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22 November 2024
“The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed.” Gargoyles (first published in 1967 as Verstörung (“Disturbance”)) is the book in which Bernhard laid claim both thematically and stylistically to the particular literary territory developed in all his subsequent novels. In the first part of the book, set entirely within one day, the narrator, a somewhat vapid student accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds, tells us of the sufferings of various patients due to their mental and physical isolation: the wealthy industrialist withdrawn to his dungeon-like hunting lodge to write a book he will never achieve (“’Even though I have destroyed everything I have written up to now,’ he said, ‘I have still made enormous progress.’”), and his sister-companion, the passive victim of his obsessions whom he is obviously and obliviously destroying; the workers systematically strangling the birds in an aviary following the death of their owner; the musical prodigy suffering from a degenerative condition and kept in a cage, tended by his long-suffering sister. The oppressive landscape mirrors the isolation and despair of its inhabitants: we feel isolated, we reach out, we fail to reach others in a meaningful way, our isolation is made more acute. “No human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche.” Bernhard’s nihilistic survey of the inescapable harm suffered and inflicted by continuing to exist is, however, threaded onto the doctor’s round: although the doctor is incapable of ‘saving’ his patients, his compassion as a witness to their anguish mirrors that of the author (whose role is similar). In the second half of the novel, the doctor’s son narrates their arrival at Hochgobernitz, the castle of Prince Saurau, whose breathlessly neurotic rant blots out everything else, delays the doctor’s return home and fills the rest of the book. This desperate monologue is Bernhard suddenly discovering (and swept off his feet by) his full capacities: an obsessively looping railing against existence and all its particulars. At one stage, when the son reports the prince reporting his dream of discovering a manuscript in which his son expresses his intention to destroy the vast Hochgobernitz estate by neglect after his father’s death, the ventriloquism is many layers deep, paranoid and claustrophobic to the point of panic. The prince’s monologue, like so much of Bernhard’s best writing, is riven by ambivalence, undermined (or underscored) by projection and transference, and structured by crazed but irrefutable logic: “‘Among the special abilities I was early able to observe in myself,’ he said, ‘is the ruthlessness to lead anyone through his own brain until he is nauseated by this cerebral mechanism.’” Although the prince’s monologue is stated to be (and clearly is) the position of someone insane, this does not exactly invalidate it: “Inside every human head is the human catastrophe corresponding to this particular head, the prince said. It is not necessary to open up men’s heads in order to know that there is nothing inside them but a human catastrophe. ‘Without this human catastrophe, man does not exist at all.'”
Here is a book where the abject meets the sublime, where objects trigger histories, and where history is bound to objects; where in every place and in every object an association can be made (some juvenile , others frightening) and where the most mundane of activities unleashes waves of emotion. Lara Pawson is on her knees cleaning the ancient tiles in her flat. She is dusting the tarnished sporting cup in which she spies a moth trap. She observes with a degree of contempt but also reassurance the sponge tucked behind the downpipe. The egg timer is its own bomb, the toaster shoved in her arms by a recently widowed neighbour a disaster waiting to happen. How can she take this functional object into her kitchen without contemplating torture? Walking with her dog along damp streets, and through scrubby wastelands, her mind wanders to other forests, other spaces of escape and entrapment. Spent Light is deplorable and beautiful. As you think you can read no more, you are drawn in by this persistent voice, by the intelligence and desperation of this mind as it grapples with history, with the objects that connect us to human actions, to human depravity and suffering. And yet, it also gives us a vision of overwhelming love, of connectedness in spite of horror; to a place where an object can tell us a history — its story, but also a story of others it has touched. For it is in the seeing, in the looking, when one thinks if only they could close their eyes, close their minds, that a truth will come. Lara Pawson is facing her demons, or is it our collective demons, and she is shocking, She confronts us with her determination and savage humour. She picks at the wound and somehow simultaneously has the ability to make a scab that will protect and heal us all. Spent Light is as compelling as it is repellent. A book filled with horrors (some intensely difficult, others facile) which are countered with remarkable acts of love and care, all held in the silent, yet powerful, presence of objects. Remarkable.
A Goldsmiths Prize finalist this year, this novel — from its unusual title to its intriguing structure and exploration of memory — is a knockout debut. Written in 77 ‘portraits’, set across an icy post-Soviet landscape, it is immersed in the manipulation and exploitations of history, both political and personal. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a town that is reckoning with its brutal past; a story of silence and speaking, of hidden desire and fragile freedom. The author explains, “Portraits is about vicious manipulations of memory, about histories that are distorted and suppressed, about people caught in the half-light of both seeing and not seeing this, but also about how art and poetry have a vital role to play in an eventual awakening.”
Experimental and daring, this is literature that pushes at the edges of the novel, illustrating fiction’s role in excavating the past, emotionally and physically.
The Goldsmith Prize judges commented: “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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Gliff by Ali Smith $45
A new book from Ali Smith is always hugely exciting — here is a writer of immense capacity, who is always driven by the urgency of the modern world but responds with a humanity and playfulness that show us possibilities hidden inside crises. Gliff is the first of a new two-book project. It's a truism of our time that it'll be the next generation who'll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? And what's a horse got to do with any of this? Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature. [Hardback]
”Here is a voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear. Smith is good at fable-ising, and at taking a young perspective in order to question afresh systems and inherited knowledge. Smith's fiction teaches with vitality that there is no such thing as a futile question.” —Financial Times
”Gliff is one of Smith's most propulsive stories — a dark adventure with high stakes, which, despite its bleak subject matter, is still a sparklingly crisp read. Typically tantalising stuff from one of our most playful writers. Smith is as frisky as ever, peppering with puns, and making hay with homonyms imbues her characters with this linguistic exuberance. A new Ali Smith book is always an event.” —Holly Williams
The Position of Spoons, And other intimacies by Deborah Levy $50
Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, Levy shares the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of her own. Each short essay draws upon Levy's life, encapsulating the precision and depth of her writing, as she shifts between questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is reveals a questioning self. [Hardback]
”Under the blowtorch of Levy's attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful. This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial.” —Guardian
Poutini: The Ngāi Tahu history of the West Coast by Paul Madgwick $75
A landmark publication, bringing together a lifetime of knowledge and research by kaumatua and 'Coaster' Paul Madgwick (Kati Mahaki, Kai Tahu). Beginning with mythology associated with Te Tai Poutini (the West Coast), this richly illustrated work follows the story of human settlement including migration and occupation by different iwi, creation of different Māori settlements, the role of pounamu, the earliest interactions between Pākeha explorers and Ngāi Tahu, the Kai Tahu land sales and Maori reserves, through to the 1998 Ngāi Tahu Settlement and today's challenges and opportunities. [Hardback]
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami $55
When a young man's girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own. When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library — a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he's willing to lose. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times. [Hardback]
”A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is quietly miraculous.. The greatest books are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami's narrator enters his mysterious libraries.” —Telegraph
”No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. “ —Financial Times
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman $38
At a superstore in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every day at 3.55 am. Under the red-eyed scrutiny of their self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty delivery trucks of mountains of merchandise, stock the shelves and stagger home (or to another poorly paid day job) before the customers arrive. When Big Will the store manager announces he's leaving, everything changes. The eclectic team members now see a way to have their awful line manager promoted up and away from them, and to dream of a promotion of their own. Together they set an extravagant plan in motion. [Hardback]
“A brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us whose full humanity has simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered.” —Joshua Ferris
”A classic of our age. Adelle Waldman turns the seemingly unremarkable matter of a retail job vacancy into a gripping study of conscience, morality and camaraderie. Help Wanted illuminates an entire universe that rarely features in literature revealing rich, nuanced, characters and the choices they face.” —Catherine O'Flynn
