I thought for a while that horse racing was a sort of sport, and I wondered if there were other sports in which the people participating in them were relatively unknown, horse racing being done in the name of the horses, after all, not in the name of the jockeys, whereas cycle racing is done in the names of the cyclists not in the name of their bicycles, and then I realised that horseracing is not a sport at all, but a kind of competition more akin to marbles, a competition of ownership, in which the jockeys are just what make the horses go, the jockeys are the augmentation of the prowess of the horses with the will of their owners, nothing more, implants, marginal figures along with the other unknown persons whose collective efforts both enable and are obscured by the horses that they serve. But this marginalisation, together with the peripatetic nature of these professions, makes the contained human society of the racecourse backstretch such a fascinating and, for want of a better word, such a human one. In small worlds what would otherwise be small is writ large, and what would otherwise be unnoticed is made clear. Kathryn Scalan’s wholly remarkable novel Kick the Latch is ostensibly the edited-down text of the Sonia half of a series of interviews between Scanlan and a longtime horse trainer (and subsequently prison guard and later bric-a-brac dealer) named Sonia, conducted between 2018 and 2021. Certainly there is a pellucid quality to these first-person accounts, the voice and language of Sonia are strongly delineated and very appealing to read, and the insights gleaned from them into the life of their narrator, from her hard-scrabble girlhood to her hard-scrabble but colourful life around the racetrack and beyond, are entirely compelling. In these twelve sets of titled anecdotes, Scanlan has succeeded in making herself entirely invisible (the text’s invisible but vital jockey), which shows invisibility to be a cardinal virtue for an author or an editor — and it is uncertain which of these labels applies itself most suitably to Scanlan’s achievement in making this book. Perhaps all good writing is primarily editing, primarily on the part of the writer themselves (and secondarily by any subsequent editor). Anyone can generate any amount of text; it is only the ruthless and careful editing of this text (before and after it is actually written down), the trimming and tightening of text, the removal of all but the essential details and the tuning of the grammatical mechanisms of the text, that produces something worth reading. The virtues of literature are primarily negative. I first came across Scanlan with her first book, the poignant and beautiful Aug 9—Fog, which was made by ‘editing down’ a stranger’s diary found at an estate sale into a small book of universal resonance. Kick the Latch could be said to be an extension of the same project: an applied rigour and unsparing humility by Scanlan that makes something that would otherwise be ordinary and unnoticed — found experiences from unimportant lives, as are all of our lives unimportant — into something so sharp and clear that it touches the reader deeply. What more could we want from literature than this?
Earth’s End publishes excellent graphic novels in Aotearoa. The latest from their publishing stable is Episodes from the pen of Tāmaki Makaurau cartoonist, artist and editor Alex Scott. Here you have a series of slice-of-life stories —episodes — that capture growing up in the city in the 1990s and the influence of media and advertising on society, particularly young people. Scott has narrowed in on the influence of advertising and the role of television initially, through to the advent of social media, to disrupt and to create an arena where there can only be disappointment and confusion. In the first story eating breakfast is dominated by the hyperactive images of Space Cadet cereal. There is no touching the ground here, rather a sense of disconnect. There are stories about relationships and desire, mostly not realised, where the protagonist has romantic expectations that occur only in soap operas. A teen narrows in on an overly hyped beauty product as the key to popularity. A man is traumatised from working in the advertising world. There’s the world of the mall, and hanging out at the beach. Judgements abound based on peer pressures, heavily influenced by advertising, reality TV and the addictive nature of the TV series. Yet there are also feisty rejections of these messages, and growing suspicions on the part of some of the protagonists. As technology changes, and the media platforms vary, Scott cleverly changes the dimensions of the frame. Gone is the TV screen rectangle. The phone takes over with its vertical reference. To reflect the screen-like style, text is captioned rather than speech-bubbled, giving another sense of remove. In the later stories, social media is king, and there is a distinctive shift to self-absorption — the screen turns on the self recording every moment in that strangely manufactured way. The illustrations are wonderful, with details that will keep you looking and looking again, seeking out the familiar. In a strange way, there is comfort in the absurdity; and yet it is this exact absurdity that questions our relationship with media, especially in the formative years of childhood and the headiness of growing up. The stories in Episodes are sad and funny, thought-provoking, and all too real. Here you will find the wonderful awkwardness of adolescence, the kid that is always sideways to the world, along with the epiphany of being yourself, and the sometimes crushing, but always necessary, understanding that life isn’t like the movies. A ballad to — and a warning about — our media-obsessed society.
