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11 October 2024.
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“People are individuals and fully entitled to their individuality, though they first must be brought into an acceptance of it.” If I write more of this it will mean nothing, but this does not stop me sitting at my little desk, here in the hall of our apartment, writing away each night after the others have gone to sleep. The clock in the sitting room slices away the seconds with each swing of its pendulum; the seconds, the minutes, the hours, each moment a decapitation of all that I have written, these sentences just as deserving of being considered shavings from my pencil as the shavings that accumulate at my page-side. Which is the better monument to my labour? It is hard to begin to write, but I am one who believes that beginning to write is possible, perhaps with superhuman effort, or with effort that is human if superhuman effort is not attainable by humans, but I do not believe that it is possible to bring writing to completion, and so I complete nothing. Not that it is not easy to stop; nothing could be easier. Anyone who writes has an equal ability to stop writing; though the ability to write may be very unequally distributed, to stop writing is within the reach of all. Why then, if stopping is so easy, do so many writers not improve the quality of their work by availing themselves more often of this common ability? If a good writer is one who manages not to write bad books, a reasonable definition, then, and I state this without conceit, though I complete nothing I am a better writer than many writers more famous than me. If it is possible to begin and possible to stop but impossible to complete, at least for me who does not believe in the possibility of completion and who does not believe that the world contains completion, only beginnings and stoppings, what is produced by all this writing? I produce nothing but fragments. I believe in nothing but fragments. Even the great sheaf of pages that I call The Proceedings is a fragment, an interminable fragment, uncompletable, and I would rather this is burned after my death than turned into a work by an editor or executor, no matter how well-intentioned. Will there come a day, perhaps a hundred years from now, when the fragment is recognised as a literary form in itself, perhaps the only literary form, the only form that can approach the truth, no matter that it limps in its approach. The smaller the fragment, then, the more perfectly it expresses its inability to be anything other than a fragment, but how shall these fragments be assembled and arranged? Fragments are best arranged in a fragmentary way. Just as dust accumulates throughout an unswept house, but more in some places than in others, such as in the space between an unclosed door and the wall against which it rests, so fragments naturally become lost within the drifts of which they are part. How shall they be found among all the other fragments in which in plain sight they are as good as lost? There is nothing lost about these lost writings. The writer and the reader are more lost than what is written, but only when they write and read. I write to be rid of myself. I write to be rid of thought. I write to be rid of what I have written but every fragment adds to this burden I write to put down. I sharpen my pencil again as the pendulum swings and add to the pile of shavings that is my more fitting legacy, the one that my executor will not hesitate to burn, should they happen to survive that long. I write as the birds begin to sing in the trees in the street below. I will not complete what I write. It is not possible to complete what I write. Whether I wish to complete what I write or not affects nothing, I will produce a fragment, but the question of whether I should strive for completion remains. I will be found where I am lost. Every opportunity is a trap, but I leap in regardless [...]
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All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles $36
Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can't escape his anger. As the world — and men in particular — continue to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal. A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy — even when that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity.
“This is the best debut I have read in at least a decade. Anyone who has wished for an English Bernhard need look no look no further.” —Stephen Mitchelmore
“A beautiful war machine. Bowles’s novel discovers a language, a mode of narration, to shelter the legitimate madness, the loneliness and rapture of a very singular individual.” —Lars Iyer
“A devastating satire on the way in which class, education and masculinity act as a kind of trap.” —The Telegraph
”All My Precious Madness is an exhilaratingly intelligent, hilariously foul-mouthed monologue: partly a crankish rant, railing violently – and digressively – against the crushing idiocies of contemporary life, partly an affecting Bildungsroman, centred on the narrator’s relationship with their father. At once crackling with spontaneity and beautifully controlled, alternating between a curmudgeon’s uproarious disgust and a child’s poignant wonder, Bowles’s novel is a wonderful piece of writing which you will be sorry to finish." —Goldsmiths Prize judges' citation
Delirious by Damien Wilkins $38
It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older sister’s shortened life. Pete is increasingly haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered. An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing, Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.
”A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.” —Witi Ihimaera
”This is just a beautifully powerful, wonderful book.” —Pip Adam, RNZ
”Funny, sharp, sad and profound, Delirious made me laugh, think, weep and actually beat my breast. A masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Knox, The Conversation
The Book of Disappearance by Ibitsam Azem (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Sinan Antoon) $45
Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa's neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. That search, and Ariel's reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv — café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters — against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.