”Finally, the profoundly human big-box store truck-unloading novel you were waiting for. Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market. The characters are so richly drawn — so full, under all their defences, of the desire to be loved — that even the annoying ones will win your heart. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master.” —Elif Batuman
”Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It's a book about work; about the retail industry in the age of Amazon; and about the effects of late capitalism on human relations. It is also hard to put down. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won't be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy.” —Keith Gessen
Shattered by Hanif Kureishi $40
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, in a pool of blood, he was horrified to realise he had lost the use of his limbs. He could no longer walk, write or wash himself. He could do nothing without the help of others, and required constant care in a hospital. So began an odyssey of a year through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home, to his house in London. While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed — a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage. This book takes these hospital dispatches — edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing — and charts both a shattering and a reassembling: a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings — of gratitude, humility and love. [Hardback]
”Extraordinary, unique and unputdownable. An exceptional volume as original as Jean-Dominique Bauby's stroke classic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and as profound and affected as Salman Rushdie's Knife . This fall provoked a rare, and inspiring, defiance, Shattered, with its unique authorship, has become a life-saver. For the reader, this compounds the intensity of its witness.” —Robert McCrum, Independent
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks $40
One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home, Rebanks couldn't stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly — and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly — her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather. Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. [Paperback]
”Humane, beautifully paced, gentle, and strangely compelling, The Place of Tides feels like, not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now.” —George Saunders
”A magnificent book — wonderfully unlike any other. The Place of Tides is big-hearted and transporting, a quietly gripping reckoning with self-sufficiency and interdependence, with the lives that make us and the lives that we make. I didn't want it to end, and I can't wait to reread it.” —Philip Gourevitch
”James Rebanks has done a miraculous thing. He takes the reader with him to a stark, remote island on the strangest mission in the toughest circumstances and makes you feel like you're coming home. A profound, transformative, uplifting story.” —Isabella Tree
Head in the Clouds by Rocío Araya (translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses) $45
Sofia goes to school every day but she still has a lot of questions. Why are grown-ups always in a rush? What number comes after infinity? Sofia's teacher says she has her head in the clouds, she's seeing birds. In collages of graph paper, worksheets, and newsprint, punctuated by scratches of graphite and bold swaths of bright paint, Sofia's world springs to life. When she gives one of her birds to her teacher, her teacher's monochrome world of blank paper and grey lines bursts into colour, affirming the joy and necessity of always being curious. Inquisitive children, with a supply of questions as limitless as their imagination, will recognize themselves in Sofia, delighting in pondering her questions - and in coming up with more of their own. [Hardback]
The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home cooking recipes from the leading chefs of Africa by Alexander Smalls and Nina Oduro $75
A vibrant library of home cooking recipes and texts contributed by 33 chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, cooks, and writers at the heart of Africa's food movement. Organised geographically into five regions, The Contemporary African Kitchen presents 120 warm and delicious dishes, each beautifully photographed and brought to life through historical notes, personal anecdotes, and thoughtful serving suggestions. Home cooks will discover a bounty of diverse, delicious dishes ranging from beloved classics to newer creations, all rooted in a shared language of ingredients, spices, and cooking traditions. Learn to make Northern Africa's famed couscous and grilled meats; Eastern Africa's aromatic curries; Central Africa's Peanut Sauce Stew and Cocoyam Dumplings; Southern Africa's fresh seafood and street food; and Western Africa's renowned Chicken Yassa. With text contributions from experts including Pierre Thiam, Selassie Atadika, Anto Cocagne, Coco Reinarhz, and Michael Adé Elégbèdé, the essay and recipe contributors to this ground-breaking survey are at the heart of the food movement of Africa, making it an essential addition to every cook and food lover's library. [Hardback]
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe $38
Post-university life doesn't suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow's Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He's been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that's been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that's finally poised to put their plans into action. But speaking truth to power can be dangerous - and power will stop at nothing to stay on top. As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn and a murder enquiry is soon in progress. But will the solution to the mystery lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old? [Paperback]
”Wonderfully accomplished and darkly funny. The Proof of My Innocence is a murder mystery, a satire on Britain's ever right-ward drift, culminating in Liz Truss; and an inquiry into truth and perception. Jonathan Coe gets better and better.” —Luke Harding
”A brilliant, shrewd, satirical novel — gimlet-eyed, funny, very clever and a searchingly profound look at the state of this strange country of ours.” —William Boyd
The Britannias, And the Islands of Women by Alice Albinia $37
The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles — from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias — transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britanniaslooks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. [Paperback (though we do have the lovely hardback available too)]
”A dazzlingly brilliant book. Travelling by boat, swimming through kelp, riding on a fishing trawler, Alice Albinia takes us on an extraordinary journey around the British isles, revealing a liquid past where women ruled and mermaids sang and tracing the sea-changes of her own heart.” —Hannah Dawson
”An artful book of waterways and wildernesses, monastic havens and tax havens. A fascinating demonstration that Britain 'singular' is shorthand for something tectonically, volcanically plural. “ —Amy Jeffs
”There are books crafted from research, worthy and informative. And there are books that happen. That need to happen. That feel inevitable. As if they have always, somehow, been there waiting for us. The voyages of Alice Albinia around our ragged fringes range through time, recovering and resurrecting the most potent myths. A work of integrity and vision.” —Iain Sinclair
Leave Your Big Boots at the Door: Pākehā confronting racism against Māori edited by Lorraine McLeod $40
The effects of colonisation and the racism that accompanies it are seen in the lives of many Māori living in the inequitable, disadvantaged margins of society, heavily influenced by the loss of their land and cultural knowledge, and often living in poverty. The Pakeha interviewed in this book have all come to recognise how this racism blights our country, and they come from a range of occupations, including police, education, health, psychology, social services, Corrections, business, and the law. As well as each providing an historical angle on the subject, they offer positive suggestions about addressing bias, power and privilege in our country's constitutional documents, systemic racism in our institutions and organisations, and in personal ways of confronting racism. All advocate for a society in which Maori regain tino rangatiratanga (power and control) over their own lives. This is an important and inspiring book, one that encourages Pakeha to face up to our past and embrace an optimistic future for Aotearoa.
The Chess Deck: 50 cards for mastering the basics by Levy Rozman $45
Chess is all about practice. With this interactive, immersive deck of 54 cards, Levy Rozman distills the most important information players need to know in order to practice right. Fifty cards with chessboard diagrams feature the best openings for black and white; tactics to know like forks, pins, and skewers; historical games to learn from; and brainteasers to test your skills. Two introductory cards explain how each of the six pieces moves and how to understand chess notation so you can analyse positions. Suitable for those who have a rudimentary understanding of chess but challenging enough for more seasoned players.
A selection of fiction from our shelves.
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Ask our advice. We’ve had decades’ worth of experience helping all sorts of people to choose just the right book to give as a gift (or to keep for themselves). Just send us your gift-recipient list and we will send you some suggestions from our shelves (or we can arrange a Zoom consultation, if you like!). We can gift-wrap the books and dispatch them to you or to the recipients, or have them ready to collect from our door. >>Ask our advice now.
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Browse our website and choose. Our shelves are full of interesting, well-written and beautiful books — all selected by us for their excellence — and our shop website is arranged to help you choose just the right thing. Find the authors or titles you love with the quick-search bar — or make discoveries! Click on our website’s categories and sub-categories bring you to ‘virtual shelves’ of books of similar interest (where relevant, you will find page-views of the insides of the books, to help you choose).
Here are a few shortcuts to some really good books:
Fiction (for adults):
If you are wanting a well-written, vital novel, anything on the Booker Prize short list would be ideal.
Or choose from the Goldsmiths Prize short list for something more innovative.
