modernity into the ancient caves that dot the landscape; he has some beguiling ideas about the role of Neanderthals through history. What’s so electrifying about this novel is the way it knits contemporary politics and power with a deep counter-history of human civilisation. We found the prose thrilling, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.”
HELD by Anne Michaels
What the judges said: “The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.
THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden
What the judges said: “Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.”
STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood
What the judges said: “Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.”
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending!
13 September 2024
Love her or hate her, you will enjoy Sadie! Sadie Smith (not her real name) is undercover. She’s out to find the dirt on the eco-radicals; and if she can’t find some, she’ll get creative. In a small remote village, the Moulinards’ commune on a scrappy piece of land, overseen by the charismatic Pascal (ex-Paris, wealthy lad living it rough and oldest friend to Sadie’s hapless ‘boyfriend’ loser film-maker Lucien). Pascal, along with his selected idealistic brotherhood are hanging on the words of modern day hermit Bruno Lacombe. Bruno lives in a cave and emails the group his missives on human history, the superiority of the Neanderthal, the earth’s vibrations, and other intellectual musings of a madman and a sage. The concerns of the local farmers and the newly arrived eco-radicals are the same. Industry is moving in with its pumping of water and singular crop fixation. There have been isolated incidents of sabotage. And Sadie’s boss wants the commune gone. Sadie's job is to get inside and find out what they will do next. And if there is no to-do list, entice some action. Sadie arrives into a dry hot summer in her little white rental, enough alcohol to keep cool and then some, and is ‘waiting’ for Lucien on his family’s estate — a rundown dwelling now rigged up with sensors, high speed internet and other spy gadgetry. Sadie’s reading Bruno’s emails, but not getting a lot of information about a plot to take out the new infrastructure. What she is getting is a fascination for Bruno and his sideways take on humanity. She’s ready to meet Pascal and gain his trust. It helps, or so Sadie wants us to believe, that she is gorgeous. She easily gains his trust, more to do with her set-up relation with Lucien than anything she particularly does, and Pascal’s never ending ability to mansplain. The women at the commune have different ideas about their assigned roles, more akin to the old patriarchy than new ideas. It doesn’t take Sadie long to get offside with them. She’ll have to be more careful to avoid their ire and their mistrust. So what is Rachel Kushner up to here? In Creation Lake, she’s pointing a very cynical finger at our attempts to save ourselves. Here comes corruption and ego in several guises, here is the power of ideas that can alter lives, here come belief systems that fall flat, and there go the Neanderthals walking with us still (according to Bruno), and here is the biggest fraud of the lot: Sadie Smith, who will be unequivocally changed by her encounter with the Moulinards and Bruno Lacombe. This is a clever, funny book with an unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator at its centre, with ideas leaping from the absurd to the strangely believable, and a cast of characters who get to walk on to the stage and play their bit parts to perfection, with references to ‘types’ as well as particular possibly recognisable individuals. Creation Lake deals with big issues — the climate, politics, industry, and power — with a playfulness and Intelligence that ricochet much like the bullets in Sadie’s guns. It encompasses ideas about where we came from and where we might be going with wry wit but also a serious nod to our current dilemmas. It’s not all doom, and Kushner may be giving us the opportunity to leave our hermit caves and look up. Although this may be a riff on the riff. And cynicism may be the winner after all — unless radical social change can capture Sadie's imagination at 4am. You’ll have to decide.
“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.”
The recently published Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa is an outstanding publication. Beautifully produced and thought-provoking, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists. From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa.
How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, alongside Kirsty Baker, Sight Lines is waiting for a place on your art library shelf.
“An exceptional book. Thoughtfully conceived, well written, timely and significant. It manages to be both scholarly – informed by the state of art writing in the present – and accessible to a general readership interested in art, women and feminism in Aotearoa.” — Peter Brunt, Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka
The books you buy today will bloom in Spring.
Click through for your copies:
Titiro / Look by Gavin Bishop $25
A completely delightful ‘first words’ board book, with details of the appealing bold pictures labelled both in te reo Māori and English.
Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist by Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor, and Greg Donson $70
A century on, her remarkable body of work remains fresh and contemporary. Featuring over 150 artworks, this book examines the continuing impact of Whanganui-born and British-trained Edith Collier and her artistic legacy. Collier was a dynamic Modernist, and the story of her years in Europe and then her return to New Zealand and the near abandonment of her practice are compelling as both art history and an affecting human story.
Leslie Adkin: farmer photographer by Athol McCredie $70
Leslie Adkin (1888-1964) was a Levin farmer, photographer, geologist, ethnologist and explorer, a gifted amateur and renaissance man, of sorts, who used photography to document his scholarly interests, farming activities and family life. His much loved and exceptionally beautiful photographs taken between 1900 and the 1930s are one of the highlights of Te Papa's historical photography collection. This book of over 150 images, selected by Athol McCredie, Curator Photography at Te Papa, establishes his reputation more clearly within the development of photography in New Zealand and showcases a remarkable body of work. McCredie's substantial text gives rich insights into the varied elements of Adkin's very busy life, including his love for his wife Maud, captured over the years in a range of intimate and engaging images which feel as fresh as when they were first taken.
