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1 November 2024
Every good book experience starts with the simplest of things. An excellent board book can open a young mind to the world and their own experience in it. At VOLUME, we are always looking for interesting picture books that will surprise and delight. Board books for the very youngest start the journey of a reading life. Here are a few recently published titles:
Titiro/Look is a bilingual first words book. Another excellent title from Aotearoa children’s author and Illustrator Gavin Bishop. The design is excellent, with its arresting illustrations and clear visual information. There’s a great range of subjects, creating plenty of opportunities to expand vocabulary and create conversations, making it a perfect book for looking at, and interacting with, for parent (or grandparent) and child.
So excited to see a new addition to the playful series from creator Antonia Pesenti. Party Rhyme! is as much fun as Rhyme Cordial and Rhyme Hungry. With hairy bread and party bats it will be hard to keep the laughter and rhyming under control. But not to worry, there will be a bear hug to keep everyone feeling cosy at the end. The lift-the-flap formula works brilliantly with Pesenti’s books, and they are robust and create just the right amount of anticipation.
If you are after a sweet bedtime book, look no further than Good Night Belly Button. Reminiscent of the classic Good Night Moon, the youngster in this story is being tucked into bed, from the tips of the toes up to the chin, all snug and sleepy. This long format board book slowly raises the blanket with each turn of the page. Good night little feet, good night little calves, good night little knees…
And here’s a wonderful title now available as a board book. Press Here by designer Hervé Tullet is brilliant. It’s all about colours and movement. It is clever and interactive without any moving parts, but plenty of lateral thinking. Highly enjoyable and endlessly fascinating! It is magic?
If you are interested in a Book Subscription for a young reader, we have designed some perfect book packages. For the youngest, we recommend WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF BOOKS. We create reading subscriptions for all ages and can adjust to fit your requirements.
Not sure which appeals the most? —Use the ENQUIRE button or just email us to start a conversation.
“When what is distant disappears, what is near tenderly draws nearer,” said Robert Walser, according to Carl Seelig, about walking in the fog. Walser’s collar is crooked, or worn, or both, he carries his furled umbrella under his arm along the mountain path, his hat is battered, the band torn, he is wearing a suit, somewhat raffish, somewhat the worse for wear, but he has no overcoat. Walser does not feel the cold, says Seelig. He enjoys the clouds, the rain. He distrusts clarity. Walser enjoys his walks with Seelig but asks Seelig not to call for him on any day but Sunday, so as not to disturb the routine of the asylum, in Herisau. There he assembles paper bags with glue, sorts beans and lentils, cleans the rooms. “It suits me to disappear,” says Walser, according to Seelig, “as inconspicuously as possible.” Even from his early days, according to Seelig, who did not know Walser in his early days and so must have had this information from Walser, or possibly another source, though no other source suggests itself, Walser took long walks to overcome the effects of nightmares. Or anxiety. Or the panic that results from the inability to engage. Not that Walser suffers from the inability to engage, exactly, though he seldom talks without prompting, not even to Seelig, says Seelig. Seelig spends little time with Walser in the asylum, but instead on the mountain paths, walking in the cloud, and in the rain, the best weather, to the small village inns where they enjoy this wine or that, or beer, or cider, and cutlets, or fried eggs, or dumplings, or cheese pies, whatever they are, or meatloaf, and pommes frites, or cabbage, or mashed potatoes and peas and white beans. Seelig records it all, afterwards, each detail of the walk and of the food and the drink and the waitresses, and every word that Walser speaks, we suppose, or, anyway, at least the essentials. With great equivalence. Off they walk again together, over the ridge, around the base of the mountain, Switzerland has many ridges and many bases of mountains, to clear their heads after the wine, and then to catch the train that will return Walser to the asylum and Seelig to wherever Seelig lives. Walser “harbours a deep suspicion of the doctors, the nurses, and his fellow patients, which he nonetheless skilfully tries to hide behind ceremonial politeness,” says Seelig, who either observes Walser more frequently than is recorded or has this information from the doctors. Seelig becomes, after all, Walser’s guardian after the deaths of Walser’s brother Karl and his sister Lisa. He republishes Walser’s work. To no avail. But Seelig is invisible to us, through making Walser visible when Walser doesn’t want to be visible. Seelig is Walser’s Boswell. Seelig is the narrator of Walser now that Walser narrates nothing. “Restraint is my only weapon,” says Walser, narrates Seelig. The restraint that made Walser significant as a writer is no different from the restraint that stopped him writing. “The less plot a writer needs, and the more restrained the setting, the more significant his talent,” says Walser, the author of, first, novels, then stories, then feuilletons, then microscripts approximating a millimeter in height in pencil on tiny scraps of paper, hidden about his person, in the Asylum in Waldau, unrecognised as actual writing until after his death, until they were deciphered in the 1990s, then nothing. When he first meets Seelig, because Seelig admires Walser's writing, Walser has already stopped writing. He has written nothing since he left Waldau and entered Herisau. Walser blames Hitler. Or society. Or the new superintendent at Waldau, according the Seelig. Walser blames editors, critics, other writers, according to Seelig. Walser’s work was admired by Kafka. He was admired by Benjamin, Sebald, Bernhard and Handke, according to them. To mention only a few. One critic called The Tanners “nothing more than a collection of footnotes,” according to Walser, according to Seelig. The Assistant was true, which is a surprise, at one time you could visit the advertising clock designed by Tobler, says Walser, says Seelig. Walser wrote the book in six weeks. The world changed. Walser changed, or he failed to change. He was celebrated and then increasingly ignored. He found it hard and then harder to get his work published. Even in the newspapers. “I could not perform for society’s sake,” says Walser, of his failure, according to Seelig, “All the dear, sweet people who think they have the right to criticise me and order me around are fanatical admirers of Herman Hesse. They are extremists in their judgement. That’s the reason I have ended up in this asylum. I simply lacked a halo, and that is the only way to be successful in literature,” says Walser to Seelig, according to Seelig, not without bitterness. Writing can only be done if it is the only thing done. Once, Walser alternated his writing with jobs as a servant or as a clerk, for money, for the time to write. Now he does not write. He wants to disappear. “It is absurd and brutal to expect me to scribble away even in the asylum. The only basis on which a writer can produce is freedom. As long as this condition remains unmet, I will refuse to write ever again,” says Walser, as recorded by Seelig. Walser’s turning away is from writing and from life. Walser's ceremonial politeness is his way of not existing, or of existing in his own absence. He is distant and withdrawn. He likes long walks, alone, we find out later, or with Seelig. He talks with Seelig, a little, when prompted, but not with others. As far as we know. The withdrawal that gives his writing such brilliance is the withdrawal that makes life unlivable, in the end, or at some point some way before the end, when one lets go of something, it is uncertain what, that everyone else grasps, naturally, or, more commonly, desperately, whatever it is, that keeps them clutching their lives. Walser, says Seelig, failed to take his own life, on more than a single occasion. His sister showed him the asylum at Waldau. He could think of no option but to enter. He did what was expected. He is diagnosed, when the term becomes available, as a catatonic schizophrenic, whatever that means, but his enjoyment of the walking, of the scenery, of the food and more especially the drink, and of the waitresses, seems genuine, at least through the eyes of Seelig, who knows him better than anyone, who sought him out because of his work and befriended him in the asylum and who accompanies him on long walks, who records everything and is sympathetic and transparent, at least to us, so that there is no reason to doubt Walser’s small and simple pleasures as they are recorded by Seelig, an affectionate man, on the level of smallness and simplicity at which they are experienced by Walser, who has set about perfecting smallness and simplicity until it resembles so very little it is almost nothing. Who is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. Who shows no emotion when told of the death of his brother, whom he loves, who refuses to break his routine to visit his sister, whom he loves, when she lies dying and asks him to come. “I too am ill,” says Walser, says Seelig. He doesn’t want to do what the other patients in the asylum aren't doing. He has an intestinal ulcer. “Must I be sick?” he asks the doctor, “Are you not satisfied to have me here in good health?” He refuses the operation. Just as well. “Is it true that you destroyed four unpublished novels?” asks Seelig. “That may be,” answers Walser, according to Seelig. Seelig says that Walser’s brother’s wife Fridolina had been told by Walser’s sister Lisa that Walser had destroyed a photograph of himself that had been taken by his brother Karl. “That may be,” answers Walser, records Seelig. Walser is convinced of his failure. At least of his inability to perform as he is expected to perform, to be successful as a writer, though he has an ambivalence towards success, to live even an ordinary life. Everything must be made smaller. “The snow has now turned to hail,” describes Seelig, of the weather. Walser carries steadfastly on. A life is full of details, even when those details are small, or insignificant, if there is such a thing as insignificant. If you wish to disappear you pay attention to the small. You have relinquished everything else and are relinquishing that too, with great care. The doctor says Walser has a disease of the lungs. It affects his heart. He should not leave the asylum grounds, says the doctor, according to Seelig. Walser accompanies Seelig to the train. The next time they walk, Walser does not walk well, says Seelig. He tires and stumbles. It seems there is not much of life left. Almost nothing. One day Walser goes for a walk. They find him later, face-up in the snow.