”In this immensely readable novel, Ms. Azem does not resolve for us the calamity of Palestine's occupation by Israel. But stylishly and with jeweled virtuosity she makes us understand that acts of great and humane imagination will be required, and with this potent book points where and how we must all go.'“ —Richard Ford
”A wonderful book, showing what the Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer.” —The Modern Novel
“A masterpiece which immediately leads the reader to ponder the historical foundations of the 1948 Nakba, as well as the Zionist intentions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land where they belong.” —Middle East Monitor
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton $40
In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create. 'Prairie' is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest, replete with wildflowers, ominous rivers, fireflies, cattle lowing and ghostly apparitions; 'Dresses' paints a wild and moving portrait of literary fashions; 'Art' is an imaginative illustrated essay which explores the relationship between fiction and visual art; and 'Other' offers an assemblage of irregular stories and essays that are hilarious or heartbreaking by turns. Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness and indefinable beauty.
"Pieces included in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other are not short stories or essays in the strict (and limited) sense, but spells, incantatory hallucinations, organically shared phantasmagoria, bodily immersions in materials worldly and other-wordly. It is a book and yet it is definitely way more: a field of irruptions. This is Dutton at her best yet." —Cristina Rivera Garza
"Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close, marveling at how her writing combines such extraordinary acts of precision, drawing forth strangeness and new presentations of beauty, with her own singular and searching, expansive style of intelligence. Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it." —Kate Briggs
The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for life, love and art by Jans Ondaatje Rolls $55
The Bloomsbury Group fostered a fresh, creative and vital way of living that encouraged debate and communication ('only connect'), as often as not across the dining table. Gathered at these tables were many of the great figures in art, literature and economics in the early twentieth century: E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, J. M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, among many others. Here the Bloomsbury story is told in seven broadly chronological chapters, beginning in the 1890s and finishing in the very recent past. Each chapter comprises a series of narratives, many of which are enhanced with an appropriate recipe, along with sketches, paintings, photographs, letters and handwritten notes, and featuring original quotations throughout. Part cookbook, part social and cultural history, this book will appeal to lovers of food and lovers of literature alike.
I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson $38
It's been six years since Rosa last saw her brother. Six years since they last spoke. Six years since they last fought. Six years since she gave up on the idea of having a brother. She's spent that time carefully not thinking about him. Not remembering their childhood. Not mentioning those stories, even to the people she loves. Now the distance she had so carefully put between them has collapsed. Can she find a way to make peace - to forgive, to be forgiven - when the past she's worked so hard to contain threatens to spill over into the present? From the acclaimed author of little scratch, this is a powerfully honest novel about how we love, how we grieve and how we forgive.
“I Will Crash places the reader firmly in the consciousness of a narrator confronted with the myriad and often conflicting impulses that arise from childhood trauma. Watson’s scattered sentences produce a deeply mesmeric and almost destabilizing effect on the reader. It’s profoundly moving, funny, and beautifully written. A masterclass on the art of ellipsis.” —Michael Magee
The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on hope and freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Luke Leafgren) $50
Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall.This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom as a question that demanded an answer, in order to preserve it as a dream. The wall becomes his stable point of reference, his anchor, both physically and psychologically. As each year brings with it new waves of releases of prisoners, he dares to hope, and seeks refuge in the wall when these hopes are dashed. And, in a small miracle, he finds love with a lawyer from the outside - while in her absence, the wall is his solace and his curse. A testimony of how the most difficult of circumstances can build a person up instead of tearing them down, The Tale of a Wall is an extraordinary record of the vast confinement and power of the mind.