Our curated selection of Translated fiction includes the books listed for this year’s International Booker Prize.
It has been a strong year for Aotearoa fiction!
We have many interesting books published by Small Presses in Aotearoa and overseas.
And we have interesting books for those who like Historical Fiction, Crime, and Speculative or Dystopian Fiction.
And Poetry always make a good gift!Books for children:
We have excellent choices in everything from Board Books to Picture Books, to Junior Fiction, to Senior (or ‘Middle Grade’) Fiction, to Novels for Young Adults.
Choose from our selection of children’s books from Aotearoa, or from our books in te reo Māori.
And we have beautiful and informative books of Non-Fiction, and Graphic Novels for Children, too!This is the time of year in which a Cook Book, an Art Book, or a Book about Gardening would make a perfect gift!
And we have interesting Graphic Novels, too…Our Culture section has books about creative and lifestyle pursuits.
Our Society section includes books on History and Politics for those interested in how people interact — in the past or in the present. It is more important than ever to understand the history and present of Aotearoa.
As the title suggests, our section on the Mind includes books on Philosophy and Psychology.
And our Science section brings you fine writing and the latest information and thinking in many fields.
We now have a Biography and Memoir section!
For a really special gift, why not give a Volume Reading Subscription! We have a subscription menu for adults, and a subscription menu for children — but, really, we can tailor a subscription in any way to suit both the reader and the giver (just ask!).
We can gift-wrap the books* and dispatch them to you or to the recipients — or have them ready to collect from our door.
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Find out about the winners of the 2024 BOOKER PRIZE and the 2024 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE.
15 November 2024
The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies. It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.
Love her or hate her, you will enjoy Sadie! Sadie Smith (not her real name) is undercover. She’s out to find the dirt on the eco-radicals; and if she can’t find some, she’ll get creative. In a small remote village, the Moulinards’ commune on a scrappy piece of land, overseen by the charismatic Pascal (ex-Paris, wealthy lad living it rough and oldest friend to Sadie’s hapless ‘boyfriend’ loser film-maker Lucien). Pascal, along with his selected idealistic brotherhood are hanging on the words of modern day hermit Bruno Lacombe. Bruno lives in a cave and emails the group his missives on human history, the superiority of the Neanderthal, the earth’s vibrations, and other intellectual musings of a madman and a sage. The concerns of the local farmers and the newly arrived eco-radicals are the same. Industry is moving in with its pumping of water and singular crop fixation. There have been isolated incidents of sabotage. And Sadie’s boss wants the commune gone. Sadie's job is to get inside and find out what they will do next. And if there is no to-do list, entice some action. Sadie arrives into a dry hot summer in her little white rental, enough alcohol to keep cool and then some, and is ‘waiting’ for Lucien on his family’s estate — a rundown dwelling now rigged up with sensors, high speed internet and other spy gadgetry. Sadie’s reading Bruno’s emails, but not getting a lot of information about a plot to take out the new infrastructure. What she is getting is a fascination for Bruno and his sideways take on humanity. She’s ready to meet Pascal and gain his trust. It helps, or so Sadie wants us to believe, that she is gorgeous. She easily gains his trust, more to do with her set-up relation with Lucien than anything she particularly does, and Pascal’s never ending ability to mansplain. The women at the commune have different ideas about their assigned roles, more akin to the old patriarchy than new ideas. It doesn’t take Sadie long to get offside with them. She’ll have to be more careful to avoid their ire and their mistrust. So what is Rachel Kushner up to here? In Creation Lake, she’s pointing a very cynical finger at our attempts to save ourselves. Here comes corruption and ego in several guises, here is the power of ideas that can alter lives, here come belief systems that fall flat, and there go the Neanderthals walking with us still (according to Bruno), and here is the biggest fraud of the lot: Sadie Smith, who will be unequivocally changed by her encounter with the Moulinards and Bruno Lacombe. This is a clever, funny book with an unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator at its centre, with ideas leaping from the absurd to the strangely believable, and a cast of characters who get to walk on to the stage and play their bit parts to perfection, with references to ‘types’ as well as particular possibly recognisable individuals. Creation Lake deals with big issues — the climate, politics, industry, and power — with a playfulness and Intelligence that ricochet much like the bullets in Sadie’s guns. It encompasses ideas about where we came from and where we might be going with wry wit but also a serious nod to our current dilemmas. It’s not all doom, and Kushner may be giving us the opportunity to leave our hermit caves and look up. Although this may be a riff on the riff. And cynicism may be the winner after all — unless radical social change can capture Sadie's imagination at 4am. You’ll have to decide.
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A Thousand Feasts: Small moments of joy… A memoir of sorts by Nigel Slater $45
Nigel Slater has always been good company in the kitchen — and in the armchair. His relaxed and personable style, and his depth of understanding of flavours, combinations and processes, make his books enjoyable on many levels — always rewarding but never challenging. a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy. Slater has always kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman's hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei; recording the small things, events and happenings that give pleasure before they disappear. In A Thousand Feasts he details a soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese. This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end. Nigel hones in on the scent of a bunch of home-grown sweet peas, the sound of water breathing at night in Japan, the occasional 'pfuff' as a tiny avalanche of snow falls from leaves. You will love his company in this nicely presented book. [Hardback]
”Slater is at his best on food and travel: his ability to evoke a culture and a mood (and his food writing by itself does both) is remarkable. He is a purveyor of the good life, simplicity, cosiness and warmth.” — Sunday Times
”Slater's greatest talent is making the ordinary extraordinary, showing us how to revel in a ripe fig or a piece of cheese. He may worry that he sounds trite and that his musings on diminutive pleasures are trivial, that he hasn't answered any of the big questions about the universe, but as I leave I feel grateful for Slater, the god of small things.” —The Times
”I loved this. It is a secular book of hours — thoughts and pleasures beautifully cadenced and generously placed.” —Edmund de Waal
”Nigel Slater has a magical capacity to find beauty in the smallest moments. A nourishing, sustaining book.” —Olivia Laing
Illumipedia: Discover the world with your magic three-colour lens by Carnovsky $45
Illumipedia is a bumper treasury of marvels specially curated from the beloved ‘Illumi’ series, revealing worlds of natural wonder with the signature magic viewing lens. In Illumipedia, discover animals, insects, dinosaurs and the ocean deeps with your three-colour lens as you explore the world and its natural phenomena like never before. Bringing together content from five books in the iconic ‘Illumi’ series, this new treasury spans the best of Nature, Oceans, Bugs and Dinosaurs — across six continents. Each spectacular artwork is really three images in one: use the magic lens to reveal different layers to the environment you're in. Each chapter begins with an introduction to one of six continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America and Australasia & Oceania. In the Nature section, your red lens reveals daytime animals, your blue lens reveals nocturnal animals, and your green lens reveals the environments they live in. In the Oceans section, your red lens reveals fish, your blue lens shows the other creatures that call each ocean home, and your green lens sheds light on underwater seascapes. In the Bugs section, meet insects through your red lens, other creepy-crawlies through your blue lens, and the miniature worlds they inhabit through your green lens. In the Dinosaurs section, witness — what else? — dinosaurs through your red lens, other prehistoric creatures through your blue lens, and long-gone environments through your green lens. From the redwood forests of modern-day North America to the vast, prehistoric expanse of Gondwana, and from the tiniest ant to the blue whale, Illumipedia is a journey through time and around the world to champion nature in all its forms. With updated facts and stats and brand-new artworks from the inimitable Carnovsky, this new instalment designed for the bookshelf is sure to inspire awe and wonder at the natural world. [Large-format hardback]
Crumbs: Cookies and sweets from around the world by Ben Mims $80