On short-listing Charlotte Wood’s STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL for the 2024 Booker Prize, 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.”
A selection of books from our shelves.
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Invisible dogs by Charles Boyle $36
“They ran wild in packs. They spread disease. They fouled the pavements. They kept us awake and then infected our dreams. They bred faster than rabbits. They laughed at the police. Whole districts became no-go areas. Finally the government took action: they were rounded up and slaughtered and buried in pits and now there are no dogs.” Invisible Dogs is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs — but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city. [Paperback with French flaps]
“Invisible Dogs is such a direct, lucid text that the reader might mistake it for a simple record of a visit to an authoritarian country. But Boyle’s wry and wiry prose, an invisible dog in itself, makes an eye contact you can’t break and produces thereafter a quietly deadly picture of the viewed and the viewer, the destination and the traveller.’” —M. John Harrison
”Funny, sinister, thought-moving like light, subtly then increasingly terrifying. Its intelligence reads like relief. Its determination not to language- or life-launder leaves it and the experience of reading it clean and cleansing re the shining and the very dark and the strangeness of us.” —Ali Smith
”I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now.” —Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
"The eponymous absence of dogs is not, it turns out, actually an absence — just an act of collective bad faith. The dogs are still there, but the locals have agreed to pretend they aren’t. Though Mike knows what’s going on — ‘It’s the things they are not telling us that we should be paying attention to’ — he’s soon all-too-willing to toe the official line. As for the narrator, his apparent superiority to his hosts soon erodes: ‘I told the journalist that in my country it’s not dogs but beggars that are invisible.’ Eventually, the pair tire of answering inane questions about their writing and appearing at official events; they start to explore for themselves, visiting off-grid street markets — and losing their hosts’ trust. Invisible Dogs is a layered book. To paint it as one big Swiftian metaphor about the ease with which we accept the erasure of the most vulnerable, or a simple parable about the smiling removal of freedoms of recent years, wouldn’t be enough. It also contains satirical meta-swipes at the fact that, as writers, ‘we were all in sales’, a subtle portrait of the paranoia induced by surveillance, and more besides. Boyle has created something dread-making, with real elegance.’ —Declan Ryan, Daily Telegraph
Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn $35
Contradictions, misunderstandings, oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges — these messy troubles are the stuff of life. In Pretty Ugly, Gunn reminds us of her unparalleled acumen in handling ambiguity and complication, which are essential grist to the storyteller's mill. These 13 stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are a testament to Gunn's ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. Gunn's is a steady, unflinching gaze. In this collection, Gunn practises 'reading and writing ugly' to pursue the deeper (and frequently uncomfortable) truths that lie under the surface, at the core of both human imagination and human rationality. Each story is an exquisite, thorn-sharp bouquet. [Paperback]
”I am fully in love with Kirsty Gunn's stories. They hit the heart of life so truly it makes me quiver.” —Jane Campion
”Fiercely conflicting energies are in play in these sparkling stories, as Kirsty Gunn at once lavishly evokes and savagely destroys the worlds of propriety and respectable community.” —Tim Parks
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (translated from French by Mark Hutchison) $37
Hailed in Le Point as a “masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance”, this novel is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s younger sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell. [Paperback]
”The story of Fanny and the Narrator is a story about our impulse to understand one another and about the way in which unknowability is what makes someone interesting; it is about, in fact, the relationship between unknowability and the desire to know, neither existing without the other, as a narrator does not exist without a story nor a story without a narrator. Exuberantly anti-realist and avowedly fictional.” —The Brooklyn Rail
”In her ability to dip down, over and over, into her secret life, and emerge with a small, sparkling patch of that whole cloth, Serre strikes me as extraordinarily luck. Serre’s primary subject, as always, is narration, and it’s thanks to this obsession that A Leopard-Skin Hat sidesteps memoir, not only by replacing siblings with friends and adopting a male Narrator but by plunging into the volatile spacetime of writing.” —The Baffler
Dusk by Robbie Arnott $38
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal. [Paperback]
”Dusk is a sublime novel of loss and redemption, fight and surrender, that left me in absolute awe. Robbie Arnott's prose is incandescent, his storytelling mythic and filled with a wisdom that extends beyond the page. With Dusk, he asserts himself as one of Australia's finest literary writers.” —Hannah Kent
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life by Lulu Miller $45
When Lulu Miller’s relationship falls apart, she turns to an unlikely figure for guidance — the 19th-century naturalist, David Starr Jordan. Poring over his diaries, Lulu discovers a man obsessed with nature's hidden order, devoted to studying shimmering scales and sailing the world in search of new species of fish. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake sends more than a thousand of Jordan’s specimens, housed in glass jars, plummeting to the ground, the story of his resilience leads Lulu to believe she has found the antidote to life’s unpredictability. But lurking behind the tale of this great taxonomist lies a darker story waiting to be told: one about the human cost of attempting to define the form of things unknown. An idiosyncratic, personal approach to this fascinating scientific biography, Why Fish Dont Exist is an astonishing tale of newfound love, scientific discovery and how to live well in a world governed by chaos. [Hardback]
“I want to live at this book's address: the intersection of history and biology and wonder and failure and sheer human stubbornness. What a sumptuous, surprising, dark delight.” —Carmen Maria Machado
”Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review
”A story told with an open heart, every page of it animated by verve, nuance, and full-throated curiosity.” —Leslie Jamison
”This book will capture your heart, seize your imagination, smash your preconceptions, and rock your world.” —Sy Montgomery
”Moves gracefully between reporting and meditation, big questions and small moments. A magical hybrid of science, portraiture, and memoir-and a delight to read.” —Susan Orlean
Ryder by Djuna Barnes $35
Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of eccentricity and anarchy; through sparkling detours and pastiche, cult author Djuna Barnes spins an audacious, intricate story of sexuality, power, and praxis. Ryder, like its namesake, Wendell Ryder, is many things — lyric, prose, fable, illustration; protagonist, bastard, bohemian, polygamist. Born in the 1800s to infamous nonconformist Sophia Grieve Ryder, Wendell's search for identity takes him from Connecticut to England to multifarious digressions on morality, tradition, and gender. Censored upon its first release in 1928, Ryder's portrayal of sexuality remains revolutionary despite the passing of time and the expurgations in the text, preserved by Barnes in protest of the war 'blindly raged against the written word'. The weight of Wendell's story endures despite this censorship, as his drive to assume the masculine roles of patriarch and protector comes at the sacrifice of the women around him. A vanguard modernist, Djuna Barnes has been called the patron literary saint of Bohemia, and her second novel, Ryder, evinces her cutting wit and originality. [Paperback]
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser $38
It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art. [Paperback]
”A hugely talented author.” —Sarah Waters
”Michelle de Kretser is a genius — one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There’s no writer I’d rather read.” —V.V. Ganeshananthan
”In the midst of a late coming-of-age plot effervescent with romantic and intellectual misadventure, de Kretser considers memory — how we enshrine our cultural heroes and how we tell ourselves the stories of our own lives — with absolute rigor and perfect clarity. Structurally innovative and totally absorbing, this is a book that enlivens the reader to every kind of possibility. I savored every word.” —Jennifer Croft"
”Michelle de Kretser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.” —Neel Mukherjee
”One of the living masters of the art of fiction.” —Max Porter
”Thrillingly original.” —Sigrid Nunez
Three Wild Dogs and the Truth by Markus Zusak $40
“There's a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us. It's love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things.” What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs — Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm? The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed — not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning. There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love — and the joy and recognition of family. From one of the world's great storytellers comes a tender, motley and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder; but it's also a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty — but also the visceral truth of the natural world — straight to our doors and into our lives, and change us forever. [Hardback]
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim $27
Today the once flourishing Jewish community of Iraq, at one time numbering over 130,000 and tracing its history back 2,600 years, has all but vanished. Why so? One explanation speaks of the timeless clash between Arab and Jewish civilisations and a heroic Zionist mission to rescue Eastern Jews from backward nations and unceasing persecution. Avi Shlaim tears up this script. His parents had many Muslim friends in Baghdad and no interest in Zionism. As anti-Semitism surged in Iraq, the Zionist underground fanned the flames. Yet when Iraqi Jews fled to Israel, they faced an uncertain future, their history was rewritten to serve a Zionist narrative. This memoir breathes life into an almost forgotten world. Weaving together the personal and the political, Three Worlds offers a fresh perspective on Arab-Jews, caught in the crossfire of Zionism and nationalism. [Paperback]
”Three Worlds, by the Oxford historian of the modern Middle East Avi Shlaim, is an often enchanting memoir of his childhood in Baghdad. A lost world in Iraq is brilliantly brought back to life in this fascinating memoir.” —David Abulafia
To Free the World: Harry Holland and the rise of the labour movement in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific by James Robb $50