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door at 15 Church Street, Whakatū.
The Gavin Bishop Treasury: Ten favourite fairy stories and original tales by Gavin Bishop $45
Two hundred pages of fabulous storytelling and stunning artwork. This beautiful gift collection will entrance families of all ages and sizes and is the ideal inducement to snuggle up and read together. The 10 gorgeous stories included in this treasury are: ‘Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant’; ‘Bidibidi’; ‘Mr Fox’; ‘Chicken Licken’; ‘A Apple Pie’; ‘The Three Little Pigs’; ‘Little Rabbit and the Sea’; ‘Stay Awake, Bear!’; ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’; and ‘Rats!’ — four of Bishop’s delightful original tales, featuring such characters as drab Mrs McGinty, who becomes a sensation when a fast-growing plant takes off in her yard, along with a rainbow-chasing sheep, a little rabbit who longs to visit the sea, and a bear who decides he can go without his winter sleep. There are also six humour-filled fairy tale retellings, including crafty Mr Fox with an empty food sack to fill, the gloriously illustrated ‘Three Little Pigs’, and ‘Rats!’, in which Mrs Polly Piper, vexed by an infestation of cheeky rodents, accepts help from the dashing, accordion-playing Rapscallion Claw. This is an exciting publication, as most of these favourites have been out of print and very hard to find. [Hardback]
Giant by Mollie Ray $45
One morning, a teenage boy wakes to find that he has grown to the size of a giant… Inspired by the journey of the author's younger brother, this wordless wonder of a book follows the experience of a family as one of their own faces a life-threatening illness. As his health declines, can the family remain resilient on his long journey through treatment? Mollie Ray's debut graphic novel is a resonant story of empathy, healing and hope. [Hardback]
”Wonderful, moving, original book. It teaches us a new visual language for love, for worry and for family.” —Robert Macfarlane
”Mollie Ray's exquisitely rendered drawings guide us tenderly through this tale of family, courage, fear and joy.” —Katie Green
French Cooking for One by Michèle Roberts $45
”Part of the beauty of the art of cooking is that it involves transience, making something delightful that then vanishes, and that in turn involves cherishing the time we spend on perfecting a dish. Cooking yourself something delicious is rewarding, satisfying, cheering. It makes us feel capable, creative, able to take care of ourselves. Cooking for yourself makes you feel spoiled and cherished.” - Michèle Roberts
A unique work of literary and culinary joie de vivre, part food memoir, part recipe book, French Cooking for One is Michèle Roberts' first cookbook, and a personal and quirky take on Édouard de Pomiane's ten-minute cooking classic. Once a food writer for the New Statesman, Roberts was born in 1949 and raised in a bilingual French-English household, learning to cook from her French grandparents in Normandy. Her love of food and cookery has always shone through in her novels and short stories. French cuisine, classic though it is, still holds delicious surprises. From quick bites for busy days to sumptuous main courses for those who enjoy spending more time in the kitchen, the focus throughout this book is on dishes that are simple and fun to prepare, and results that are mouthwatering to contemplate and, of course, to eat. With over 160 delicious recipes, the majority of which are vegetarian, combined with piquant storytelling and feminist wit, French Cooking for One is a working cook's book with French flair, bursting with life and illustrated with the author's original ink drawings, full of charm and humour. More than a handbook of classic French dishes, French Cooking for One also bears testimony to a singular literary life. Vignettes of Roberts' childhood in Normandy and of her years living in Pays de la Loire are peppered with anecdotes about intellectual and artistic luminaries: an omelette prepared by Gertrude Stein's cook for Picasso; a simple pasta dish calling to mind the French philosopher Julia Kristeva and the Scottish poet Alison Fell's images of female orgasm; and Emma Bovary's extraordinary wedding cake, among others. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Michèle Roberts’s enchanting book French Cooking for One proves la cuisine française can be enjoyed alone, when there is nothing to interrupt the joy of preparing good ingredients and turning them into enticing dishes. Her anecdotes and notes of wisdom that accompany the recipes make her the perfect companion in the kitchen.” —Carolyn Boyd
Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle) $40
Fifteen years after killing her husband's lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they've started a business — FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies — dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs — she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband's lover, too. Crimes against women versus crimes by women; culpability, fallibility, and our responsibilities to each other — this is Piñeiro at her wry, earthy best, alive to all the ways we shape ourselves to be understandable, to be understood, by family and love and other hostile forces. Includes an intermittent chorus of feminist voices: Rebecca Solnit, Rita Segato, Judith Butler, Vivian Gornick, Marguerite Duras! From the author of Elena Knows. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Time of the Flies is orchestral: a page turner that is also a crime novel, a thriller, a meditation on feminism, our choices, our lack of choices. As Piñeiro unpacks her Pandora’s box of stories, voices, preoccupations, characters, you wonder, how on earth will she weave them together? Not that you care — her ability to be everybody and everything, including flies, carries you along. An absorbing read, for sure, and oh what a satisfying pleasure to see all the pieces come together — painful satisfaction, because then, you know, the novel will soon be over." —Julia Alvarez