”The Tale of a Wall is the reason we have literature. Nasser has made art out of poison with his honesty and golden pen. He brings to light the specificity of experience of the Palestinian prisoner in a manner that makes every reader think about the incarcerated in their own countries without forgetting Palestine. It helps us understand the consequences on others when we do not wield whatever power we each hold for solidarity. A profound and important work.” —Sarah Schulman
”A stunning book. A poetic and remarkable account of decades of imprisonment and the effect it can have on the mind, body and soul. This is a story of unimaginable loss, but also of survival.” —Sally Hayden
”Nasser Abu Srour doesn't allow his long incarceration in an Israeli prison to break his spirit. He turns to the wall of his cell that is intended to confine him into his path to freedom, and in the process, out of the darkness of his cell produces a luminous memoir.” —Raja Shehadeh
”A unique, lyrical exploration of what his inhumane confinement has taught him about resistance, love, lies, forgiveness, and the complicated struggle for liberation of his fractured, occupied land. Rather than allow the many walls surrounding him from childhood to break him down, he has turned them into darkly luminous companions on a journey into the heart of cruelty and redemption.” —Ariel Dorfman
Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu $38
Erun can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom. Star is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide. It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began. A tragicomedy set in the confines of a 1994 Daihatsu Mira, Poorhara is a journey of epic proportions — a poignant, expansive and darkly funny first novel written by a true poorhara.
”Poorhara is a hilarious and heartbreaking debut with characters so stunningly well-realised they will walk into your dreams at night. It’s a hero's journey with no easy answers – just harsh, furious life with all the pain, the anger and the beauty we can barely hold in or hold together. Rahurahu is a genius.” —essa may ranapiri
Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France by Dinah Hawken (with paintings by Patricia France) $40
Poet Dinah Hawken responds to the works of Dunedin artist Patricia France, who began painting in her fifties while living at Ashburn Hall, a psychiatric institution in Dunedin. Patricia's psychiatrist encouraged her to 'paint out the past' through her art, and she began in watercolour and gouache before moving on to oils. Her early abstracts evolved into vibrant compositions that often feature women, children, landscapes and flowers. Towards the end of her career her eyesight began to deteriorate, but she continued to paint. Patricia France's works have now been shown in more than 30 exhibitions throughout New Zealand - including, in 2024, at Toi Mahara in Waikanae. In her intimate, unrhymed sonnets, each presented with the work by France to which it responds, Dinah Hawken addresses a friend she never met, seeking to make a connection across time with the artist and her world.
Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave $65
In the first major national history of Aotearoa New Zealand to be published for 20 years, Professor Michael Belgrave advances the notion that New Zealand’s two peoples — tangata whenua and subsequent migrants — have together built an open, liberal society based on a series of social contracts. Frayed though they may sometimes be, these contracts have created a country that is distinct. This engaging new look at our history examines how.
”Becoming Aotearoa couldn’t be more timely. While Belgrave references scholarly debates and weighs a multitude of sources, this isn’t an academic text. With its concision and interest in linking past and present, it’s more accessible than its most recent predecessor, Michael King’s The Penguin History of New Zealand. Anyone who hasn’t had the chance to go beyond the basics of our history may find a lot here that surprises them.” —Rachel Morris, NZ Geographic
Te Tiriti o Waitangi Relationships: People, politics and law edited by Metiria Stanton Turei, Nicola R Wheen and Janine Hayward $50
The writers address topics such as Treaty principles, sovereignty, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and mana whenua relationships to te Tiriti and settlements. The book emphasises the roles of tikanga and rangatiratanga in fostering genuine progress, and envisions a future guided by these principles in advancing Māori-Crown relationships. This is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of te Tiriti's role in shaping Aotearoa New Zealand's social, political and cultural landscape.
Ngā Hapa Reo: Common Māori Language Errors by Hona Black and Te Aorangi Murphy-Fell $37
With the surge in interest in te reo Māori in recent years, a range of errors have become common in classrooms and the wider world, many caused by language interference (following the patterns of English rather than te reo). This book hopes to fill that gap with easy-to-follow, fun examples of language errors, providing readers with the correct usages, and explanations in both te reo and English.
How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the politics of the body by Matthew Beaumont $40
You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body. How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of 'walking while black'. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom. Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new interpretation of the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raising important questions about the politics of the body.
"In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Beaumont reminds us that walking is far from a neutral activity. With the help of Frantz Fanon, Beaumont locates freedom at the level of the body; free from the systems of oppression, exploitation, and harassment." —Lauren Elkin
Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees: Native Bees of Aotearoa New Zealand by Rachel Weston $30
It’s hard to be noticed when you’re the size of an apple seed! New Zealand’s 28 species of native bees are teeny-tiny and super speedy! Kiwi bees pollinate Aotearoa’s native plants and trees — and they truly are the bee’s knees! Most people are not aware that New Zealand has native bees, but once you meet them, you are sure to fall in love with them! Rachel Weston introduces Aotearoa’s gentle little bees. With 36 photographic images, fun illustrations, diagrams and QR video clips of native bees zipping and zooming, Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees is an informative, interactive visual feast. Native bees have been flying under the radar for far too long, until now. Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees connects children to the world around them, where native bees (ngaro huruhuru) have had a long evolutionary history.