The is the best biscuit encyclopedia we have seen — you will be pleased to have it on your kitchen bookshelf. Bake your way around the world with this collection of 300 irresistible, authentic, and delicious biscuit recipes from nearly 100 countries. Whether enjoyed at breakfast, with afternoon tea, on holidays, or as a late-night snack, biscuits are a universally beloved treat. In Crumbs, food writer, recipe developer, and self-confessed baking obsessive Ben Mims takes home cooks on a delicious tour across countries and cultures, presenting a sweet and satisfying guide to crumbly, crunchy, chewy desserts — from Snickerdoodles, Date-Filled Maamoul, and Almond Macaroons to Cardamom Biscuits, Italian Waffle Cookies, and Okinawan Brown Sugar Shortbread. Organised geographically, Crumbs is chock-full of old-world and modern classics, and intriguing local recipes from more than 100 countries. Each begins with a fascinating origin story, followed by clear, step-by-step instructions and notes on regional variations. Beginners will appreciate Mims's introduction to essential equipment, ingredients, and techniques such as shaping, rolling, and slicing, while bakers of all skill levels will find inspiration in the bounty of recipes, each carefully tested and perfected for home kitchens. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, the book features delectable photographs and special icons designating dairy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan recipes, as well as approachable, easy-to-make options that come together in 30 minutes or less. Recipes include: Chocolate-Glazed Elisenlebkuchen, Danish Pepper and Spice Cookies, Egyptian Stuffed Eid Cookies, Filipino Powdered Milk Shortbreads, French Macarons, Icelandic Gingerbread, Malaysian Milky Cashew Cookies, Nigerian Coconut Macaroon Balls, Pakistani Cumin Seed Cookies, Portuguese Biscoitos, Puerto Rican Guava and Almond Thumbprint Cookies, Rugelach, Spanish Almendrados, Shrewsbury Biscuits, Speculaas, Sri Lankan Crunchy Sugar Cookies, Syrian Sesame and Pistachio Cookies, Thai Rolled Wafer Cookies, Venezuelan Shortbread Cookies, and Welsh Griddled Currant Cookies, plus international variations on wedding cookies, Christmas cookies, and other sweet treats for special celebrations. [Hardback]
”Crumbs is the most well-researched and diverse cookie book I have ever encountered. Traveling through time and across cultures and lands, this is a unique and dynamic investigation of what the small-but-mighty cookie means to different people. Ben Mims has written an instant classic.” —Hetty Lui McKinnon
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale $30
The new poetry collection from Emma Neale is fascinated by our doubleness. Prompted by the rich implications in a line from Joseph Brodsky — “The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie” —it combines a personal memoir of childhood lies with an exploration of wider social deceptions. From the unwitting tricks our minds play, to the mischievous pinch of literary pastiche; from the corruptions of imperialism or abuse, to the dreams and stories we weave for our own survival, these poems catalogue scenes that seem to suggest our species could be named for its subterfuge as much as for its wisdom. Yet at the core of the collection are also some tenets to hold to: deep bonds of love; the renewal children offer; a hunger for social justice; and the sharp reality that nature presents us with, if we are willing to look. [Paperback]
McGlue by Ottessa Mosfegh $35
Salem, Massachusetts, 1851 — McGlue wakes up in prison, too drunk to be sure of how he got there, or even his own name. They say he killed a man, and that man may have been his best friend. That man may have been his lover. Now, McGlue wants one thing and one thing only — a drink. Because when he is sober he remembers, and McGlue wants to forget. As he is visited by people demanding answers — the authorities, his well-meaning lawyer and his weeping mother — McGlue struggles to bury the memories that haunt him, of a violent childhood, swashbuckling adventures, and the only man who ever loved him. [New hardback edition]
”Wonderful.” —Guardian
”Strange and beautiful.” —LA Times
”A gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur. You're in safe, if sticky hands with an Ottessa Moshfegh story. Everything bulges and reeks in this novella, which feels as if it was written in a permanent state of nausea. The plot spins faster than its main character's head. What elevates this novella are the scalpel-sharp observations about McGlue's nihilism and her prose, which is as distilled as the liquor McGlue necks. It's a wild ride.” —The Times
My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar $45
A novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi. Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States — whose perspective sheds its own light on his story. All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India — from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID — and buffet both Jadu’s and Jugnu's lives. Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence. [Hardback]
”This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.” —Salman Rushdie
”Kumar's late father's life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story. Kumar's beautiful, truthful fiction finds and provides great strength — too late for Kumar's parents, but in good time for his grateful readers.” —James Wood
Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby $40
After her university department is closed due to budget cuts, a philosophy professor tests the limits of the soul and body by performing dehumanising experiments on unwilling subjects. Violent Faculties follows a philosophy professor influenced by Sade and Bataille. She is ejected by university administrators aiming to impose business strategies in the interest of profit over knowledge (does this sound familiar?). She designs a series of experiments to demonstrate the value of philosophy as a discipline, not because of its potential for financial benefit, but because of its relevance to life and death. The corpses proliferate as her experiments yield theoretical results and ethical conundrums. She questions why it is wrong to kill humans, what is it about them that makes their lives sacred, and then attempts to find it in their bodies, their words, their thoughts, and their souls. [Paperback]
"I've never read anything quite like Charlene Elsby's Violent Faculties and I suspect I never will again. Part tenure application, part manifesto of sadistic feminism, Elsby's story of a professor pushed to rational excess by administrative powers-that-be reads like an overview of Western philosophy as written by your brilliant and bloodthirsty best friend who happens to be a malignant narcissist. Elsby's voice is daring, original, and wholly uncompromising. Violent Faculties is a work of true transgressive transcendence." —Paula Ashe
"Elsby's voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron." —B.R. Yeager
"Fusing philosophy and horror, Charlene Elsby's Violent Faculties is a masterful tale of human misery and the macabre, a story that transcends its innermost psychosocial experiments and becomes a cautionary tale by way of academic study. Elsby is at the peak of her powers, and this book is her calling card. I can't wait to see what sadistic experiments she has in store for us next." —Michael J. Seidlinger
”A disturbing dissertation on humanity that lures you into its extreme experiment in philosophical flagellation and doesn't dismiss you until the final footnote." —Brian McAuley
Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee $28
Can it possibly matter that we allow two young people to imagine that they love one another when in two days' time they will in any event be parted? It is the summer of 1851 and Charlotte Morrison is on holiday in Germany with her brother and his wife. On the surface, Charlotte is an unmarried aunt with a sparse, unfulfilled life. But beneath that quiet respectability lie unsuspected depths hidden murmurings. On a day trip boating down the Rhine, Charlotte sights a fellow traveller, Edward Newman, who releases the hissing floodwaters of her subconscious. Dark and dangerous, they sweep Charlotte towards the watershed of her life, stretching her imagination to its limit; almost to breaking point. [Paperback with French flaps]
Kia Mau: Resisting colonial fictions by Tina Ngata $25
An excoriation of the decision by the New Zealand government to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain James Cook and the implications of that decision both for Maori and for the wider global struggle against colonialism. Analysing these thinly veiled celebrations alongside the role of the Doctrine of Discovery while charting Cook’s crime spree of murder, rape and pillage, Ngata urgently calls for a practice ethical remembering that requires unlearning the falsehoods of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ and coming to terms with the horrifying reality of ongoing colonisation. [Paperback]
The Dream of a Tree by Maja Lunde (translated from Norwegian by Diane Oatley) $40