Taboon: Sweet and savoury delights from the Lebanese bakery by Hisham Assaad $60
"There is bread and salt between us." This phrase, symbolizing the act of breaking bread together, welcome, gratitude, friendship, and trust, epitomizes the spirit of the baking culture of the Middle East. And the oven is the beating heart of every community. This beautifully photographed cookbook explores the vibrant baking culture of Lebanon. Perfectly poised between the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Lebanese food draws influences from myriad cultures and offers a delicious collection of baking recipes to tempt the home baker seeking new taste adventures. Lebanon is a land of culinary richness and a vibrant spirit, and this book tells the story of its baking cuisine: exploring all its regional influences and traditions. Here you will find over 80 recipes for classic home-style breads, traditional family favorites that have been handed down through generations, alongside pastry-shop delicacies, classic cakes, and street-food treats. [Hardback]
Palo Alto: A history of California, Capitalism, and the world by Malcolm Harris $30
The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an extraordinary story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative. Palo Alto's weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, racial genetics, and ‘broken windows’ theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. The book ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.[New paperback edition]
Quarterlife by Devika Rege $38
The Bharat Party has come to power after an intensely divisive election. Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai by their promise of ' better days '. With him is Amanda, eager to escape her New England town by volunteering in a Muslim-majority slum. Inspired by them, Naren's charismatic brother Rohit sets out to explore his ancestral heritage in the countryside, where he falls in with the very young men who drive the Hindu nationalist machine. As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterised by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets — and the simmering unrest erupts. [Paperback]
”What begins as a novel of ideas becomes the secret history of a nation. A superb read, both moving and inspiring.” —Jeet Thayil
Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud by Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt $48
In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realisation or failure of second chances — outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone. The authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, "it is the mending that matters." [Hardback]
"A fearless book. Greenblatt and Phillips speak to each other, and to us, with unflinching candor, wisdom, and tenderness about the possibility of renewing or remaking our lives. Second Chances stages a grand reckoning with fate and free will, fantasy and reality, and, above all, with the excitement and the terror of suddenly finding ourselves in a strange story, in a brave new world." —Merve Emre
Walking Practice by Dolki Min (translated from Korean by Victoria Caudle) $35
After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth's gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food As they discover, humans are delicious. Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shifts their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit a prey's sexual preference, then attacks at the pivotal moment of their encounter. They use a variety of hunting tools, including a popular dating app, to target the juiciest prey, and carry a backpack filled with torturous instruments and cleaning equipment. But the alien's existence begins to unravel one night when they fail to kill their latest meal. Thrust into an ill-fated chase across the city, the alien is confronted with the psychological and physical tolls their experience on Earth has taken. Questioning what they must do to sustain their own survival, they begin to understand why humans also fight to live. But their hunger is insatiable, and the alien once again targets a new prey, not knowing what awaits. Dolki Min's haunting debut novel is part psychological thriller, part searing critique of the social structures that marginalize those who are different — the disabled, queer, and nonconformist. Walking Practice uncovers humanity in who we consider to be alien, and illuminates how alienation can shape the human experience. [Paperback; 21 line drawings throughout]
"Walking Practice explores the burden of gender expectations, the struggle of having a flesh prison body, having to feed yourself and wanting to be loved, and even the awkwardness of dealing with other people on the subway. But what really makes this story sing is the uniqueness of the narrator's voice — both compelling and witty. It is moving and funny, critical and crass. This one is for anyone who is made to feel like an alien in their own body." —Tor
Myths of Geography: Eight ways we get the world wrong by Paul Richardson $40