The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world by William Dalrymple $45
Major religions that rose to dominate Earth's largest continent. Trade networks that stretched from Japan to Hadrian's Wall. Innovations such as the numeral system and the very concept of zero, laying cornerstones for all of mathematics and science to come. Music, dance, and visual arts of stunning sophistication. —Premodern India gifted all these and more to the world. Yet today, obscured by other powers, the subcontinent's extraordinary part in global history as the economic, spiritual, and cultural hub of Asia is too often overlooked. In The Golden Road, revered historian William Dalrymple corrects the record, telling the captivating story of ancient India's ascent through a swift and breathtaking tour of the ideas and places Indians created. Treks into the sunless depths of cave monasteries illuminate the origins and spread of Buddhism. Far-flung archaeological expeditions — from the sand-blown Red Sea coast of Egypt, to Afghan mountain refuges, to verdant Cambodian jungles — reveal the impact of Indian commerce. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship and acclaimed narrative skill, Dalrymple paints a vast canvas populated by merchants and monks, surgeons and sculptors, astronomers, kings, queens, missionaries, and more.
Han Kang's semi-autobiographical The White Book is a contemplation of life and death. It’s her meditative study of her sibling’s death at a few hours old, and how this event shapes her own history. Taking the colour white as a central component to explore this memory, she makes a list of objects that trigger responses. These include swaddling bands, salt, snow, moon, blank paper and shroud. “With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like a white ointment applied to a swelling, like a gauze laid over a wound.” Han Kang was in Warsaw - a place which is foreign to her when she undertook this project - and in being in a new place, she recalls with startling clarity the voices and happenings of her home and past. The book is a collection of quiet yet unsettling reflections on exquisitely observed moments. These capsules of text build upon each other, creating a powerful sense of pain, loss and beauty. Each moment so tranquil yet uneasy. Han Kang’s writing is sparse, delicate and nuanced. Describing her process of writing she states, “Each sentence is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air.” You can sense the narrator’s exploration and stepping out into the unknown in her descriptions of snow, in her observations as she walks streets hitherto unknown, and in her attempts to realise the view of her mother, a young woman dealing with a premature birth, and the child herself, briefly looking out at the world. Small objects become talismans of memory, a white pebble carries much more meaning than its actuality. Salt and sugar cubes each hold their own value in their crystal structure. “Those crystals had a cool beauty, their white touched with grey.” “Those squares wrapped in white paper possessed an almost unerring perfection.” In 'Salt', she cleverly reveres the substance while at the same time cursing the pain it can cause a fresh wound. The White Book is a book you handle with some reverence - its white cover makes you want to pick it up delicately. The text is interspersed with a handful of moody black and white photographs. This is a book you will read, pick up again to re-read passages, as each deserves concentration for both the writing and ideas.
A selection of books found on our shelves.
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To mark Aotearoa Bookshop Day, and to celebrate the importance of bookshops to their customers and of customers to their bookshops (it’s a perfect match, really), we are offering 10% off any book purchase this weekend (from now until 10AM on Monday 14 October) — just enter the code RIPEKA when checking out (Rīpeka is the name of Bookshop Day reading taniwha). Also, we will donate $1 for every book sold to the Kiwi Christmas Books campaign, which provides books for children who might otherwise go without.
The 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE has been awarded to the subtle and fearless Korean writer, HAN KANG.
“Han Kang’s intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” —Nobel judges’ citation
“Han Kang is one of the greatest living writers. She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be.” —Eimear McBride
THE VEGETARIAN (translated by Deborah Smith)
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
HUMAN ACTS (translated by Deborah Smith)
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless.
THE WHITE BOOK (translated by Deborah Smith, with photographs by Choi Jinhyuk)
While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. The White Book becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white — breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin — and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. The White Book — ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister — offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
GREEK LESSONS (translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon)
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
WE DO NOT PART (translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)
One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.
Publishing in February 2025 — order now!
Read our latest newsletter (starting on our fifth century!) Find out which books have been short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize!