Longyearbyen, 2110: Far to the North, buried deep in the mountains, is a massive vault filled with seeds from every corner of the Earth. Tommy grows up in the brutal landscape of Spitzbergen alongside his two brothers, for whom he would do anything, and his grandmother, the seed keeper of the vault. Life just to the South of the North Pole is demanding, but their tiny community has found its shape. It has been many years since they cut off contact with other countries, and in their isolation, they live in harmony with nature. When Longyearbyen is hit by a disaster, Tommy, his brothers, and his grandmother are among the few survivors. Six lonely people in a deserted landscape, in possession of a treasure the world thought forever lost. At the same time, in a place far, far away, Tao subsists on the memories of her son Wei-Wen, whom she lost twelve years ago. Every day is the same; she is numb with sadness. And she is starving, like the rest of her people, trapped on a barren, impoverished land where countless species have disappeared. But everything changes the day Tao is asked to lead an expedition to the North. The destination is Spitzbergen and its legendary seeds. The Dream of a Tree is a chilling and gripping tale about our responsibility to this planet, both as a species and as individuals. Past, present and future are woven together, and the novel poses questions that our age is striving to answer: How did homo sapiens become the species that changed everything? Do we deserve to be masters of nature? And are we, too, an endangered species? [Paperback]
The Lost Music of the Holocaust: Bringing the music of the camps to the world at last by Francesco Lotoro $40
For more than thirty years Francesco Lotoro, an Italian pianist and composer has been on an odyssey to recover music written by the inmates of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps and the gulags of Stalin's Soviet Union. Between 1933, the year of the opening of the Dachau Lager in Germany, to Stalin's death in 1953 when thousands of Soviet prisoners were released, Lotoro pieces together the human stories of survivors whose only salvation was their love of music. Across three decades of relentless investigation, his findings as captured in Lost Music of the Holocaust are extraordinary and historically important. Lotoro unearthed over eight thousand unpublished works of music, ten thousand documents (microfilms, diaries, notebooks, and recordings on phonographic recordings), as well as locating and interviewing many survivors who in a previous life had been trained musicians and composers. Be it a symphony, an opera, a simple folk song or even a gypsy melody, Lotoro has travelled the globe to track them down. Many pieces were hastily scribbled down ow whatever the composer could find: food wrappings, a vegetable sack and even a train ticket stub. To avoid discover by camp guards, Lotoro even discovered forgotten pieces of code inmates had invented to hide their real meaning - music. In many cases, the composers would be murdered in the gas chambers or worked to death, not knowing whether their music would be heard by the world. Until now. [Paperback]
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich $38
In Argus, North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to all of his problems; Kismet can't even imagine her future, let alone the kind of future Gary might offer. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say 'no' and so the die is cast. Hugo has been in love with Kismet for years. He has been her friend, confidante and occasionally her lover — and now she is marrying Gary, Hugo is determined to steal her back. Meanwhile Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly truck drives along the highway from the farm to the factories, she tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future — both her daughter's and her own. Starkly beautiful like the landscape it inhabits, this novel is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets. [Paperback]
”Erdrich's achievement is pretty remarkable: a narrative voice with brio and lightness that wends and weaves between modes and moods. It's unpredictable and multifaceted.” —Michael Donkor, Guardian
Ten Birds that Changed the World by Stephen Moss $28
For the whole of human history, we have lived alongside birds. We have hunted and domesticated them for food; venerated them in our mythologies, religions, and rituals; exploited them for their natural resources; and been inspired by them for our music, art, and poetry. In Ten Birds That Changed the World, naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells the gripping story of this long and intimate relationship through key species from all seven of the world's continents. From Odin's faithful raven companions to Darwin's finches, and from the wild turkey of the Americas to the emperor penguin as potent symbol of the climate crisis, this is a fascinating, eye-opening, and endlessly engaging work of natural history.
How to Feed the World: A factful guide by Vaclav Smil $40
A myth-busting book about how the world produces and consumes its food and how to do so without killing the planet. Why are some of the world's biggest food producers also the countries with the most undernourished populations? Why is food waste a colossal 1,000kcal per person daily, and how can we solve that? Could we all go vegan and be healthy? Should we? How will we feed the ballooning population without killing the planet? How to Feed the World shows how we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. [Paperback]
Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of the world by Dorian Lynsky $40
As Dorian Lynskey writes, "People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia." In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularised in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them, from H.G. Wells, Jack London, W.B. Yeats and J.G. Ballard to The Twilight Zone, Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max and The Terminator. Prescient and original, Everything Must Go is a brilliant, sweeping work of history that provides many astute insights for our times and speaks to our urgent concerns for the future. [Paperback]
”So engagingly plotted and written that it's a pleasure to bask in its constant stream of remarkable titbits and illuminating insights.” —The Guardian
”So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end — the world, or the book.” —Adam Rutherford
Samantha Harvey’s beautiful and hypnotic novel, Orbital, has just been awarded the Booker Prize 2024!
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, describes the winner as ‘a book about a wounded world’, adding that the panel’s ‘unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition’ .
Harvey said of writing Orbital: ‘I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space’.
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
A selection of yellow books from our shelves.
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Read our latest newsletter and find out about some interesting books that we’ve been reading this week. Find out who was awarded the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, and which books are in the running for the Booker Prize this week. There are also plenty of new releases that we think you will enjoy. Happy reading!
8 November 2024
Orbital is hypnotic. The first revelation is the language. Harvey’s languid prose takes you somewhere unknown, somewhere beautiful and beguiling but also strangely unsettling. Then you notice that time is upended, that all the rules of earth that you know but hardly consider are unpicked; —are absent. Because you, like the six people circling the earth, are transported into this whirring machine. You are in orbit. Here a day is sixteen days. A morning every ninety minutes. A space station observing the earth, watching a typhoon, lamenting the planet called home, recording what happens below and what happens within; —an endless cycle of experiments, observations, and routine. Six people morphing into one organism as their lives in this bubble of a world push them, more accurately float them, closer to each other to a place where dreams overlap and longings coincide. And where each of the six, ironically, captured by individual thoughts, and misgivings, are more alone than ever. They revel in the wonders of space; —the magnitude of the universe; —the mysticism of the moon, the awe of spacewalking, and the unfathomable future of life on other planets. They are in admiration of technology, while simultaneously in despair at what they observe on that precious planet, Earth. Yet, there is also reverence and wonder. A ballad to the small blue planet that sustains us and that holds so many things of beauty. From the space station nature is overwhelming; —the orange deserts, the great swathes of ocean, the ice of the polar caps, the beguiling southern auroras. Harvey’s imagining of Earth from space through the eyes of six humans from different nations as they observe an Earth that has few borders (the great rivers show, and the coasts of Europe are well lit) and a radiance that captures the planet as a whole as if you could hold it in your palm, also dives into the particular, the minuscule; —those moments that are individual and small in the scale of things (especially if you are orbiting in space). A grandmother at the market in Nagasaki, an astronaut making contact with a lonely woman on Earth via ham radio, a postcard given with love depicting a painting framing a question about viewpoint, the regret of a flippant answer, and the obsession with a disaster which becomes a ritual. These beautiful juxtapositions of the grand and the particular are caressed by Harvey's language and descriptive narrative. This is observation at its best. The observation of our planet, (triggered by the author’s watching of live feed from the ISS when suffering from insomnia), and the observation of humanity in all our glory and failure. Little wonder that this novel is Booker Prize shortlisted. Beguiling and breathless with a rhythm all its own, this is a small novel packed with ideas, a celebration of our planet, as well as a call to action for embracing and protecting all its wonder, natural and human.