Our maps may no longer be stalked by dragons and monsters, but our perceptions of the world are still shaped by geographic myths. Myths like Europe being the centre of the world. Or that border walls are the solution to migration. Or that Russia is predestined to threaten its neighbours. Richardson challenges recent popular accounts of geographical determinism and shows that how the world is represented often isn't how it really is — that the map is not the territory. Along the way we visit some remarkable places: Iceland's Thingvellir National Park, where you can swim between two continents, and Bir Tawil in North Africa, one of the world's only territories not claimed by any country. We follow the first train that ran across Eurasia between Yiwu in east China and Barking in east London, and scale the US-Mexico border wall to find out why such fortifications don't work. [Paperback]
”As continents, borders, nations, economic growth and sovereignty become the buzzwords of today's global conflicts, Paul Richardson's Myths of Geography skewers each one with elegant precision. His book places political geography at the heart of how we understand the challenges of the twenty-first century. A bracing and important book.” —Jerry Brotton
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (translated from Arabic by Robin Moger) $45
Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat's suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence, her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat's death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it's as if al-Zayyat never existed. Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love and Silence in the nineties, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel's rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love and Silence disappear from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat's life, interviews family members and friends, reconstructs the afterlife of Enayat in the media, and tracks down the flats, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums among which Enayat divided her days. Touching on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse and divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema, this wide-ranging, unclassifiable masterpiece gives us a remarkable portrait of a woman artist striving to live on her own terms. [Paperback]
”A brooding, atmospheric read charged with a singular magical beauty. Iman Mersal conjures up the zeitgeist of artistic Cairo after the July revolution and reveals a merciless and inflexible world behind the genteel, cultivated image.” —Leila Aboulela
Black Village by Lutz Bassmann [Antoine Volodine] (translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman) $38
Tassili, Goodmann, and Myriam. Two men and a woman, dressed in rags — former poets, and former members of a dystopian military service — walk the bardo, the dark afterlife between death and rebirth. The road is monotonous and seemingly endless. To pass the time, they decide to tell each other stories: bizarre anecdotes set in a post-apocalyptic world, replete with mutant creatures, Buddhist monks, and ruthless killers. The result is a mysterious, dreamlike series of events, trapped outside of time as we know it, where all the rules of narrative are upended and remade. [Paperback]
"With Black Village, Lutz Bassmann, a heteronym of Antoine Volodine, pens a collection of rare intensity, carried by writing of staggering power. By breaking the codes of narrative, by upsetting genres, he offers, within the disaster that this book tells, a literature that reinvents and affirms the infinite potential of language." —Art Press
Land Is All That Matters: The struggle that shaped Irish history by Myles Dungan $39
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived 'off the land' in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived 'on the land' as well. Agriculture was the only economic resource for the vast majority of the population outside the north-east of the country. Land was vital. But most of it was owned by a class of Protestant, English, and often aristocratic landlords. The dream of having more control over their farms, even of owning them, drove many of the most explosive conflicts in Irish history. Rebellions against British rule were rare, but savage outbreaks of murder related to resentments over land ownership, and draconian state repression, were a regular feature of Irish rural life. The struggle for the land was also crucial in driving support for Irish nationalist demands for Home Rule and independence. Dungan examines two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. It explores the pivotal moments that shaped Irish history: the rise of 'moonlighting', the infamous Whiteboys and Rightboys, the insurrection of Captain Rock, the Tithe War of 1831-36, the Great Famine of 1845 that devastated the country and drastically reduced the Irish population, and the Land War of 1878-1909, which ended by transferring almost all the landlords' holdings to their tenants. These events take place against the backdrop of prevailing British rule and stark class and wealth inequality. Land Is All that Matters tells the story of the agrarian revolution that fundamentally shaped modern Ireland. [Paperback]
Unreel: A life in review by Diana Wichtel $40
