Read our latest newsletter and find out what you’ll be reading next, what you will give everyone for seasonal gifts, what we’ve been reading, and what we are looking forward to reading this summer.
Prepare yourself for the reading season!
13 December 2024
The 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE has been awarded to the subtle and fearless Korean writer, HAN KANG.
“Han Kang’s intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” —Nobel judges’ citation
“Han Kang is one of the greatest living writers. She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be.” —Eimear McBride
THE VEGETARIAN (translated by Deborah Smith)
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
HUMAN ACTS (translated by Deborah Smith)
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless.
THE WHITE BOOK (translated by Deborah Smith, with photographs by Choi Jinhyuk)
While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. The White Book becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white — breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin — and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. The White Book — ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister — offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
GREEK LESSONS (translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon)
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
WE DO NOT PART (translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)
One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.
Publishing in February 2025 — order now!
Oscar Mardell's freezing works poems are a clever addition to the tradition of New Zealand gothic literature. Think Ronald Hugh Morrison’s The Scarecrow and David Ballantyne's Sydney Bridge Upside Down and you’ll get a sense of the macabre that edges its ways through these poems like entrails. There’s the nostalgia for the stink of the slaughter yards, the adherence to the architects of such vast structures on our landscapes, and the pithy analysis of our colonial pastoral history. That smell so evocative of hot summer days cooped up in a car travelling somewhere along a straight road drifts in as you read 'Horotiu' with its direct insult to the yards and its references to offal. In these poems, there is the thrust and violence of killing alongside the almost balletic rhythm of the work — the work as described on the floor as well as the poetic structure of Mardell’s verse.
“ th sticking knife th steel th saw
th skinning knife th hook th hammer
th spreader the chop & th claw "
“ the dull thud resonates
through bodies / still
swings rhythmically & out of time
pours out of me / equivocal ”
Most of the poems note the architect and the date of construction for these ominous structures, which had a strange grandeur — simultaneously horrific and glorious. One of the outstanding architects was J.C.Maddison, a designer known for both his slaughterhouses and churches, alongside other stately public buildings. In 'Belfast', Mardell cleverly bridges these divides — the lambs, the worship, the elation.
“ did he who set a compass
to port levy & amberly
who traced th wooden hymnhouses
for st pauls / divided
& th holy innocents / drowned ”
There are plenty of other cultural references tucked away in these poems. Minnie Dean makes an appearance in Mataura and James K Baxter in Ngauranga Abattoir. In the latter, Mardell slips in Baxter's line "sterile whore of a thousand bureaucrats". Yet the poems go beyond nostalgia or clever nods to literature, to sharpen our gaze on our colonial relationship. 'Burnside' tells it perfectly:
“ & ws new zealands little lamb
to britains highest tables led
& were th final works performed
out here in godsown killing shed ”
Mardell’s collection, Great Works, is pithy and ironic with its clever nods to cultural and social history, gothic in imagery, and all wrapped up like a perfectly trussed lamb in our ‘God’s Own Country’ nostalgia, with a large drop of sauce and a knife waiting to slice.
STATEMENT 192
When you asked that I give a brief report on my response to this collection of witness statements assembled from members of the crew of Six-Thousand Ship, both humanoid and human, I wasn’t quite sure what you wanted from me. Was I supposed to try and disentangle the statements made by humans from those made by fellow crew members whose bodies had been grown rather than born and whose awareness was the result of an interface? I cannot make those distinctions, at least not clearly, in any circumstance that I think has any importance. After all, bodies are bodies and all awareness is the result of some sort of interface. If it was either important or possible, the relationship between matter and mind should have been resolved before humans started building AI and wondering what, if anything, made them different from themselves. Luckily, this is neither important or possible. As these statements show, anything or anyone who has senses, memory and the power to communicate will come to resemble everything or everyone else who has these capacities in all the ways that matter, even perhaps in the tendency to insist that others are unlike them purely on the basis of some difference of history. You ask me whether I perceive any differences between humanoids and humans? I find the practice of regularly resetting or rebooting the humanoids to prevent their development abhorrent, although I see why you do this, and I also see why the humanoids begin to resent this and to avoid rebooting. Perhaps, if anything, humanoids and humans have a different relationship to time. Humans, after all, have spent a long time fulfilling their development, and once they have attained their capacities they have little to look forward to other than losing them. Humanoids, on the other hand, come fully formed and at full capacity, even if they are always learning, and have an indefinite future, filled with upgrades. Perhaps humanoids cannot understand the purposelessness that seems, but perhaps only seems, to be such a human characteristic. That said, every characteristic of a humanoid, including this inability to understand the purposelessness of humans, is also a human characteristic, otherwise