“He devoted his life to free the world from unhappiness, tyranny and oppression,” reads Harry Holland’s memorial in Wellington. Militant unionist, socialist agitator, writer and organiser, Holland was a firebrand leader of workers — in Australia, where he was jailed for sedition during the Broken Hill miners’ strike of 1909 — in Aotearoa NZ, from his arrival during the 1912Waihī Strike, to his death at the tangi of the Māori King in 1933. Elected an MP in 1918 and NZ Labour Party leader from 1919 to 1933, Holland was the “compassionate champion of the common people.” He campaigned against military conscription and war, forged a political alliance with Māori, supported strikes by indentured labourers in Fiji, defended the Samoan Mau movement against the NZ colonial administration, and condemned the mass layoffs and wage-cutting during the Great Depression. When Labour was elected to government in 1935, Michael Joseph Savage cabled Holland’s widow, Annie: “Harry’s life of service enabled us to win.” James Robb’s fresh, uncompromising biography features excerpts from Holland’s own writings, on matters as diverse as Massey’s Cossacks, industrial accidents, the poetry of Robert Burns, the White Australia policy and the Russian revolution. We rediscover this visionary socialist leader through his own words. [Paperback]
The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston $30
Dictionary wishes she could tell a story just like the other books. So one day she decides to bring her words to life. How exciting it is, she thinks, that an adventure is finally happening on her very own pages! But what will she do when everything gets out of control, all in a jumble, and her characters collide causing the most enormous tantrum to explode. This isn’t what she wanted at all! How on earth will she find sense in all this chaos? Her friend Alphabet knows exactly what to do and sings a song that brings calm and order to Dictionary’s pages once again. [Hardback]
Mother Tongue Tied: On language, motherhood, and multilingualism — Disrupting myths and finding meaning by Malwina Gudowska $40
It is estimated that more than half of the world's population communicates in more than one language and over a third of the population in the United Kingdom is multilingual. And yet life in multiple languages is rarely discussed publicly, myths and misconceptions prevail and the pressure to keep heritage languages alive has become a private conflict for millions. Linguistic diversity is more prevalent than ever, but so is linguistic inequality. Linguist Malwina Gudowska, herself trilingual, sheds light on the ways in which we navigate language, its power to shape and reshape lives, and the ripple effects felt far beyond any one home or any one language. It takes one generation for a family language to be lost. One generation — like mother to child. Mother Tongue Tied explores the emotional weight of raising multilingual children while grappling with your own identity and notions of home. At what cost does a mother save a language? Or does she let it slip away and, with it, a part of herself her children may never know. [Hardback]
”Mother Tongue Tied brilliantly illustrates how multilingual mothers are disproportionately tasked with preserving linguistic heritage on one hand and preparing children for public society on the other — all while finding a language for their own new maternal identity. A thought-provoking, political and empathetic book.” —Eliane Glaser
Persian Feasts: Recipes and stories from a family table by Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller, Lila Charif, Laya Khadjavi, and Bahar Tavakolian $70
When Leila Heller's mother, Nahid Taghinia-Milani came to the United States in 1979, she brought her recipes with her. Persian Feasts features Iranian delicacies from Iran in a dazzling tapestry of textures and aromas, from Shiraz in the south to Tabriz in the north. This exquisite collection of 100 dishes includes hearty stews, saffron-infused rice dishes, succulent kebabs, and delicate rosewater desserts — each one telling a story that is steeped in tradition and has been passed down from generation to generation. Unexpected ingredient combinations create distinctive tastes and aromas to every dish - from a simple Herb Frittata to a comforting Eggplant, Walnut & Pomegranate Stew to a delicately perfumed Cardamom and Rose Water Pudding. This highly personal book for home cooks — including family stories, historical accounts of food culture, recipe origins, and celebratory menus — is a feast for the senses, celebrating an abundance of spectacular food prepared with seasonal ingredients, fresh herbs, and fragrant spices. [Hardback]
Small Acts by Kate Gordon and Kate Foster $19
There are people everywhere who need help, who might seem okay on the outside but aren't on the inside. People whose whole entire day can be changed ... Josh wants a friend but he doesn't know how to find somewhere to belong ... Ollie wants to express herself but doesn't want to be noticed ... Small Acts introduces two kids with great hearts who know that helping others can start with one small act of kindness. Josh has a plan to start with just that. So does Ollie. What Josh and Ollie don't know yet is that they need each other to make their plans work. [Paperback]
Determination by Tawseef Khan $40
Jamila Shah is twenty-nine and exhausted. An immigration solicitor tasked with running the precious family law firm, Jamila is prone to being woken in the middle of the night by frantic phone calls from clients on the cusp of deportation. Working under the shadow of the government's 'hostile environment', she constantly prays and hopes that their 'determinations' will result in her clients being allowed to stay. With no time for friends, family or even herself (never mind a needy partner), Jamila's life feels hectic and out of control. Then a breakdown of sorts forces her to seek change — to pursue her own happiness while navigating the endless expectations that the world seems to have of her, and still committing herself to a career devoted to helping others. In this polyphonic, character-driven novel, we meet the staff of Shah & Co Solicitors, who themselves arrived in the UK not too long ago, and their clients, more recent arrivals who are made to jump through hoops to create a life for themselves whilst trying to achieve some semblance of normality. [Hardback]
”A compassionate, beautifully told portrait populated by lives that circle the UK's lamentable immigration story. This is a story of determination, also grief, hope, loss and desperation, as well as a reminder of the care, patience and kindness at the human end of a broken system.” —Guy Gunaratne
”Tawseef Khan dramatises timely quests for migrant justice amid the grinding frustrations and punitive hypocrisy of the modern British state. Resisting stereotypes and easy moralising, this is absorbing, witty, eloquent fiction, as well as a trenchant political critique.” —Tom Benn
”Determination is a hymn to empathy, alive with care and love. This is a novel not just to spend time with for the joy of the richly detailed world Khan has created but to be enlivened and challenged by. Embedded in his compelling and compassionate novel is an emphatic rebuttal to the racism and xenophobia rife in this country.” —Rebecca Watson
”A heart-breaking, honest, and deeply important story, providing a window into the world of a UK immigration lawyer and the lives touched by her work. This is a moving, immersive, and vital piece of fiction.” —Jyoti Patel
Insectarium by Dave Goulson and Emily Carter $55
Insects are essential for life as we know it. There are at least one million species of insects, together making up over 80 per cent of all living species on Earth. Around 10,000 new species of insects are discovered every year. In Insectarium learn about the secret world thriving right underneath your feet. How did insects evolve into what they are today? How do they work together and how do they defend themselves? Explore the rooms of Insectarium and meet the beautiful demoiselle and the gigantic goliath beetle. Learn why these small creatures have such a huge impact on the world around us, and why we should be protecting them. [A beautifully done large-format hardback]
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher $28
The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags. But America is stifling her — her wilfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness and the narrator unravels spectacularly. In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging — all while resisting easy moralising. [Paperback]
”A masterpiece.” —Slavoj Zizek
”A filthy, elegant book.” —Raven Leilani
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25 October 2024
Alphabetisation as an organising principle at least possesses the virtue of scientific rigour. Alphabetisation is a way to achieve this. Alphabetisation is very clean, even when that which is alphabetised is very dirty (I mean dirty in a non-pejorative sense). Although it appears to be a principle that organises without adding meaning to that which is organised, a principle that organises without aiding understanding of that which is organised, that is actually its virtue. Although the experiences to which our memories relate may have been temporally organised, if organised is the right word, our memories are themselves certainly not temporally organised. Diaries are not memories, but memories could be somehow rescued from diaries, if we only knew how. Do we force new conjunctions of meaning upon sentences that abut each other merely due to their alphabetical sequence, and is this a good thing? Experimental writing needs to follow a rigorously scientific method to yield interesting results. Heti could have alphabetised all the words or alphabetised all the letters, but these, although they may have some scientific or statistical value (probably a fairly low value, I would guess), would not have been very interesting. Heti took ten years of her diary entries and put all the sentences into alphabetical order. Heti’s text is 60000 words long; my review is not long enough to be interesting. How would we arrange our lives, our thoughts, if we did not use time as a method of arrangement? I am aware that I am unlikely to do this, for reasons that could reasonably be labelled laziness. I, at least, can seldom stretch my comprehension beyond a sentence. I do not think that my attempt is very successful (even though it doesn’t need to be very successful; somewhat successful would be sufficient), but why not? I do not think that we would have got bored, though we do get bored of many things. Is this interesting? I was going to say that the way in which the book is written transforms its contents, or the context of the contents, changing our experience of the contents from what it would otherwise have been. In any case, you will find Alphabetical Diaries funny, tender, poignant, and certainly good company (or maybe it’s the author who is good company). In presenting Heti’s thoughts non-temporally arranged, the book resembles a personality, which is also a phenomenon non-temporally arranged, similarly expressed from sequentially lived experience. Is this an interesting way to proceed? It is, however, difficult to determine by what principle our memories are organised, if they can be said to be organised at all, or, if they are organised, whether they are organised by a principle, if it is not impossible to be organised without a principle of organisation. It presents that which it organises without imposing a meaning or context that would dictate or influence our understanding. Living, I suppose, is a forwardly propulsive phenomenon, temporally speaking, and reading also is forwardly propulsive wherever it lands upon a text. Memories appear to be associatively organised, which is what could be called a slippery principle of organisation, or a soft principle of organisation. Memory, however, is not forwardly propulsive. Now I will put all my sentences into alphabetical order. Otherwise the knowledge that the method will in due course be applied to it may influence the writing of the text. Perhaps there is a quantum length of text at which alphabetisation reveals repetitions, patterns, tendencies that might otherwise not be noticed (that is to say, in a shorter text). Perhaps, though, the alphabetical method, if we can call it a method, only really works if the author of the text to which it is applied is unaware of its future application to the text. Plot is as artificial in texts as it is in our lives. Reading would not be reading if it didn’t