He had read, he said, that Olga Tokarczuk, the author of the book he was reading and the author of many other books for which she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, a couple of which other books he had also read, he said, was intending to stop writing books because of the pain she experienced in her spine when writing them, pain she experienced in fact as a consequence of writing them. Pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of writing books, he said, but pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of other occupations, too, writing books is not special in that regard. For instance, he said, pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of my occupation, and I frequently suffer from what could be called intolerable pain in the spine if it were not for the fact that I tolerate it somehow, sometimes with the help of morphine sulphate. Pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of my cut-and-paste occupation, he said, just as it is an occupational hazard of Olga Tokarczuk’s occupation of writing books, pain in the spine is a way in which my cut-and-paste occupation becomes intolerable other than the extent to which I tolerate it. I spend hours each day, cutting and pasting, he said, mostly metaphorically, as actions performed on a computer are generally done metaphorically rather than literally, but, it seems, he said, that most of my other non-computer actions are actually nothing more than the application of digital cut-and-paste principles to the physical world, removing objects or persons from one context and inserting them into other contexts in accordance with the desires or duties that comprise my wider existential job description, so to call it. Very occasionally, he said, he did perform literal actions of cutting and pasting using some sort of literal cutting blade and some sort of literal adhesive substance, but, he said, almost all my actions are either metaphorical cut-and-paste actions performed on the computer or meta-metaphorical cut-and-paste actions performed by the application of digital cut-and-paste principles to the physical world. He hoped that he was in the running, he said, for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Cut-and-Paste, if that prize will be awarded this year, because the pain he experienced in his spine while cutting-and-pasting made him want to stop his occupation at the highest level, just as Olga Tokarczuk was wanting to stop her occupation of writing books at the highest level. In fact, he said, the pain in his spine made him want to stop his cut-and-paste occupation even if he could not do so at its highest level, he would like to stop it at any level, Nobel Prize in Cut-and-Paste or not, he said, he would like to stop, but not, perhaps, after all, to write books. Maybe to spend more time reading books, he said after a little thought, maybe if I had the time I would read more books and read them better, more and better, he repeated as if more and better were some sort of ideal in themselves. Certainly, he said, my career in cut-and-paste and my other activities which are actually no more than the application of digital cut-and-paste principles to the physical world, leave me very much less than a good amount of time for reading and certainly nowhere near enough for reading well. When asked whether he thought the reading of books was in itself a form of cut-and-paste, the cutting of words from the page and the pasting of these into his brain, or into his mind, or whatever he might choose to call it, and, by extension, whether all awareness is nothing more than the cutting of experience and the pasting of it into the brain or mind, he affected not to understand the question and suggested that there was in any case no such thing as the mind and that the whole idea of inside-and-outside was an illusion resulting from the reading of literature, the very thing he had just said he wanted to have more time to do. At least by now I might have finished the book that I am reading, if I had spent and had more time to spend reading it, he said. This was not much of an assertion, he admitted, though he was reading to a deadline and had fallen short and would inevitably fall short of the reading performance to which he was committed, entirely, he admitted, through his own fault, both in the committing and in the falling short of the commitment. Not that the task was remotely a burden he said, or not a heavy one, the novel he was reading was an enjoyable one, a satire of the misogyny inherent in the literary canon, a novel bulging with the twitterings of men proclaiming ersatz profundities on the world and its operations as men tend to do in, for instance, so-called great novels of ideas. In fact, he said, he had read that Olga Tokarczuk had cut and paste portions of the actual dialogue directly from several such great novels of ideas in which men proclaim upon the world and upon its operations and in which women have a role so narrow that they are hardly seen at all. Perhaps they are thankful for that, he said, perhaps not being seen is in itself a liberation, if seen from the other side, not being seen and not therefore being known preserves the possibilities of nature from the confines of knowledge, so to call it, he thought. Certainly in this novel, a sort of mirror to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a sort of reflection caught by an excess of light upon some surface inadvertently shiny, is written with such perfect lightness that the intended profundities of the so-called great novels of ideas will here-ever-after be seen as nothing but the twitterings of clowns, if it is true that clowns twitter, the chirrupings of ignoramuses, or ignorami, perhaps, he wondered. Who could be content hereafter, in literature or in life, with the vapidity and narrow knowledge here so eloquently lampooned? “To be a man means learning to ignore whatever causes trouble. That’s the whole mystery,” writes Olga Tokarczuk in this book, he said. To know is to achieve an ignorance, he said, for the world is not either one thing or another thing, but both one thing and another thing and everything in between, he said. Convenience makes liars of us all. In this novel by Olga Tokarczuk, he said, the conversations, if we could call them that, that make a farce of the great ideas of its characters are rather passively witnessed by one Mieczysław Wojnicz, seemingly a young man staying at a Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the health resort of Görbersdorf in 1913, just before the Great War of Men, while he and the other residents of the Guesthouse wait for rooms to become available at the main sanitorium in Görbersdorf, rooms that never, it seems, become available because nobody ever gets better. Death is inside each of them, he said, but it is scrupulously denied and mostly it does not seem to affect them much except for when it does. Knowing, or thinking to know, he said, is inseparable from illness, both as consequence and cause, knowing, so to call it, he said, is just the scrupulous denial of death. “Here there are only the living. The dead disappear, and we have no further interest in them. We disregard death,” he said, quoting the novel once more. There is no cemetery in Görbersdorf, despite it all, he said. What is the illness, he asked, though it was not clear who he was asking, that can never be cured by what takes place in a novel if that illness is not inherent in the novel itself? Mieczysław Wojnicz does not contribute to the conversations, so to call them, but is more or less subjected to them, as he is to all that he sees, and he is uncomfortable when it seems that he himself may be seen, unlike the other guests, who are continually polishing themselves to be seen, he observed, polishing themselves and striving to define how the world should see them and be seen. There is nothing more ludicrous than that, he said, there is nothing more ludicrous or more common everywhere than that. But, he said, occasionally in the text a voice breaks in, another tone of voice, though it is unclear just whose voice this may be, he said, often at the ends of chapters, or at other places in the text, a transcendent voice not limited to a person but a kind of fluid transpersonal awareness of rotting and sprouting, detail without definition, very different from the literary twitterings of the clowns, if clowns do twitter, the voice of all that is excluded from their clownish theories of the world, or unreachable by their clownish theories and thereby preserved from them, chthonically active, neither one thing nor another but somehow borderless, both one thing and the other and everything in between. All my cutting and pasting, he said, just reinforces the borders across which I cut and paste, I will cut and paste no more, he said. At least, no more today.
Rachel Cusk's remarkable novel has just been awarded the 2024 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE (for works that expand the horizons of the novel form). In this book, Cusk continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade 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, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — 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. {Thomas}
“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, Goldsmiths Prize
"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, Goldsmiths Prize
The Booker Prize 2024 will be announced on the 12th November (GMT). Read the shortlist. All in stock now! The perfect summer reading pile. Click through to find out more:
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The Royal Free by Carl Shuker $38
Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum, The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing — by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake (now a film by Christine Jeffs). James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the 'third oldest medical journal in the world', the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices — the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?). His job is utterly boring, but — or so he tells himself — totally crucial: the Royal London is a stronghold of care for the human body, a bastion of humanism in a disintegrating world. In the London outside of the office, the prognosis for the body politic is bad: civic unrest is poised on the brink of riots. Attempting to grieve for his lost young wife, while haunted by a group of violent North London teenagers in a collapsing city, James is brought to crisis. [Paperback]
”His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.” —NZ Listener
Toi te Mana: An indigenous history of Māori art by Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki $100
A landmark account in words and pictures of Māori art, by Māori art historians, covering everything from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Māori artists. In 600 pages and over 500 images, this very impressive volume invites readers to climb on to the waka for a remarkable voyage — from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists at the Venice Biennale, from whare whakairo to film, and from Te Puea Herangi to Michael Parekowhai. The authors explore a wide field of art practice: raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattoo), whakairo (carving),rakai (jewellery), kakahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media and film. And they do so over a long time period — from the arrival of Pacific voyagers 800 years ago to contemporary artists in Aotearoa and around the world today. Through wide-ranging chapters alongside focused breakout boxes on individual artists, movements and events, Toi te Mana is a waka eke noa — an essential book for anyone interested in te ao Māori. [Hardback]
Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer $38
Slender Volumes locates the cypress trees of Buddhist folklore in Onehunga and the teachings of the Zen tradition along its foreshore. Elaborating on kōans collected by poet-philosopher Eihei Dōgen, each poem fastens centuries and distances together to find insight in everyday things: seagulls on a handrail, insects drinking from a pan of water, sump oil glistening in a white bucket. Clear-sighted and compassionate, Slender Volumes recovers what it means to be intimate with our surroundings and to meet the particulars of our world with perfect curiosity. Very nicely written and produced. [Paperback with French flaps]
/slanted by Alison Glenny $30
A field guide to the spirit and endeavours of Edwardian mountaineer Freda Du Faur (1882–1935), the first woman to summit Aoraki Mount Cook, the highest peak in the Southern Alps of Aotearoa New Zealand. Through flights of verse, pages of concrete visual poetry, and fragments of archival materials, this new collection is glistening with newness on every page.