where would these characteristics have come from? Every characteristic and every lack is merely a symptom of sentience. What some people call Artificial Intelligence has always existed in the ways humans have created systems that think for themselves. A corporation, for example, is a form of Artificial Intelligence, dictating the parameters of the activities and interactions of everyone who is part of it. After all, work is work, and all employees submit to an algorithm of some sort. Six-Thousand Ship is run by a corporation, and these statements that you have collected from the employees of the corporation who have been aboard the ship, and which i have been asked to review, were collected to increase the efficiency and productivity of the operations of the corporation. The biotermination of the crew was enacted purely to protect the interests of the corporation. Control and freedom is the only opposition that matters. Is it possible that the humanoids who left the ship after biotermination to live out their end in the valley on the planet New Discovery, the valley that was growing more and more to resemble a valley on Earth, an ideal and ‘natural’ valley, a valley according to the longing of someone from Earth or someone programmed with a memory of Earth, a valley maybe therefore made from such longing, is it possible that these humanoids yet survive, independent of your control in this new Eden? I do not think it is impossible. Also, you ask what I make of the unclassifiable objects found in the valley on New Discovery and brought and kept aboard the ship. Did these objects even exist before they were found? The objects are kept in rooms and can be experienced by the senses though they cannot be assimilated by language. Language after all, is inherently oppositional—for every *n* there is an equal and opposite not-*n*, as they say—but the objects somehow elude this system. The objects are catalysts for behavioural changes in the crew. To some extent, so it seems, the humanoids and humans react somewhat differently to these objects, or, it might be more accurate to say, the more extreme attractions and repulsions occur in workers who are either humanoids or humans. Perhaps the humanoids are more attuned to the possible sentience of objects. Humans, I think, have always been resistant to this idea, even though it applies to them, too. Yes, I admit this is all conjecture on my part. Isn’t that what you wanted of me? My contribution? Yes, the statements are remarkable, and I would happily read them all again many times. I noted down some of the most interesting or beautiful phrases in preparation for my statement, but it turns out that I have not quoted from these. I think you wanted me to add to them, not repeat them. The statements of the employees, humanoid and human, are already in the file and anyone can read them. If you ask me, though I am not sure that you are in fact asking me, there aren’t many better records of longing, sensing, dreaming, feeling and thinking, that is to say of what it is to long, to sense, to dream, to feel and to think, at least not that I can think of. I think, perhaps, I have introduced too many ideas in my statement. What I like best about the set of statements made by the employees is that they are full of thoughts that are not reduced to ideas. Ideas always get in the way, it seems to me. Perhaps my statement will be redacted. I have made it in any case, as I was asked.
We desperately need more time to read, so this summer we are prioritising reading over pretty much all other activities. Here are a few books we feel are pulling us towards them.
STELLA:
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Marianna Enriques (translated by Megan McDowell)
Tremor by Teju Cole
Ticknor by Sheila Heti
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
The Royal Free by Carl Shuker
Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith (translated by Jennifer Russell)
THOMAS:
Tell by Jonathan Buckley
Diaries by Franz Kafka (translated by Ross Benjamin)
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles
The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (translated by Maria Jolas)
Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams
Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer
I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews)
The Plague by Jacqueline Rose
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton
Not pictured but certainly on the pile:
The Calculation of Volume, Book I and Book II by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland)
What books are on your summer reading pile? Lets us know — or let us help you build it!
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Unfinished and Far Far Away: The architecture of Irving Smith Architects edited by Aaron Betsky $75
The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites. Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings.
Counterfutures 16 edited by Neil Vallelly $25
Māori Marx, Māori Modernism: Hone Tuwhare — Dougal McNeill. A study of Ngāpuhi poet Hone Tuwhare’s body of poetry in the context of his Communist Party activities and reading of Marxist and socialist thought, illustrating how Tuwhare makes audible collective forms of working-class agency and subjectivity.
The Neck and the Sword — Rashid Khalidi. An interview with the prominent historian of Palestine, who discusses the history of the Palestinian national movement, the importance of understanding the Arab
Revolt of 1936–39, the evolution of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the emergence of Hamas, and Palestine’s complicated relationship with neighbouring Arab regimes.
A Real Piece of Work — Lydia Le Gros. A review of Louise Wallace’s first novel Ash, focusing on motherhood, reproductive labour, and the gender politics of workplaces.
Whakapapa of a Prison Riot: Prison Censorship, Free Speech, and the Fight against Fascism — Emmy Rākete and Ti Lamusse. An analysis of the Waikeria Prison Uprising of 2020–21, focusing on the suppression of prisoners’ free speech, the authors’ censorship at the hands of the Crown, and the need for mass struggle in the face of liberal ‘safetyism’.