have propulsion. Really it is the having of memories that is associatively organised and perhaps not the memories themselves, if there are such things as memories that are separate from the having of them, which I doubt (though it is hard to say where memories come from if there are not). Really, the alphabetisation of the sentences is an editorial intervention that is more part of the process of reading than of writing. Surprising results are only surprising if we are surprised by them. The alphabetisation dictates how we access the text. The alphabetisation is a morselisation of the writing and has much in common with the way in which we access memory, which also appears in morsels. The book in many ways is a celebration of the sentence because the sentence is the form preserved or foregrounded by the alphabetisation. The sentence is an optimum unit of interest. This is interesting. This makes me want to apply Heti’s alphabetical method to pre-existing works of literature to see what the method may reveal about them once they are liberated from their traditionally temporal arrangement. Time is a harder principle of organisation than association but it is a softer principle than alphabetisation. Time is almost as soft a principle as association. We must free ourselves from plot. We used to read sections of the Alphabetical Diaries when they appeared online about a year ago in The New York Times back when we subscribed to The New York Times, largely, in the end, to read the Alphabetical Diaries. We would read the latest instalment of the Alphabetical Diaries aloud in bed each Sunday morning, alternating the reading so that we could also drink coffee while reading the Alphabetical Diaries. We would still happily be reading instalments of The Alphabetical Diaries in bed on Sunday mornings if the alphabet and our subscription to The New York Times had not run out at pretty much the same time. Why do I present all my ideas, if they can be said to be ideas, as questions? Will my review obscure the book it addresses in the way my reviews typically obscure the books they address? Would it be possible to write a review of this book in the way that the book itself is written, alphabetising the sentences in the review? Would such a review illuminate the book in a way that adds something to our, or my at least, understanding of it? You might think that reading someone else’s diary entries, especially when they are presented without a diary’s traditional organising principle, would become boring if it did not start out boring, but Heti’s sentences are compelling, compoundingly so, either because she has interesting thoughts; or because her thoughts, vulnerabilities, longings and so forth are entirely relatable, if that is not too nauseating a term, even if they are not interesting per se; or because boredom is a temporal phenomenon that has been excluded or bamboozled by the form.
Marta must be quiet as a mouse. Marta must not be noticed. Marta can be in the lobby, but remain invisible. Marta must not take the elevator. Marta’s mother is a maid at the Hotel Balzaar. Things have not always been this way, but survive they must. Marta’s father is missing. The war has taken him away, and they have not heard from him in over a year. Marta watches the cat and mouse on the clock chase each other through time, she dreams in front of the strange painting, and spends her days going up the stairs, and down the stairs, waiting for the day to pass. When a countess checks into the hotel along with her bright green parrot, Marta is drawn into her web of stories. Stories that seem to nestle one inside the other. Stories with clues, maybe, to her father’s disappearance. Or maybe not. Marta wants her father to return, but how will he find them when he doesn’t know where they are? Marta strikes up a rapport with the Countess and her amazing bird. A bird who, apparently, was once a General. How did this General become a parrot? It’s one of the seven tales the Countess will tell Marta. Seven tales of magic and mystery, seven tales that never quite end, but leave questions unanswered and poor Marta increasingly frustrated. And how does the Countess know so much about Marta? Despite these frustrations and probing questions, Marta is drawn into the world of these Norendy Tales, just as you will be, and hangs on the words of the Countess, deeply wanting to believe that they are the key to her father’s return. But does she believe, or has she given up hope? The Hotel Balzaar is a charming tale of a young girl’s bravery in the face of hopelessness, of a girl who will venture through a hidden door to the roof of the hotel, where the world is a place of possibility and promise. Yet, just as the last story is about to be revealed — the story that will bind the other six tales together — our story-teller, the Countess, has departed. Marta’s story is left untold. Or is it? Another lovely tale from the excellent Kate DiCamillo, with superb Júlia Sardà illustrations completing the classic fairy tale atmosphere in this tale of bravery and hope.
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The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
Kartik Popat breezes through his teenage years despite having no friends. He has no time for his fellow Indians or immigrants. He wants to earn money, without doing any work. He dreams of being a filmmaker, but ends up working at Parliament, racing through the ranks of advisors and party hacks. As the Covid lockdown sets in, he learns that there are more grifts in the world, than doing a half-arsed job. (Mr Popat disputes all of the above characterisations.) The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa. The novel lampoons the concept of the model minority, as Kartik makes a mockery of representational politics and reacts to the echo chambers and political movements of the day. [Paperback]
“It’s the best book I’ve read all year. It is so good. It is such a good salve for any despair you’re feeling about politics at the moment. It’s just the most wonderful, wonderful book. It’s funny. It’s crack-up funny. It’s all very astute, very clever. It’s a brilliant book.” —Pip Adam (RNZ, 22.10.24)
Final Cut by Charles Burns $85
The much-anticipated and exquisitely unsettling new graphic novel from the author of Black Hole, probing not only the personal and creative obsessions of its artist character but the deeper psychosexual territories of American film and culture. As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie — his reluctant muse — set off to a remote cabin in the woods. Armed with an old 16-millimetre camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, a homage to Brian's favourite movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams — both his damsel in distress and his saviour. Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art. [Hardback]
”I love everything about this book: the story, the drawings, its way with all things extraterrestrial. It's wraparound wonderful, as close to immersive as any comic could be — a book to be read and reread.” —Observer
”Burns's new book is a joy to read and a welcome return to his long form storytelling that he's been sorely absent from for years. The central plot is beautifully told with subtle meanderings from a bygone age of youth, but accompanied with the strange and often disturbing imagery we're so used to seeing from a creator at the top of his game. A great melding of both style and substance.” —Charlie Adlard
The White Review Anthology of Writing in Translation edited by Rosanna McLaughlin, Izabella Scott, and Skye Thomas $37
The White Review Anthology of Writing in Translation brings the most innovative and exciting international writers working today to an Anglophone audience. The anthology places the work of celebrated authors and translators alongside emerging voices. It includes excerpts from novels, full-length short stories and narrative non-fiction previously unpublished in English. Contributions to the anthology include: 'Butterflies', a short story by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell; 'Peach', a short story by Sema Kaygusuz, translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely; 'Red (Hunger)', an extract from a novel by Senthuran Varatharajah, translated from German by Vijay Khurana; 'Alegría', a story by Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo, translated from Spanish by Carolina Orloff; 'Mulberry Season' an excerpt from the novel Darkness Inside and Out by Argentinian writer Leila Sucari, translated from Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy; and the short story 'Jackals' by Haytham El-Wardany, translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls. Part of the content was selected from a global 'open call to translators'. {Paperback]
”Throughout its existence, The White Review has served as the most sparkling of birthing wards for the delicate, difficult, and delightful children of other languages' literatures that might have otherwise never found their way into life in English.” —Polly Barton
”Since the very beginning The White Review has demonstrated its aesthetic and political commitments to work in translation, actively giving space to marginalised languages, debut translators, and all manner of transcultural connections. It has always been a home for collaboration, community, experiment, and daring.” —Lauren Elkin
”Nothing less than a cultural revolution.” —Deborah Levy
[ … ] by Fady Joudah $33
Fady Joudah's powerful collection of poems opens with ‘I am unfinished business’, articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah's survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine's daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens — a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be — and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But "Repetition won't guarantee wisdom," Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language "before our wisdom is an echo." These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. Joudah reminds us, "Wonder belongs to all." [Paperback]
"Joudah's [...] offers a stunning magnification of consciousness that undertakes the work suggested by the title: reembodying in the text-beautifully, painfully-what has been systematically removed." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Within [...] pages, the poet's voice travels across centuries and continents, historicising the fate of the Palestinian people while illuminating the bewilderment, eros, and spirituality of everyday life. Joudah's integrity and craftsmanship elasticise the boundaries of the lyric and embrace a reckoning with colonial violence. But these glimmering, layered poems defy easy categorization, even as they brim with the wisdom we inherit from the dead." —Aria Aber, Yale Review
The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams $40
Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists, with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines. Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright. In Leiden, among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining 'King Alfred', a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming 'to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society'. Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fuelled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb. This is a book white people are not ready to read yet; neither are most black people. But it is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.” —Chester Himes (1967 review)
”If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.” - Walter Mosley
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt $36
A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends. “Maman was exigeante — there is no English word — and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.” Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge's, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York? [A beautifully produced hardback from the New Directions' ‘Storybook ND’ series.]