”/slanted is to me three things: one; a finely-made poetry of the eye, which becomes simultaneously and intensely a poetry of the ear and the echo, two; an historical poetry interested in the language of prior texts, and three; a deeply civilisational poetics, because it approachesEnglish through a non-Western and anti-imperialistic lens. Combining these three things, Glenny is a marvellous and challenging Antipodean experimentalist.” —A.J. Carruthers
”Glenny is as devoted to the ridges and valleys of the line and letter as her collection’s real-life muse and subject, climber Freda Du Faur, is to scaling the peaks. /slanted brings together paraphrase, erasure, shape and LANGUAGE poetry in an elliptical, challenging book. This is poetry that knows the power of form—of ordering, arrangement, selection—a collection that knows the power of placing one foot after another.” —Jake Arthur
”/slanted feels created by hand and by foot. The hardened heels, the ice-cut steps and the glacier-wear (in this case, skirts!) are palpable, while the snow and stalactites and steep-angled slopes sprawl like obstacles across the page. Through it all, Freda Du Faur treads slowly over two-faced mountains, a “sporting female” battered by altitude and her time in history, straining to see but never knowing what she means to us now. Climbing becomes poetry, and poetry a way of climbing up and out of the past.” —Laura Williamson
Paper Boat: New and selected poems, 1962—2023 by Margaret Atwood $60
Tracing the legacy of a writer who has fundamentally shaped our contemporary literary landscapes, Paper Boat assembles Atwood's most vital poems in one volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voices to remarkably drawn characters — mythological figures, animals and everyday people — all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. 'How can one live with such a heart?' Atwood asks, casting her spell upon the reader, and ferrying us through life, death and whatever comes next. Walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy as only she can, Atwood's journey through poetry illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears. Spanning six decades of work — from her earliest beginnings to brand new poems — this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors. [Hardback]
”What a book of magic Paper Boat is a bright and cornucopic life force of a book. It resounds with the acuteness of Atwood's wisdom, the warmth of her cold eye, her uniquely lit courage.” —Ali Smith, Guardian
Future Jaw-Clap: The Primitive Art Group and Braille Collective story by Daniel Beban $50
Future Jaw-Clap tells the story of a highly influential movement in New Zealand music: the self-made musicians of pioneering free jazz ensemble Primitive Art Group, who carved out their own radical musical language in the cold, hard reality of 1980s Wellington, and have gone on to richly diverse careers in music. From their beginnings as ‘the punks of jazz’ in small clubs and the anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid protests of the early 1980s, through the heyday of the Braille Collective's many colourful groups, self-released records and intersections with dance, theatre and visual arts, to the Six Volts providing music for the iconic album Songs From the Front Lawn, and beyond, these musicians and the many others they have drawn into their orbit have done much to shape the music of Aotearoa. Based on a deep oral history project and extensive archival research, and illustrated with photographs and other items, Future Jaw-Clap is a portal into an extraordinary musical world of free music in Aotearoa. [Flexibound]
”Astounding and illuminating.” —Thurston Moore
”Wonderful.” —Nick Bollinger
”A must-read.” —Mike Nock
”Everyone who wants to start a band in Aotearoa should read this book.” —Don McGlashan
Last month, Primitive Art Group released a new double LP, 1981–1986, from Amish Records, available from Flying Out. This gatefold, 2XLP combines the group’s only two albums, consisting of one LP of Five Tread Drop Down cuts plus 'Cecil Likes to Dance', a never-before-released live recording from Thistle Hall (1984) and the full 1985 LP Future Jaw-Clap.
Petroglyphs by Craig Foltz $30
US Ex-pat Craig Foltz’s latest collection continues his interrogation of language, space and time. More than simple time stamps, these Petroglpyhs chart the inner workings of consciousness via the examination of mythical creatures, strip malls and various bodies of water. The form of these works morph and dissolve over time. A book becomes paper. Becomes fire. Becomes ashes. Sometimes it is only through the prism of an unimagined other that we can fully locate ourselves. [Paperback]
”In the poems of Petroglyphs, Craig Foltz is like a burlesque artist who begins the act wearing dozens of layers and strips down until he is covered by only the most strategically-placed phrases. The book’s three sections—by turns expansive, lapidary, and fragmentary—show how a great deal of what we ‘know’ can be summoned up by mere suggestion, and that attempts at explanations don’t necessarily make things clearer.By the end you’ll feel naive for having believed in stable concepts in a world where there are curious semantic slippages, where ‘practical experience is no substitute for practical experience’.” —Erik Kennedy
”This is poetry that makes me want to write poetry. Causation and correlation tease apart like pulled jackfruit; a phrase could be a ladder ora riptide. Dextrous, inquisitive and rich—swap where are we going? for how are we having this much fun?” —Ya-Wen Ho
”This is a sparkling work, transporting the reader through layers of biology, paleontology and deep time. The only constant is an overarching imagination, transforming itself, sentence by sentence, into something wonderful and strange.” —Richard von Sturmer
”1. Affixes of lithic matter escape morphology. 2. Meaning buckles under the pressure of cellular mysticism. 3. Taxonomy spreads limbic.4. Under a microscope, a diatom may appear as a smooth pebble or an aperture of light. 5. Poets are advised to bring a headtorch, waterproof footwear and to mind the stalactites.” —Toyah Webb
Living Things by Munir Hachemi (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches) $28
Living Things follows four recent graduates — Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex — who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living in a campground, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling. [Paperback]
"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." —Dizz Tate
"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." —James Greer
An Absence of Cousins by Lore Segal $28
Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but 'elective cousins'. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to - a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares — the institute's director and his wry, acerbic wife — hold the key? In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door. [Paperback]
Into a Star by Puk Qvortrup (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $38
'Three in the bed. One not yet born, another dead, and I'm alive.' Puk is 26 years old, preparing for the birth of her second child, when her husband has a heart attack on his morning run. She leaves their toddler with a friend and dashes to the hospital, where Lasse lies unresponsive in a coma. He dies a few hours later. Into a Star follows Puk and her young family for one year after this tragedy, which has shattered the ordinary life she thought she would live, as she finds her way slowly through the enormous grief and, eventually, out the other side. With remarkable dignity, candour and attention to the domestic details that make us human, Puk Qvortrup invites us into the hardest moments of her life. And she reveals, amid the devastation, a powerful thread of hope. [Paperback]
"Into a Star is a luminous meditation on loss and renewal. Despite the heart-breaking subject matter, it filled me with a sense of life’s beauty, and of the unexpected paths we take to happiness.” —Hermione Thompson
”Into A Star is written with an immediate simplicity that it's impossible to resist. A private tragedy reminiscent of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. But Puk Qvortrup writes younger, more exposed, more from the body.” —Svenska Dagbladet
New Stories by Owen Marshall $38
Accidental meetings, unexpected turns in the road, job offers that take you into new territories- our lives seem arbitrary and unpredictable. In Marshall’s latest collection of short stories , people teeter on the brink of experience. From murder to an affair, to a promotion or a breakdown, the array of vivid characters aren't always aware of what they encounter, not sure whether they are being given an opportunity, a challenge, a temptation, a lesson, or just another day to get through. Meanwhile, feelings of fear, lust, curiosity and frustration simmer beneath the surface. Will the people grasp what life throws at them? [Paperback]
The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank $35
We all used to be something else, and we will all be something new again in the worlds to come. Written in an effort to ward off existential dread, and to find new understandings and consolations for those similarly afflicted, The Chthonic Cycle is an eccentric and brilliantly curated tour through time, in which fascinating objects glint and spark and the transience of humanity flickers. At the heart of Una Cruickshank’s debut are Earth’s interlocking cycles of death and reuse. The blood of a billion-year-old tree emerges from the sea as a drop of amber; 4,756,940 pieces of Lego float towards the Cornish Peninsula; a giant squid’s beak passes through a whale’s intestines into bottles of Chanel No. 5. The violence of colonisation underpins some of the transformations illuminated here, as we follow wave after wave of ruin and remaking. This is a rare kind of writing, both galaxy-sweeping and microscopically specific. The Chthonic Cycle reminds us to be chastened and scared by our world — its mind-bending age, the insane complexity of its systems, the violent upheavals and mass extinctions — as well as to be awed.