4 October 2024
Humans have continued to evolve, he thought, by making objects that are extensions of themselves, extensions not only in a physical and practical sense but in a mental sense also. Thinking is done mainly outside my head, he thought, my memories and intentions are embodied in and enacted by the great commonwealth of objects in which I hang suspended, displacing my volume perhaps, but entirely at the mercy of objects that mediate my every experience and over which I have only very narrow and limited control. These objects grasp me more tightly than ever I could grasp them, he thought, they define the scope of my thoughts and actions, they call to each other through the qualities they share with each other, and they bind me to all the other people similarly caught in this inescapable infinite web of objects. I am caught, he thought, I am connected through objects to everyone and to everything that everyone does with any object anywhere. I am not sure that I like this. Through the objects around me, both useful and ornamental, through these objects’ connections with and similarities to other and yet other objects, I am implicated in all actions committed by all humans using objects that embody intentions, that are made for a purpose or suggest themselves as suitable for a purpose, that are available for the use of humans, that press their purpose on the minds of humans. We are all connected through objects because all objects are connected. “Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” states the protagonist, so to call her, of Lara Pawson’s excellent little book, Spent Light. Although the ostensible scope of the book is entirely domestic and simple and small and plausibly claustrophobic, the quotidian household objects that she considers, objects that are seldom considered but merely used, reveal, by similarity, connections with objects used in and enabling acts of violence, injustice and exploitation committed on both humans and the environment anywhere in the world. A pepper mill is connected to a grenade, an egg timer is the same mechanism used to detonate a time bomb, on the toaster given to her by her disconcerting neighbour “above each light is a word printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL”. Every characteristic of every thing twitches a web of association and resemblance often leading to her memories or at least knowledge of despicable actions committed with similar objects or implicated by the functions of her objects somewhere distant or else. These associations often reveal Pawson’s close observation of cruelties from her time as a war reporter in parts of the world seemingly different from but in fact not unconnected with her current rather domestic existence. But although the reader never knows when they will next be shocked by Pawson’s association of an object, an object that they very likely have themselves or which is very similar to an object that they have in their own intimate environment, with an act of cruelty, torture or genocide, an association that may change forever the way that the reader looks at their own object, the same world-wide web of objects that links us to these acts contains also associations that connect us, despite or because of the objects that we own, with others in acts of support, nurture or love; acts of support, nurture and love that are all the more angry, vital and beautiful because of the global contexts in which they must be waged. Lara Pawson, he thought, on the evidence of this book, is good company in the waging of such acts.
Welcome back Raccoon, Badger, Fox, Bear, and Crow! Raccoon is reading a great book. It’s a wonderful adventure. It’s so exciting, he decides it’s time for his own expedition;— a journey around the world! For that he will need a boat, and he knows where he can find one. His friend, Badger, is just the fellow. Badger has everything, and all in their allotted places. Check out his storage shelves — so orderly! Badger also thinks he will be the perfect companion for this journey. Everyone needs a friend on such a journey. Boat and paddles in hand, they are ready to go. Setting off for the river, they meet Fox at the market selling her eggs. What about food? I better come along with you, insists Fox. The three friends are now prepared for their journey around the world. Bear is out fishing and reminds them about sea monsters and jellyfish. You’ll need a bear on your crew. Off to the river the four friends go. Crow flies past, and exclaims, I’ll be the look-out. Of course, they need a look-out for such a grand adventure. All together, they get under way. It’s a beautiful day for a journey down the river to the ocean. What a great adventure! Philip Waechter’s Around the World With Friends, like his previous picture book about our five wonderful friends ( A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends), captures us. The five friends are adorable, their joyful and positive interactions irresistable, and the story moves at just the right pace, and with a gentleness that is sometimes missing in picture books. The illustrations are delightful and there is always more to see with each reading. Each of the friends has their special talent and all this comes in handy on their adventure down the river. An adventure which mostly goes to plan, but isn’t always plain sailing, so there will be some problem-solving along the way. There will be games on a sandy bank, scrambled eggs and oh dear! — rain. Exciting adventures are wonderful, especially with friends, but what about Fox’s chickens, and Bear needs his teddy at night, and Raccoon forgot to bring his book. Heading home is just fine — especially when there are plans for a new adventure very soon! A perfectly charming picture book for young adventurers. Recommended for gift-giving and inspiring summer adventures, filled with imagination and delight.