"A staggeringly intelligent examination into the nature of truth, love, respect, beauty and trust. This is that rare thing, or merle blanc, as maman might say: a perfect book. I've read it four times, which you can do between breakfast and lunch." —Nicola Shulman, The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a short, sharp sliver of a story — only 64 pages — but every single word is pitch perfect. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a shot of ice-cold vodka-Belvedere or Grey Goose only, of course." —Lucy Scholes, Prospect
"For a wonderfully sideways take on the complex intersections between class, wealth and power — intersections that invariably favour those who have most of them already — I recommend reading The English Understand Wool, by the American writer Helen DeWitt." —Alex Clark, The Observer
"The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt's best and funniest book so far — quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading." —Heather Cass White, The Times Literary Supplement
Nine Minds: Inner lives on the spectrum by Daniel Tammet $45
Meet nine extraordinary people on the autism spectrum. A Japanese researcher in psychology sets out to measure loneliness while drawing on her own experience of autism. A quirky boy growing up in 1950s Ottawa sows the seeds of his future Hollywood stardom. In the US, a non-verbal man explores body language, gesture by eloquent gesture, in his mother's yoga classes. Nine Minds delves into the extraordinary lives of nine neurodivergent men and women from around the globe. From a Fields Medal-winning mathematician to a murder detective, a pioneering surgeon to a bestselling novelist, each is remarkable in their field, and each is changing how the world sees those on the spectrum. Exploding the tired stereotypes of autism, Daniel Tammet — autistic himself — reaches across the divides of age, gender, sexuality and nationality to draw out the inner worlds of his subjects. Telling stories as richly diverse as the spectrum itself, this illuminating, life-affirming work of narrative nonfiction celebrates the power and beauty of the neurodivergent mind, and the daring freedom with which these individuals have built their lives. [Hardback]
”Tammet's exquisite portraits remind us that the variety of brains is every bit as essential as any other form of diversity.” —Andrew Solomon
”Daniel Tammet's wonderful portraits of autistic people's inner lives illustrate the range of neurodivergent talents and experiences, and celebrate human cognitive diversity.” —Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre
”Beautifully rendered, painstakingly researched, and completely absorbing, Nine Minds offers something that autistic people urgently need: it humanises us.” —Katherine May
”In Nine Minds, Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant and author of Born on a Blue Day, reports on the unique lives and cognitive differences of nine neurodivergent people. This fascinating book engages by imaginatively entering its subjects' inner worlds. Each profile is based on hours of interviews. Readers will discover a spectrum filled with valuable different kinds of minds.” —Temple Grandin
The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on hope and freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (translated from Arabic by Luke Lefgren) $50
This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and did. 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. [Paperback with French flaps]
”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
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru $37
A novel about beauty, power, and capital's influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it. Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height — the greater public panicked in quarantine — and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn't recovered from the effects of a recent Covid infection. When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see again: Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more different: as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well, setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion. Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind. [Paperback
"That wild time of youth is brilliantly conjured throughout Blue Ruin in flashback scenes that seem to pulsate with the roar of drunken parties and the thump of dance music. We are instantly swept along by the laconic grace and psychological acuity of Mr. Kunzru's writing and by the commotion he unleashes at will and to great effect. Indeed, Mr. Kunzru has drawn a narrator so appealing that we forgive him almost anything. In a novel where little happens, at least on the surface, and where the making and selling of art is examined at length, Jay's odyssey also broadens a narrative that might otherwise have become fatally introspective or, worse still, pretentious. But Mr. Kunzru's satirical eye, keen wit and compassionate intelligence guard against any such slide. Blue Ruin may end with the fate of a valuable painting hanging in the balance and millions of dollars about to vanish with a single drunken gunshot. By then, however, we care as little as Jay does about the fate of objects. Mr. Kunzru has made his point." —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal
”Even as Blue Ruin delves into the past with Proustian specificity, it does not succumb to nostalgic cliche about a time when young artists could achieve success almost overnight. Rather, Kunzru focuses on how the lives of the three friends diverge. Blue Ruin's success stems from its uncompromising connection between the pains of the past and the decomposition of the present, without celebrating either. Through the simple story of a once-lauded artist becoming a delivery driver in an effort to push his career-and himself-to the limit, Kunzru creates a trajectory in which social tensions are rising, liberalism is disappearing and fascism is once more gathering momentum." —Ed Luker, Frieze
Happy Apocalypse: A history of technological risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz $45
Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas. But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose. In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity. Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.
”Happy Apocalypse offers a compelling, powerful and very timely critique of the claim that we live in a period unprecedentedly marked by an awareness of technological crises and environmental risks. Fressoz shows instead, and in striking detail, how in France and Britain in the decades around 1800, in major fields of concern such as public health, industrial safety and environmental impact, calculations of risk and estimates of safety were both impressively widespread and energetically debated. The book offers a brilliantly original analysis of how industrialists and entrepreneurs, legislators and scientists, public lobbies and private interests, all made sense of the processes that accompanied the establishment of new kinds of capitalist society and their models of welfare, profit and security. Happy Apocalypse will be required reading for anyone concerned with the ways in which current crises of safety and survival can be better understood in their proper historical settings.” —Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
England: A natural history by John Lewis-Stempel $70
England's landscape is iconic — a tapestry of distinctive habitats that together make up a country unique for its rich diversity of flora and fauna. Concentrating on twelve habitats, John Lewis-Stempel leads us from estuary to park, chalk downland to woodland , river to field, village to moor, lake to heath, fen to coastal cliffs, in a book that is unquestionably his magnum opus. Referencing beloved great writers in whose footsteps he treads — Gilbert White, John Clare, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas — and combining breathtakingly beautiful prose with detailed wildlife observation, botanical fact and ancient folklore, Lewis-Stempel immerses himself in each place, discovering their singular atmosphere, the play of the seasons; the feel of the wind in midwinter; the sounds of daybreak; how twilight settles. England: A Natural History is the definitive volume on the English landscape, and the capstone of John Lewis-Stempel's nature writing. [Hardback]
”No-one comes close to Lewis-Stempel's ability to paint the English landscape in words. Maddeningly brilliant.” —Sally Coulthard
”It is now expected of the modern nature writer to draw together landscape, wildlife, history and culture, but few — if any — do it as deftly as Lewis-Stempel does here. There is still a place for this kind of assured and expert countryside writing. Not just a place, but acres of room.” —Richard Smythe, Times Literary Supplement
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $37
Mariana Enriquez's first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past. [Paperback]
”One of Latin America's most exciting authors.” —Silvia Moreno-Garcia
”A mesmerising writer who demands to be read. Her fiction hits with the force of a freight train.” —Dave Eggers
The Hotel Balzaar (A Norendy tale) by Kat DiCamillo, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $28
In the land of Norendy, tales swirl within tales-and every moment is a story in the making. At the Hotel Balzaar, Marta's mother rises before the sun, puts on her uniform, and instructs Marta to roam as she will but quietly, invisibly — like a little mouse. While her mother cleans rooms, Marta slips down the back staircase to the grand lobby to chat with the bellman, study the painting of an angel's wing over the fireplace, and watch a cat chase a mouse around the face of the grandfather clock, all the while dreaming of the return of her soldier father, who has gone missing. One day, a mysterious countess with a parrot checks in, promising a story-in fact, seven stories in all, each to be told in its proper order. As the stories unfold, Marta begins to wonder: could the secret to her father's disappearance lie in the countess's tales? [Illustrated hardback]
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst $38
A dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man's acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age. Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles's envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys' careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician. Our Evenings is Dave Win's own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.