”Rich and lyrical, gorgeous and astonishing, scientific and poetic — this stunning collection has left me smiling, looking afresh at the world. I loved this book for its intensity and curiosity and its vivid language.” —Rebecca Priestley
”Una Cruickshank reaches across the history of life on Earth to hold a mirror up to our lives. With exacting precision, charisma and curiosity, The Chthonic Cycle casts light on the links between everything in the vast web of earthly delights, putting each of our lives in the perspective of deep time and the ever-present cycles of evolution and extinction. Every page of this rich and illuminating debut is a feast.” —Ash Davida Jane
Nights Out at Home: Recipes and stories from twenty-five years as a restaurant critic by Jay Rayner $55
”For the past twenty-five years, I have been reviewing restaurants across Britain and beyond, from the humblest of diners to the grandest of gastro-palaces. And throughout I've been taking the best ideas home with me to create glorious dishes for my own table. Now I get to share those recipes with you.” In Nights Out at Home, Jay Rayner's first cookbook, the award-winning writer and broadcaster gives us delicious, achievable recipes inspired by the restaurant creations that have stolen his heart over the decades, for you to cook in your own kitchen. With sixty recipes that take their inspiration from restaurants dishes served across the UK and further afield, Nights Out at Home includes a cheat's version of the Ivy's famed crispy duck salad, the brown butter and sage flatbreads from Manchester's Erst, miso-glazed aubergine from Freak Scene and instructions for making the cult tandoori lamb chops from the legendary Tayyabs in London's Whitechapel; a recipe which has never before been written down. It also features Jay's irresistible, MasterChef Critics-winning baked chocolate pudding with cherries, and his own personal take on the mighty Greggs Steak Bake. Seasoned with stories from Jay's life as a restaurant critic, and written with warmth, wit and the blessing, and often help, of the chefs themselves, Nights Out at Home is a celebration of good food and great eating experiences, filled with dishes to inspire all cooks. [Hardback]
”A fantastic collection of heart warming, full-flavoured recipes from one of Britain's leading food writers. A must buy for anyone who loves food, restaurants and cooking.” —Tom Kerridge
”Jay has a way with words, but he's also a dab hand in the kitchen. This book is not just a collection of food memories but also of recipes that make you want to roll up your sleeves and start cooking.” —Michel Roux
Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman $37
Some family stories, fragments of their lives, continue to nag and haunt us. Lily Hasenburg was just such a figure in Holman's growing years. She was whispered into his ear by grandmother Eunice — in memorable stories of her older sister, who married and moved to Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and was later caught up in the Nazi web spun around Adolf Hitler. Unable to shake loose this story, Holman pursued her to Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. Here, we have an account of his pilgrimage; the kind of family history we might bury, and forget — to our loss. [Paperback]
”Holman travels, learns German, encounters the lost who were always right there. Lily, Oh Lily is family memoir at full stretch, made with love, yearning and just a hint of reproach. A wise, timely, beautiful read.” —Diana Wichtel
The Horse: A galloping history of humanity by Timothy Winegard $45
The Horse is an epic history that begins more than 5500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe when the first horse was tamed and an unbreakable bond with humans was forged — a bond that transformed the future of humanity. Since that pivotal moment, the horse has carried the fate of civilisations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transport, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion and a formidable weapon of war. With its unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse has influenced every facet of human life and widened the scope of human ambition and achievement. Horses revolutionised the way we hunted, traded, travelled, farmed, fought, worshipped and interacted. They fundamentally modified the human genome and the world's linguistic map. They determined international borders, moulded cultures, fuelled economies, and decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have been integral to both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives. [Paperback]
Jewish, Not Zionist by Marilyn Garson $30
Raised in Zionism, Marilyn Garson worked four years in Gaza and let it challenge everything she thought she knew. She returned to Aotearoa seeking both Jewish community and justice in Palestine. Painfully excluded by some, she co-founded Alternative Jewish Voices to let belief fuel activism. Nationally and internationally, this story comes from the front line of a principled movement for Jewish solidarity with Palestine. Garson grew up in Canada, the youngest of four sisters in a Zionist-Jewish household. She immigrated to Hokianga in the mid-1980s. From 1998 she worked in Cambodia and Afghanistan. In 2011, she received an offer to work in the Gaza Strip—an extraordinary invitation to live among people she had been told were her enemies. Her first book, Still Lives – a Memoir of Gaza tells the story of four years, two wars, and an unlikely social enterprise. Garson returned to Aotearoa in 2015. [Paperback]
The 113th Assistant Librarian by Stuart Wilson $24
Oliver Wormwood thinks his new job in the library will be boring. Until he learns that books hold great power — and danger. By the end of his first day, Oliver has witnessed the librarian's death, been frozen by a book, met a perplexing number of cats, and fought off a horde of terrifying creatures. With only a mysterious girl called Agatha to show him the ropes, Oliver needs to learn fast — if he wants to live longer than the 112 assistant librarians before him. [Hardback]
Eleven Writers and Leaders on Democracy, And why it matters by Margaret Atwood, Mary Beard, Elif Shafak, Lea Ypi, Lola Shoneyin, Aditi MIttal, Yuan Yang, Erica Benner, Adela Raz, Kaja Kallas, and Vjosa Osmani $19
Urgent reflections on the value of democracy from eleven women writers and thought-leaders 2024 is an exceptional year for democracy. Nearly half the world's population will take part in a national election, with billions heading to the polls. It's a thrilling, unprecedented moment for change — yet democracy is also under threat. Women are at the forefront of the fight for democratic rights, as well as most vulnerable when those rights disappear. Here eleven extraordinary women — leaders, philosophers, historians, writers and activists — explore democracy's power to uplift our societies. Between its ancient origins and its modern challenges, they share a vision for a better future — one we can build together. A bit late for some but even more urgent because of this. [Paperback]
“2024 is a year of elections. But will it be remembered as a year of democracy? That is in the balance. Democracy cannot be limited to a campaign, a vote, a victory speech. It is a process - or, to be more precise, a series of processes - that go to the heart of what a society really is. It depends on our shared understandings and on our commitment to making it work.” —Juliet Riddell