Resetting the Co-ordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Chris Braddock, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Layne Waerea, and Victoria Wynne-Jones $70
The first anthology/reader of performance art of Aotearoa New Zealand, Resetting the Coordinates offers a lively, 50-year critical survey of Aotearoa New Zealand's globally unique performance art scene. From the post-object and performance art of the late 1960s to the rich vein of Maori and Pacific performance art from the early 1990s, its 18 chapters by researchers and practitioners is a major reference for art and performance communities of New Zealand, Australia and further afield. It discusses the influential work of Jim Allen, Phil Dadson, Peter Roche and Linda Buis, performance art initiatives in post-earthquake Christchurch and queer performance art, among many other topics.
After a Dance: Selected stories by Bridget O’Connor $38
Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday. In After a Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here — at its best and at its delightful worst.
”These are some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I've read in a long time.” —Roddy Doyle
”Every O'Connor story is a performance, a live fight with time and decay, disgust and the human body. She wrote intensely from her time and place; to read her now is to be catapulted back to 1990s London. Yet the voice, the themes are more relevant than ever. No wonder she was so preoccupied with temporality: she was before her time.” —Martina Evans, The Irish Times
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang $25
Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang's unique imagination invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
“United by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion.” —China Miéville
”A science fiction genius. Ted Chiang is a superstar.” —The Guardian
We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida (translated from Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda) $36
On the top floor of an old building at the end of a cobbled alley in Kyoto lies the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. Only a select few — those who feel genuine emotional pain — can find it. The mysterious centre offers a unique treatment for its troubled patients: it prescribes cats as medication. Get ready to fall in love:-—Bee, an eight-year-old female, mixed breed helps a disheartened businessman as he finds unexpected joy in physical labour; —Margot, muscly like a lightweight boxer, helps a middle-aged callcentre worker stay relevant; —Koyuki, an exquisite white cat brings closure to a mother troubled by the memory of the rescue kitten she was forced to abandon; —Tank and Tangerine bring peace to a hardened fashion designer, as she learns to be kinder to herself; —Mimita, the Scottish Fold kitten helps a broken-hearted Geisha to stop blaming herself for the cat she once lost. As the clinic's patients seek inner peace, their feline friends lead them towards healing, self-discovery and newfound hope. [Hardback]
Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon $38
Haddon weaves ancient myths and fables into fresh and unexpected forms, and forges new legends to sit alongside them. The myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth is turned into a wrenching parable of maternal love — and of the monstrosities of patriarchy. The lover of a goddess, Tithonus, is gifted eternal life but without eternal youth. Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals. From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks. Whether describing Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit, or St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert, his powers of observation are at their height when illuminating the thin line between human and animal.
”A marvel of a collection — suffused with curiosity, humanity and mystery, bold in its scope and virtuoso in its telling. Mark Haddon makes stories matter.” —Kaliane Bradley
”In sentences as precisely cut as paper sculptures, Mark Haddon fits ancient myth to the cruelties and wonders of the present.” —Francis Spufford
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff $26
A servant girl escapes from a settlement. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief of everything that her own civilisation has taught her. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how — and if — we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves. [New paperback edition]
”I could not stop reading. A haunting, thrilling, gripping and rich. An unputdownable adventure, a mystery and a strange beautiful redemption.” —Naomi Alderman
”Groff is a mastermind, a masterpiece creator, an intoxicating magician. I wait with impatience for every book and I am always surprised and delighted. The Vaster Wilds feels like her bravest yet, hallucinatory, divine, beyond belief but also entirely human.” —Daisy Johnson
The Year of Sitting Dangerously by Simon Barnes $29
In the autumn of 2020, Simon Barnes should have been leading a safari in Zambia, but Covid restrictions meant his plans had to be put on hold. Instead, he embarked on the only voyage of discovery that was still open to him. He walked to a folding chair at the bottom of his garden, and sat down. His itinerary: to sit in that very same spot every day for a year and to see — and hear — what happened all around him. It would be a stationary garden safari; his year of sitting dangerously had begun. For the next twelve months, he would watch as the world around him changed day by day. Gradually, he began to see his surroundings in a new way; by restricting himself, he opened up new horizons, growing even closer to a world he thought he already knew so well. The Year of Sitting Dangerously inspires the reader to pay closer attention to the marvels that surround us all, and is packed with handy tips to help bring nature even closer to us. [Now in paperback]
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout $38
It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known — "unrecorded lives," Olive calls them — reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
”The shrewd-eyed observer of love, loss and the ties that bind - life, basically - is back. Strout weaves a gossamer light web of a community's hopes and setbacks.” —Observer
Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to A.I. by Noah Yuval Harari $45
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI - a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity.
The Name She Gave Me by Betty Culley $25
A thoughtful and moving YA novel in verse. Rynn was born with a hole in her heart — literally. Although it was fixed long ago, she still feels an emptiness there when she wonders about her birth family. As her relationship with her adoptive mother fractures, Rynn finally decides she needs to know more about the rest of her family. Her search starts with a name, the only thing she has from her birth mother, and she quickly learns that she has a younger sister living in foster care in a nearby town. But if Rynn reconnects with her biological sister, it may drive her adoptive family apart for good.
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers $25
An experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage their dreams, desires, connections and communities. [New paperback edition.]
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, 2023.
”A polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of these isles as it's rarely taught.” —Observer
”It's been a while since I've reacted as emotionally to a novel. An epic the north has long deserved: ambitious, dreamy, earthy, dark, welcoming and not. There are readers like me who will not just enjoy this book but feel deeply grateful for its existence.” —Financial Times
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6 September 2024
Scaffolding is the story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London, so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
”Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly — a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin's nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.” —Guardian