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The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame $40
Janet Frame’s third novel, long out of print, is republished by the esteemed Fitzcarraldo Editions to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. The Edge of the Alphabet is a piercing, startlingly strange work about identity, the post-colonial experience and the search for connection in a lonely world. Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world. This edition includes a new foreword by Catherine Lacey.
”Her writing is engaging and idiosyncratic – full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard. That is the joy of books like this, out of print for 60 years, but now roaring into view, stronger and brighter than ever. It’s good to have it back.” —JJohn Self, The Times
”Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob…. Frame’s fiction … made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.” —Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement
”‘It is the most Woolfian of Frame’s work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking The Waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.” —Catherine Taylor, Guardian
”Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.” —Hilary Mantel
”It is a revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.” —Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
”Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels almost as if it were not written.” —Jane Campion, Guardian
I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews) $34
Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short — sometimes very short — stories. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.
”Pure genius.” — Max Porter
”Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.” — Publishers Weekly
”Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.” — Kirkus Reviews
”Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form. The brevity of The Illiterate alone tells you that this is not her whole story. It is simply the one she tells.” — Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
”For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.” — Missouri Williams, The Nation
This Mouth Is Mine by Yásnaya Elena A. Gil (Yásnaya Aguilar) (translated by Ellen Jones) $40
"This Mouth is Mine is an important reminder that the linguistic is political and that linguistic discrimination tends to intersect with racism. The book shows that indigenous languages are modern languages too, as suitable for writing rock lyrics, tweeting jokes, or explaining quantum physics as Spanish and English." —The Times Literary Supplement
A passionate cry for living, vital, indigenous languages and the people who speak them., this book should be required reading for our current government. Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Yásnaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico's relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best. What does it mean to have a prize for Indigenous literature when different Indigenous languages are as far from each other as they are from Japanese? What impact does considering Tzotzil "cultural heritage" have on our idea of it, when it is still being used, and refreshed, and changed (like every other language) today? How does the idea of Indigeneity stand up, when you consider Indigenous peoples outside of the frame of colonialism? Personal, anecdotal, and full of vivid examples, Aguilar does more than advocate for the importance of resistance by native peoples: she offers everyone the opportunity to value and enjoy a world in which culture, language, and community is delighted in, not flattened. "We have sacrificed Mexico in favour of creating the idea of Mexico" she says. This Mouth Is Mine is an invitation to take it back.
"This volume is a collection of denunciations against linguistic discrimination, contempt for speakers of languages other than Spanish, the constant violation of their linguistic rights, and the lack of access to self-determination over their territories. This is evidence that, although it proclaims otherwise, the Mexican state has failed to build a true intercultural relationship. This is a dialogical text that weaves an individual voice with that of the community to reflect on the struggle for linguistic diversity and vitality, in a context of systematic violence against peoples and communities who defend their language and territory." —ONAHCYT
"Thanks to the accessible and unpretentious language used by the author, this book is an undemanding and even fun read without losing the rigour and seriousness that such an important subject deserves. It is difficult to find a book to compare with This Mouth is Mine, since the struggle of Indigenous peoples to bring their own perspectives to the table has been hard and many obstacles are still placed in their way of achieving autonomy. Still, the fact that the foundations are only just being laid to amplify historically marginalised voices in the academy makes this work all the greater an achievement for those whose viewpoints have been ignored because they have been expressed in languages other than Spanish. The publication of This Mouth is Mine is not only a tool for questioning the role that the state has played in the elimination of the native cultures of the national territory, but also constitutes significant progress toward the creation of a socio-cultural policy focused on linguistic diversity." —Idiomatica, revista universitaria de lenguas
Orbital by Samantha Harvey $26
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity? {Now in paperback}
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize (and a customer favourite).
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden $38
It's fifteen years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be — led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep — as a guest, there to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis — she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house — a spoon, a knife, a bowl - Isabel's suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation — leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva — nor the house — are what they seem.