Born to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a 1950s Kiwi tradwife too busy to police her viewing, Diana Wichtel cut her teeth on the Golden Age of television. But in the 1960s, things fell apart. Diana's fractured family left Canada and blew in to New Zealand, just missing the Beatles, and minus a father. Diana watched television being born again half a world away, and twenty years later walked into the smoky, clacking offices of the Listener where she became the country's foremost television critic — loved and loathed, with the hate mail in seething capital letters to prove it. Meanwhile, television's sometimes-pale imitation — real life — unreeled. This is a sharply funny, wise and profound memoir of growing up and becoming a writer, of parents and children, early marriage and divorce, finding love again — and of the box we gathered around in our living rooms that changed the world.
Other Rivers: A Chinese education by Peter Hessler $40
An account of two generations of students in China's heartland, chronicling a country in the midst of tumultuous change through the prism of its education system. More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties - members of China's "Reform generation" - and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student - an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler's new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China's boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme 'meritocracy' at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him a first-hand view of raising a child in China.In Peter Hessler's hands, China's education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what's happened to the country, where it's going, and what we can learn from it. [Paperback]
Island (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Julian Hanna $23
Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago "a little world within itself," unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path - strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and traveling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison - we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? [Paperback]
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson $26
a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles's return. Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it's like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem — moving, disturbing and delightful.
”This book is amazing — I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing.” —Alice Munro
”Anne Carson has created, from fragments of the Greek poet Stesichoros, a profound love story told as forty-seven compulsively readable long-lined poems of intense cinematic detail.” —Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review
”Totally engrossing.’ —Ocean Vuong
Sharp, brainy, and hugely enjoyable — Rachel Kushner’s new novel exceeds even our anticipatory dreams. A thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of a mysterious elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation tout court. Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno's idealism laughable — he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Beneath this parodic spy novel about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history.
Short-listed for the Booker Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award, this is another Kushner standout. Perfect for your summer reading pile!
“Creation Lake reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture. Only Rachel Kushner could weave environmental activism, paranoia, and nihilism into a gripping philosophical thriller. Enthralling and sleekly devious, this book is also a lyrical reflection on both the origin and the fate of our species. A novel this brilliant and profound shouldn't be this much fun.” — Hernan Diaz
“Wild and brilliantly.. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carre: smart, funny and compulsively readable.” —Observer
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Read our latest newsletter.
Find out how to get all your seasonal gift purchases done (and how to get something for yourself).
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."
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Click through to our website for your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
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.
Click through to find out more:
Three ways to get all your seasonal gift shopping done painlessly (pleasurably!) at VOLUME:
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.
Ask us for something particular. Is there a particular book that you would like to give, or that someone has requested as a gift? If we don’t have the book on our shelves already, we will tell you how long it will take to arrive and find the best option for you. >>Tell us what you are looking for.
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.
(*we do not charge for gift-wrapping)
Read our latest newsletter.
Use the VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR to select your seasonal gifts.
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.
The best ways to get all your seasonal gift shopping done painlessly (pleasurably!) at VOLUME:
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.
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 makes 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 by overnight courier to you or to the recipients — or have them ready to collect from our door.
(*we do not charge for gift-wrapping)
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
These books are on our shelves now — click through to our website for your copies.
Books can be dispatched by overnight courier or ready to collect from our door.
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.
Click through to find out more:
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