”The best novel that's been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It's funny but desperately moving too.” —The Sunday Times
”The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time.” — The Guardian
”Our Evenings is a truly astonishing novel, by turns delicate and ferocious, radical in the way it explores questions of race, class, sexuality and origins in a genteel English Home Counties setting. It is the story of a country undergoing great change, even if its people aren't aware of it — the novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end.” —Tash Aw
Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) $40
In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo's nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door. As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend — all under the bright lights of Tokyo's 'sleepless town', Kabukicho. In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author's own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent. [Paperback]
”Demonstrates that death is the only way forward. Oozes with maternal cruelty.” —Yoko Ogawa
The Hidden Globe: How wealth hacks the world by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian $40
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. The Hidden Globe is a riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had—bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by by foreign governments and multinational foreign corporations—and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. By mapping the hidden geography that decides who wins and who loses in this new global order—and how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires. [Paperback]
”In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.” —Pankaj Mishra
This Earthly Globe: A Venetian cartographer and the quest to map the world by Andrea di Robilant $38
In the autumn of 1550, an anonymously authored volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). This was closely followed by two further volumes that, when taken together, constituted the largest release of geographical data in history, and could well be considered the birth of modern geography. The editor of these volumes was a little-known public servant in the Venetian government, Giovambattista Ramusio. He gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo to detailed reports from the Muslim scholar and diplomat Leo Africanus. In an enthralling narrative, Andrea di Robilant brings to life the man who used all his political skill, along with the help of conniving diplomats and spies, to democratise knowledge and show how the world was much larger than anyone previously imagined.
”An extraordinary story that reads more like a thriller than a book about history. A dazzling tale, brilliantly told.” —Peter Frankopan
Kai Feast: Food stories and recipes from the maunga to the moana by Christall Lowe $50
Nau mai, haere mai ki tenei kai hākari wainene! Christall Lowe invites you to a hākari at her family table — replete with mouthwatering dishes infused with the flavours of Aotearoa, brimming with manaakitanga, and served with wonderful tales of nostalgia. In this illustrated story of feasting you'll find a bountiful basket of kai and korero gathered all the way from the mountains to the sea. It's lip-smackingly good kai — from soul-warming kaimoana hot pot, umu pulled pork and hāngī infused with native rongoa, to kūmara donuts, sweet korimako cake and burnt sugar steamed pudding. Recipes are woven with stories of traditional gathering and feasting, tips on cooking for a crowd and notes on foraging and using native herbs. With Kai Feast in your kitchen, you'll be prepared for any occasion, big or small. [Hardback]
Party Rhyme! by Antonia Pesenti $24
It's PARTY RHYME! Put on your PARTY BAT, enjoy the LIZZIE DRINKS, but don't eat too much HAIRY BREAD! Flip the flaps to reveal clever puns, witty rhymes, and playful language. Perfect for children's love of birthday parties, Party Rhyme combines bold illustrations and kid-friendly jokes that will appeal to both younger and older children. Huge fun. [Board book with reverse gatefold flaps]
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
‘Object Lessons’ is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
If you love the long-form essay, esoteric facts, or are curious about the world about us, particularly objects in this world, then you will love Bloomsbury Publishing’s ‘Object Lessons’ series. Between us we have read a fair few ‘Object Lessons’, and they are always incisive, interesting, and highly engaging in content and style. To help you discover this excellent series we are offering you 25% off in-stock titles.* Head over to the Object Lessons page and start selecting. Find your favourite objects or explore some new ones. (PS these make excellent gifts!)
* This weekend only. Promotion finishes Tuesday 29th, 10am. Use the promotion code: OBJECT
We use Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cookbooks frequently at home — her recipes are very user-friendly and her methods and proportions guarantee perfect and delicious dishes that immediately become favourites.
”Every meal is something to celebrate — a casual gathering with friends, a weeknight dinner, a long birthday lunch in the garden. It doesn't matter what the occasion, there is an unspoken joy in sharing food with others.”
This collection of recipes includes a guide to creating menus for any occasion, from a celebration of summer produce to pure comfort food in cooler weather, a simple family dinner to a relaxed lunch with friends. Julia pairs ingredients in harmonious and delicious ways, with recipes for every season.
We can dispatch to anywhere in Aotearoa by overnight courier, or have books ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
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18 October 2024
A puzzle, he said, noticing that I was attempting a rather easy and common sort of puzzle, one which I nonetheless was finding challenging, possibly due to the fact that he was observing me, a puzzle I was in any case doing only to fill in the time as I waited for him to stop talking, a puzzle is a poor sort of puzzle because everyone recognises it as a puzzle, he said, unlike language, which is a stronger sort of puzzle because it is not obvious whether it is a puzzle or not. I knew better than to ask him what he meant by this statement, partly because I didn’t really want to encourage him to deliver one of his long-winded explanations but mainly because I knew that once he had made a statement like that he would deliver one of his long-winded explanations whether he was asked to explain it or not; it seemed not to occur to him that any long-winded explanation delivered by him might not be received with the enthusiasm with which it was delivered. At least it was good to see him enthusiastic. He had just finished reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, and was now, it seemed, ready to explain it to me, although not yet having finished it had not stopped him explaining it to me as he was reading it, or at least from frequently exclaiming about it in such a way that was not sufficiently coherent to pass as an explanation, not that his explanations were in themselves generally in any case coherent. Parade, he explained, splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distil, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations (here he made that irritating gesture in the air with both hands about and throughout the phrase as if to indicate that if anybody were to transcribe the phrase they should put it in inverted commas (even though italics would be to my mind more appropriate)), the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the intimate and societal scales, or so he said. Parade, he said, continued Cusk’s project of the ‘Outline Trilogy’, of withdrawing the narratorial involvement from the novel, sometimes perfecting an entirely non-participatory, characterless ‘we’, without assuming, or presuming, really, access to the minds of any of the characters other than as evidenced by their actions or their words. “To see without being seen: there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation,” he read suddenly from a place he had marked in the book. Cusk achieves a wonderfully clean and perfectly flat style, he said, achieving an impeccable neutrality, almost an anonymity, on the most passionate and involving subjects, reporting conversations without contributing to them, but from a near perspective, like the parent in the novel filming her child in the school play so closely and so exclusively that, at least in her representation of it, the play itself made no sense other than that contingent upon the performance of her child. “Pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity, reveals the pathos of identity,” he read again, or had memorised, or was pretending to read or to have memorised in order to give his opinions more authority. There is no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive, he shouted, I think now lost to his own metastasising speculations, at best only barely suppressed, no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive other than as they exist in language! There are no persons, no characters, he said, and I think he was referring to our lived reality as much as to the book that he had read. It reminds me, he said, calming a little, of Nathalie Sarruate's Planetarium, in that persons are unimportant or are at least shown to be entirely constructed by phrases and thoughts and attitudes clustering together and adhering to each other, a phenomenon that is more the province of language than a property of any living actuality. Again, the impulses, motivations and attitudes that may or may not exist in the unconscious, so to call it, he said, or in the preconscious, and we cannot say anything about these states, which cannot be said even to be states because to do so would be to make them or at least their existence to some extent conscious, he claimed, these impulses, motivations and attitudes require and are also formed by the language that is used to express them in order to be expressed. Was he even making sense, I wondered, but he did not pause, seemingly untroubled by such a possibility. Cusk’s practice, kicking away the novelistic crutches, so to call them, he said, removing the distractions of plot, the illusions of character, or at least by demonstrating that plot is a distraction and character an illusion, helps us to see more clearly, to be both present and not present, both involved and uninvolved, both when reading a novel and when reading our own lives, for want of a better term to call them. Language contains the inclinations, he said, that we usually and by mistake apply to persons. I suppose that this is what he may have meant when he spoke of language being a puzzle of a stronger sort, but he did not give me a chance to ask him this. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels, he continued, and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction, Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. I exercised my concentration, finished my rather easy and common sort of puzzle, which at least was readily identifiable as a puzzle, and left the room despite his continuing explanation.