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
”We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.” —Booker judges
”Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’, which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, Van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.” —Lauren Bufferd, BookPage
”This is a beautifully realised book, nearly perfect, as van der Wouden quietly explores the intricate nuances of resentment-hued sibling dynamics, the discovery of desire (and the simultaneous discovery of self), queer relationships at a time when they went unspoken, and the legacy of war and what it might mean to have been complicit in its horrors.'“ —Kirkus
⿻ 數位 Plurality : The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl et al $68
A superb handbook for wresting digital technology from the hands of those who seek to use it to exploit and control us, and instead for using it to make a better, freer, more inclusive life for all. Digital technology threatens to tear free and open societies apart through polarisation, inequality, and loneliness. But in the decade since the weeks-long occupation of the Taiwan parliament, a diverse island of resilience has shown another way is possible. Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, withstood the pandemic without lockdowns, and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalising on a culture of innovation to "hack the government." Here, the architects of Taiwan's internationally acclaimed digital democracy share the secret of their success. Plurality (symbolized ⿻) harnesses digital tools not to replace humans or trust, but to channel the potential energy in social diversity that can erupt in conflict instead for progress, growth and beauty. From intimate digitally empowered telepathy to global trade running on social networks rather than money, ⿻ offers tools to radically enrich relationships while leaving no one behind. ⿻ thus promises to transform every sector from healthcare to media, as illustrated by the way it has been written: as a chorus of open, self-governing collaboration of voices from around the globe. Their work in public on this openly available text shows — as well as tells — how everyone from a devout African farmer to a Hollywood celebrity can help build a more dynamic, harmonious and inclusive world.
Tree of Nourishment (‘Kāwai’ #2) by Monty Soutar $40
It’s 1818 on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui, New Zealand. Hine-aute, granddaughter of the legendary warrior Kaitanga, is fleeing through the bush, a precious yet gruesome memento contained in her fishing net. What follows is a gripping tale of a people on the cusp of profound change that is destined to reverberate through many generations to come. The Europeans have arrived, and they’ve brought guns and foreign diseases, ushering in a whole new world of terror and trouble. They’ve also brought a new religion, which will cause Māori to question everything they had believed to be true. Hine and her sons Ipumare and Uha are caught in the crossfire of change, creating fractures in their close familial bonds and undermining everything they hold dear. From raids by musket-wielding war parties to heightened internecine warfare; from the influx of whalers, traders and Christian missionaries to the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi, Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment strikes hard and deep into the heart of the initial impact of colonisation on Māori.
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie $28
For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.
Juice by Tim Winton $55
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
Self-Esteem and the End of the World by Luke Healy $45
Who is Luke Healy?' For over ten years, a graphic novelist called Luke Healy has invested all of his self-esteem into his career. Then, almost overnight, just as his brother is getting married, both seem to vanish. Spiralling and lacking purpose, he searches for identity — in self-help books, replacement jobs and human connection — and visits cheesy British hotels and abandoned Greek islands. Set against the backdrop of a dangerously changing global climate, with melting ice-caps and flooding cities, Self-Esteem and the End of the World spans two decades of tragicomic self-discovery until the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood revival of Luke's work comes into view — but what might be the cost?Quietly funny, smartly introspective, and grounded in deeply-felt familial highs and lows, Self-Esteem and the End of the World ponders what happens when the person you are isn’t who you need to be, who you are when nobody’s watching, and ultimately, who can you possibly be at the end of the world?
Cypria: A journey to the heat of the Mediterranean, A new history of Cyprus by Alex Christofi $40
Think of a place where you can stand at the intersection of Christian and Arab cultures, at the crossroads of the British, Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman and Egyptian empires; a place marked by the struggle between fascism and communism and where the capital city is divided in half as a result of bloody conflict; where the ancient olive trees of Homer's time exist alongside the undersea cables which link up the world's internet. In Cypria, named after a lost Cypriot epic which was the prequel to The Odyssey, British Cypriot writer Alex Christofi writes a deeply personal, lyrical history of the island of Cyprus, from the era of goddesses and mythical beasts to the present day. This sprawling, evocative and poetic book begins with the legend of the cyclops and the storytelling at the heart of the Mediterranean culture. Christofi travels to salt lakes, crusader castles, mosques and the eerie town deserted at the start of the 1974 war. He retells the particularly bloody history of Cyprus during the twentieth century and considers his own identity as traveller and returner, as Odysseus was.
Ideology: An introduction by Terry Eagleton $37
Ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. Eagleton unravels its many definitions, exploring its tortuous history from the Enlightenment to the present. The book provides lucid accounts of the thought of key Marxist thinkers, as well as that of philosophers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Freud and the post-structuralists, and a political reformulation of a vital set of ideas.