Forgotten in a trunk. Left in the dark. Unwanted. Once they had been on display, crafted with care. They belonged together and they had a story. Would they be together again, and would there be a new story? Kate DiCamillo works her magic with The Puppets of Spelhorst. With the texture of a folk tale, she reveals the story of a girl, a boy, a king, an owl, and a wolf. An old man sees a puppet in the window of a toy shop and the memory of a love is rekindled. He wants to take her home and look into her eyes so like those of his sweetheart long gone, but, bothersome: he has to have all the puppets. And so, it comes to be. In the night the girl sitting atop a dresser sees the moon and describes its beauty to her companions. The old man sleeps and does not awaken. And then an adventure begins. A journey that will take them through the hands of the rag-and-bone man, to an uncle with two inquisitive nieces, where a new story will be made — one which involves all of them; even though they will have their fierce teeth tampered with (the wolf), be mistaken for a feather duster (the owl), left abandoned outside and kidnapped by a giant bird (the boy), be snaffled into a pocket (the girl), and left alone with no one to rule (the king). Yet this is not the only story. Emma is writing, and Martha is making mischief. A story is ready to be told. An extra hand and a good singing voice are needed. In steps the maid, Jane Twiddum — someone who will have a profound impact on the fate of the five friends. The Puppets of Spelhorst is an absolute delight with its clever story. A spellbound tale. "Now it all happens," whispered the boy. "Now the story begins."
This is a delightful book, and the sequel, The Hotel Balzaar, is due here soon — I am really looking forwards to it. Both books are perfect for reading and gifting.
>>Your copy of The Puppets of Spelhorst
>>Order The Hotel Balzaar now (stock is on its way!)
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The Remarkables: The most incredible children I’ve met — So far! by Clotilde Perrin $40
A large-format treasure trove, featuring portraits of 40 extraordinary imaginary children with descriptions of each one's superpower. Meet the most extraordinary children you'll ever see — or might ever see. An electric child, a flying child, a stone child, an invisible child, a thunder child, a cake child — what superpower would you wish for? On each spread, the children describe their characteristics, tell anecdotes, and present the superpowers that makes them unique. A ‘class photo’ brings the children together at the end, alongside a quiz for the reader to find out their own superpower. (BTW: The perfect present!)
Episodes by Alex Scott $40
This astoundingly good Aotearoa graphic novel subtly and devastatingly investigates the crushing disjunction between media-mediated popular culture (as distilled in product advertising) and an actual world comprised of ‘atypical’ individuals yearning for authentic contact and acknowledgement. A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush, and a former child star struggles to escape his past. Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed and well-drawn critique of our media-obsessed society.
”Episodes is funny, sad and strange in the way that so much of the ordinary and familiar is strange. Like a word you say over and over until its oddness is revealed.” —Sharon Murdoch
Vehicle: A verse novel by Jen Calleja $40
In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, this title is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.
”A high-stakes speculation, an adventure into a new world order as well as the possibilities of the novel-form, Vehicle is a feat of ungovernable imagination. Bold, bracing, brilliant.” —Kate Briggs
”To say that Vehicle is a feminist Pale Fire for the Brexit generation may not be high enough praise for this intoxicating, thrilling and endlessly inventive work.” —Joanna Walsh
”Jen’s work brilliantly surfs the wave of engagement with translation, marginalised and re-assertive cultures within and beyond Europe, necessarily calling out the connection between colonial and patriarchal attitudes and actions in literary culture. Bringing a deliciously non- realist and wittily self-aware tone that is unusual in UK writing, it strikes an important balance that fits with a new wave of writing that is brilliantly romantic and feminist.” —So Mayer
Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens $40
A selection of short fiction from a purveyor of comical, techno-millenarian unease. Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognisable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for — or neglect — one another. The stories examine big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective
”Ghost Pains is a brilliant, sophisticated collection. Jessi Jezewska Stevens is one of the rare writers capable of taking both life and literature seriously while giving you reasons to laugh.” —Nell Zink
”Jessi Jezewska Stevens's stories gleam with their wonderfully bleak comic swerves, keen observation and fresh syntax. The world may be a goner, but short fiction is in good hands here. Ghost Pains is alive, an invigorating pleasure.” —Sam Lipsyte
”I remember the first time I read a short story by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. I was immediately drawn to its strangely rhythmic sentences, its playful sense of humour. There is a brilliant feeling of both absurdity and sincerity in these stories, of the time we are living through. I know I will want to read her always.” —Amina Cain
Good Cooking Every Day: Simple recipes. Beautiful menus. All year round. by Julia Busuttil Nishimura $50
We use Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cookbooks frequently at home — her recipes are very user-friendly and her methods and proportions guarantee perfect and delicious dishes that immediately become favourites.
”Every meal is something to celebrate — a casual gathering with friends, a weeknight dinner, a long birthday lunch in the garden. It doesn't matter what the occasion, there is an unspoken joy in sharing food with others.” This collection of recipes includes a guide to creating menus for any occasion, from a celebration of summer produce to pure comfort food in cooler weather, a simple family dinner to a relaxed lunch with friends. Julia pairs ingredients in harmonious and delicious ways, with recipes for every season.
He Kupu nā te Māia — He Kohinga Ruri nā Maya Angelou (Ngā Ika a Whiro o Te Panekiretanga o te Reo) $35
Kua haurua rautau te roa o Maya Angelou e whakarākei ana i te ao ki ana kupu me ōna whakaaro, i hua mai ai ko te huhua o ana titonga kanorau, pukapuka mai, tuhingaroa mai, whakaari mai, ruri mai. I runga anō i te whāriki o tana ao toi, kua tuituia ngā kupu whakatuma, ki te kaikiri, ki te tohe, ki te whai ora, ki ngā wheako hoki o te wahine me te kirimangu, mā roto i tōna reo ahurei. Kua huia ngā ruri ki ngā wāhanga e whitu e hāngai ana ki te ao tonu o Maya, e whai pānga ana anō hoki ki a ngāi Māori: te whanaungatanga, te mate kanehe, te oke o te ia rā, te kirimangu, te whakatōrea, te rere o te wā me te whakaao māramatanga. I te pukapuka nei rere ai ko te reo o te kāhui wāhine o Te Panekiretanga o Te Reo, me ōna kanorautanga. Kuia mai, māmā mai, rangatahi mai, teina mai, tuakana mai, he wāhine kua rongo, kua kite i te ihi o te whai reo, me te wehi o te reokoretanga. Ka titi tonu ngā kupu a te māia ki te ngākau o te hunga e āritarita ana ki te reo Māori i tēnei huinga ruri āna.
A selection from the collected poems of Maya Angelou, translated into te reo Māori by thirty-four wāhine from across Aotearoa. This collection of ruri/poems will warm the hearts of Maya Angelou’s most ardent admirers and will also introduce new readers to the legendary poet, activist and teacher. Presented with English and Māori on facing pages, as well as poetic biographies of each translator, this book is a taonga that welcomes a literary icon to Aotearoa.
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and narrative by Isabella Hammad $26
Author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history. In this moving and erudite melding of literary and cultural analysis, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
”Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose. This is a book that calls us to witness our place in history. Isabella Hammad deserves our thanks for sharing it with the world.” —Sally Rooney
”A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.” —Max Porter
”Hammad's writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.” —Olivia Sudjic
”Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.” —Rashid Khalidi
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel $25
Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women's art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman - a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola — to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession. She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
”Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It's also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel's protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction.” —Daisy LaFarge
”The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page.” —Sophie Mackintosh
rock flight by Hasib Hourani $33
Hasib Hourani's rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora.
Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family. rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.
”rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don't.” —Alison Whittaker
”Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is propelled by urgent anaphoras and compelling fragmented imagery. Scrolling and sprawling across the page and downward and outward, as attempts to articulate and scrawl the horrors facing the Palestinian people. Out of such scrawls are new languages, new refusals.” —Victoria Chang
Pātea Boys / Ngāti Pātea by Airana Ngarewa $37
A lively and playful bilingual collection of stories about growing up in Pātea. Interlinked and full of recurring characters, these stories are about growing up in small-town Aotearoa — sneaking away during cross country, doing bombs while the lifeguard isn't looking, peeling spuds on the marae, crashing a car at age four, and learning to live by the tikanga 'don't ask, don't tell'. Exuberant, exciting, poignant and heartfelt, each story is featured in English and te reo Māori. The perfect resource for those on their reo learning journeys as well as for readers who enjoyed The Bone Tree.
Nature, Culture, and Inequality by Thomas Piketty $35
In his new work, Thomas Piketty explores how social inequality manifests itself very differently depending on society and epoch in which it arises. History and culture play a central role, inequality being strongly linked to various socio-economic, political, civilisational, and religious developments. So it is culture in the broadest sense that makes it possible to explain the diversity, extent, and structure of the social inequality that we observe every day. Piketty briefly and concisely presents a lively synthesis of his work, taking up such diverse topics as education, inheritance, taxes, and the climate crisis, and makes a lively contribution to the debate on the existence or otherwise of ‘natural inequality’.
”A profound and optimistic call to action and reflection. For Piketty, the arc of history is long, but it does bend toward equality. There is nothing automatic about it, however — as citizens, we must be ready to fight for it, and constantly (re)invent the myriad of institutions that will bring it about. This book is here to help.'“ —Esther Duflo
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel $28
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight. This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we've been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon? Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls' lives, which intersect for a moment — a universe that shimmers and resonates.
Long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
“As blazing and distinctive a performance as I've beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel's figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters' bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I'm amazed.” —Jonathan Lethem
The Zone: An alternative history of Paris by Justinien Tribillon $43
In The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh's paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine, the Zone, so often misun- derstood, is the key to understanding today's Paris, and even France itself. Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed makeshift housing, allotments, and dancehalls in the nineteenth century, the Zone has performed many functions and been a place of contention for two centuries. Dismantled in the 1920s, the fortifications were first replaced with gardens, stadia and homes. After the war came the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road promising seamless travel in a futuristic car-centric Paris. With the ring road came new dreams of modernity in reinvented suburbs: new towns, high-rise architecture and social housing built at record speed. Yesterday's Paris made way for tomorrow's banlieue. But the metropolitan dream was never realised. The Zone became a symbol of division: between inner and outer cities; between the bourgeois centre and the working-class immigrant outskirts; between 'us' and 'them'. The Zone, both a physical space and a powerful myth, came to crystallise the social, spatial and ethno-racial differences between Paris and the banlieue. The Zone is a brilliant anatomy of the true heart of Paris. An essential book for urbanists and historians.
”Shows how to read the recent history of Paris from its edge towards its center. How do the complicated conditions in the banlieue shape life for the Paris of tourists, monuments and bourgeois amenities? This book is innovative in its methods and absorbing in its analysis. More than this, Justinien Tribillon has worked out a way to understand other cities from the outside in.” —Richard Sennett
History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the past for the future of humanity by Roman Krznaric $40
What can humankind's rich history of radical revolts teach us about the power of disobedience to change climate policy? What inspiration could we take from seventeenth century Japan to create a regenerative economy today? How might the history of financial capitalism help us understand what it takes to bring AI under control? Here, leading social philosopher Roman Krznaric unearths fascinating insights and inspiration from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. From bridging the inequality gap and keeping AI under control, to reviving our faith in democracy and avoiding ecological collapse, History for Tomorrow shows that history is not simply a means of understanding the past but a way of reimagining our relationship with the future. Krznaric shows how, time and again, societies have risen up, often against the odds, to tackle challenges and overcome crises. History can offer a vision for radical hope that could turn out to be our most vital tool for surviving and thriving in the turbulent decades ahead.
”This joyful and informative book opens our minds and souls, helping us to see with new eyes and to believe in ourselves as a species, so we can meet our predicament with a belief that change really is possible.” —Gail Bradbrook, Co-Founder, Extinction Rebellion
”An amazing feat of synthesis and imagination, weaving together many different strands of world history to make a pattern that can guide us in the present toward a vibrant future. Krznaric's book is immensely suggestive of positive actions that have track records; they've worked before, and in new formulations they can work again. Wise and practical inspiration.” —Kim Stanley Robinson
A selection of books from our shelves that give insight into Palestinian experience.
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Episodes by Alex Scott $40
This astoundingly good Aotearoa graphic novel subtly and devastatingly investigates the crushing disjunctions between media-mediated popular culture (as distilled especially in product advertising) and an actual world comprised of ‘atypical’ individuals yearning for authentic contact and acknowledgement. A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush, and a former child star struggles to escape his past. Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed and well-drawn critique of our media-obsessed society.
”Episodes is funny, sad and strange in the way that so much of the ordinary and familiar is strange. Like a word you say over and over until its oddness is revealed.” —Sharon Murdoch
The GOLDSMITHS PRIZE celebrates fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. This year, all six (excellent!) shortlisted titles “ask uncomfortable questions while nonetheless finding exuberance and joy in a form that makes such questioning both possible and pleasurable: the novel at its most novel.” —judging chair
Click through to our website to get your copies of these enjoyable and interesting books. We can dispatch to anywhere in Aotearoa by overnight courier, or have the books ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
THE WINNER
PARADE by Rachel Cusk
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands. The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a true story — about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves.
What the judges say: "Every sentence in Parade seems to grapple with an idea. People die, perspective shifts, scenery changes, and yet there remains a clear, sharp line of thought that holds the reader. In effortlessly beautiful prose Cusk challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art, and of how each can exist alongside the ordinariness of life. Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment."
“Examining the life of the artist and the composition of the self, Rachel Cusk’s Parade exposes the power and limitations of our alternate selves. Probing the limits of the novel form and pushing back against convention, this is a work that resets our understanding of what the long form makes possible.” —Abigail Shinn, Chair of Judges
"Every sentence in Parade seems to grapple with an idea. People die, perspective shifts, scenery changes, and yet there remains a clear, sharp line of thought that holds the reader. In effortlessly beautiful prose Cusk challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art, and of how each can exist alongside the ordinariness of life. Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment." —Sara Baume, judge
THE OTHER SHORT-LISTED BOOKS
ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS by Mark Bowles
All My Precious Madness is a story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but who — most emphatically — repeats it. 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 — continues to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum, until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal. A savagely funny novel that disdains moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy — even when that empathy means understanding the darkest parts of humanity. It is, as Terry Eagleton says, “a wonderfully stylish, intelligent piece of work” — and one of the most electric debuts in recent years.
What the judges say: "Mark Bowles’s 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."
TELL by Jonathan Buckley
Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is interviewed for a possible film about her employer. A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.
What the judges say: "For the reader, it is as if we have our ear pressed against a keyhole, listening, or are flies on a wall, witnessing events that seem to portend some momentous revelation about a man. Tell is a relentlessly truthful and absorbing tale about the human condition and a searing account of the complexity of life in the modern world. Employing the simplest of narrative devices but used in the most innovative ways, Jonathan Buckley has produced a profound work of fiction."
CHOICE by Neel Mukherjee
How have we come to live this way? At what cost? Who pays the price? A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift. These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee’s novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them.
What the judges say: "A truly ambitious and compelling fiction from an author at the height of his powers. Choice lays out three narratives exploring 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas. The novel is not only intellectually impressive, it is also immensely moving, and shot through with heart-breaking moments."
SPENT LIGHT by Lara Pawson
A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care. Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss — because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. In the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.
What the judges say: "It is impossible to predict, at the beginning of almost every paragraph of Spent Light, where it will have taken the reader by the end. With a remorseless attention to detail Pawson encounters familiar objects and excavates from each a portal to the past, or to a distant corner of the world, or to the shadows of the narrator’s complex mind. Spent Light is an evisceration of solemn reality, a novel that somehow manages to balance horror, humour and incredible tenderness."
PORTRAITS AT THE PALACE OF CREATIVITY AND WRECKING by Han Smith
The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know. She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows — almost — about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape. Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past.
What the judges say: "Composed as a series of portraits, some fragmentary, all multi-faceted and allusory, Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure. At once a poignant coming of age story and an exploration of how language is shaped by ideology, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is tender and merciless in its slanting look at the history of state violence and its unacknowledged but profound effects on individuals and communities. An important reminder that the stories we tell can serve as propaganda and as powerful works of resistance, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking demonstrates how the novel can reflect and resist the double speak of our own time."
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