”Witty, lucid, and powered by that stinging, militant, ironising intelligence which distinguishes Eagleton's work.” —Guardian
Odyssey by Stephen Fry $40
Troy has fallen. After 10 years of war, the Greeks make their way back to their own lands - but what homes now await them? Agamemnon must return to his wife Clytemnestra, who has been nursing her rage since he sacrificed their daughter to the gods for a favourable wind. Her revenge will know no bounds. Meanwhile, Odysseus has angered the god Poseidon and he is cursed to wander the seas. Follow Odysseus after he leaves the fallen city of Troy and takes ten long dramatic years — battling monsters, resisting goddesses, and suffering the curse of Poseidon — to voyage home to his wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca. The fourth and final volume of Fry’s epic undertaking of retelling Greek myths and legends.
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
* The New Directions title is Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , the Dialogue Books edition is titled Spontaneous Acts (same book, different titles, different jackets… buy the one you prefer!)
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27 September 2024
From the opening pages, its gothic lettering contents page, an image of a carriage arriving in a small mountain village surrounded by forests, the looming buildings of the sanatorium, you feel as if you have entered the opening scenes of Nosferatu. Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Empusium, subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, builds intrigue from the outset. It’s 1913, a year before great turmoil, and curing tuberculosis is all the rage. Our young Polish hero, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, has been sent to the Silesian village of Gorbersdorf for the fresh air, the cold baths and the expert advice of Dr.Semperweiss. The sanatorium is popular and full. Wojnicz takes a room at the more economical Guesthouse for Gentlemen run by the unseemly Optiz with help of a rugged lad, Raimund. Here his fellow guests, after a day of health procedures and walks in the village, sit down to dinner together. It’s an evening of conversation, often arguments, about existence, human behaviour, psychology, and politics; as well as the purpose of women or more accurately their flawed views on the inferiority of women. This topic of conversation, much to the surprise and annoyance of Wojnicz, who they take pleasure in warning and teasing, is a frequent and recurring theme, helped along by a local speciality, a mushroom-infused liquor— the hallucinatory effects fueling the conversation, as well as driving the gentlemen towards introspection. Wojnicz’s fellow housemates include a serial returnee who seems driven by ennui, a humanist bent on lecturing our dear young hero, a young student of art (dying), and the aptly nicknamed The Lion, his bombastic nature making him easy to dislike. Thrown into this dysfunctional playground, the timid Wojnicz is unnerved, and this is not helped by a suicide by hanging on his first day in the house. A house with strange creakings, with cooing in the attic and the whoosh of that new thing, electricity. Not to mention the horror chair with straps in the room upstairs, the graves in the cemetery with an abundance of November death dates, and the uncanny behaviour of the charcoal burners in the forests. Secrets abound, and Wojnicz has several of his own he’s keeping close to his chest. Tokarczuk builds this multi-layered tale from snippets of Greek mythology, the new ideas of the period (think Freud) and as a response to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (published 100 years ago). Like Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead there is a mystery here, a fizzing at the edges, black humour, and a deadly serious exploration of ideas. While Drive Your Plow is pushing the idea of eco-activist in response to harmful tradition, The Empusium is examining the misogyny of the 20th century canon and by extension the influence of these writers, philosophers and psychologists on the contemporary intellectual landscape. To counter the conversations of the ‘gentlemen’, there is a wonderful sense of being watched, that things are not what they seem, and justice will be done. In Greek mythology, the Empusa were shapeshifting creatures. Appearing as beautiful women they preyed on young men, and as beasts devoured them. Beware of those that have one leg of copper, and the other, a donkey’s. As Wojnicz finds the Guesthouse increasingly repressive, the rigours of treatment intrusive, the hallucinogenic effects of liquor to be avoided, and the tragic decline of the young man Thilo unbearable, he also finds in himself a strength as to date untapped. Whether from curiosity, delusion, avoidance of his own fraught familiar relationships, or an unconscious desire to live, our hero explores the depths of the house and the village in an attempt to discover what drives the men of this village to act so horrifically. Add into this rich psychological horror, rich, fetid descriptions of the forest, its minutiae, the fungi and foliage, an atmospheric mindscape grows. Reading The Empusium is like looking through a telescopic lens, one that fogs over, but a twitch of the controls, and a whisk of a cloth, brings it all into sharp relief. If you haven’t read Tokarczuk, it’s time to start.
TEXT EDITION
FITZCARRALDO EDITION
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