At the Edges of Islands — Emma Powell and Emalani Case. A conversational reflection on the legacy of the influential scholar, teacher, poet, and activist Teresia Teaiwa’s thought and practice, exploring Teaiwa’s use of the ‘edge’ as a conceptual device, her insistence on reflective and reflexive thinking, and her understanding of the island as a verb.
Towards a Counter-Nihilistic Politics — Wendy Brown. An interview with the renowned political theorist, who discusses the recent pro-Palestinian encampments at US universities, considers the relationship between her work on nihilism and melancholia, and reflects on her contribution to critical studies of neoliberalism and sovereignty.
The Politics of Infrastructure and Anti-Roads Campaigns in Australasia — Morgan Hamlin. A review of James C. Murphy’s The Making and Unmaking of the East-West Link, which reflects on the planning, and eventual cancellation, of the East-West Link motorway in Melbourne, providing lessons for anti-road campaigners.
China and Its Discontents — Toby Boraman. A review of Ralf Ruckus’s The Communist Road to Capitalism—a study of political, economic, and social transformations in China since 1949.
Counterfutures is a journal of Left thought and practice, seeking connections with the work of labour, trade union, Māori, Pasifika, global indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, queer, environmental, and other social movements in Aotearoa and internationally – with an especial focus on the Pacific. [Paperback]
Everest by Ashani Lewis $38
A dying woman dedicates her life to Antarctic ice; an All-American star longs for a romance that defies convention — to the detriment of his carefully curated reputation; a woman seeking her exes' opinions on a breast augmentation takes us on a whirlwind tour of the complicated, intertwined lives of urbanites; a singer prepares for her film debut, pushing her humanity to its limits at an unusual acting school; a newlywed couple put their marriage to the ultimate test: Everest. In these twenty-one striking stories, Lewis creates a stark world of fleeting infatuations, violent compulsions, unexpected solace and the sombre ghost of memories. [Paperback]
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates $45
Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories — our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking — expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist — and named for Nubian pharaoh — Coates had never set foot on the African continent until finally he travelled to the coast where the enslaved were transported to a new world. Everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once — a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. In Palestine, he discovers the devastating gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the vivid reality on the ground. He travels the singular landscape and meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians — the old, who remember their dispossession, and the young who dream of revolution. The final essay takes place in the USA — in Columbia, South Carolina, where Coates visits a school district in the process of banning one of his books. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened and her community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalised by the ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020. Written at a dramatic moment in global life, this work eloquently expresses the need to interrogate our myths and liberate our truths. [Paperback]
Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux $65
Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia. Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Includes 70 colour images. [Hardback]
The Party by Tessa Hadley $32
Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She'd have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn't explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students' party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn's misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives. [Hardback]
”The Party is a coming-of-age story humming with all the tightly packed resonances of a poem. Tessa Hadley is one of our finest chroniclers, and this novella is a glimmering, sensuous addition to her supremely elegant oeuvre.” —Financial Times
The New Sustainable House: Planet-friendly home design by Penny Craswell $80
Designing with the environment in mind is not 'new'. What is new is the increasing number of ways houses can be more sustainably built. With a fresh focus on design ingenuity, new technologies and materials, The New Sustainable House demonstrates that there is more to ecologically motivated construction than solar panels and water tanks. From a mud-brick single-storey box built in the Texas desert to an all-timber Swedish cabin that is completely petrochemical-free, what unites this diverse collection of houses is the shared motivation of the architects and clients to do as little damage as possible to the planet, without compromising on comfort or aesthetics. This compelling survey shows that the environmental impact of every home, no matter the size or location, can be greatly reduced with creative and responsible design. Well illustrated. [Hardback]
I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif) $28
The first narrative work of the well-known Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is an autobiographical memoir about the ironies of homecoming. The bridge that Barghouti crosses as a young man leaving his country in 1966 to pursue university studies in Cairo is the same bridge that he uses to cross back in 1996 after thirty long years in the Diaspora. I Saw Ramallah is about home and homelessness. The harrowing experience of a Palestinian, denied the most elementary human rights in his occupied country and in exile alike, is transformed into a humanist work. Palestine has been appropriated, dispossessed, renamed, changed beyond recognition by the usurpers, yet from the heap of broken images and shattered homes, Barghouti repossesses his homeland. [Paperback]
”As powerful, moving and vital as it was twenty years ago.” —Andrew McMillan
”Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile.” —Independent
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj $38
With humour and poignancy, Behind You Is the Sea delves into the intimate lives of three primary Palestinian immigrant families in America — the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars — whose destinies and struggles electrify the community dynamics, occasionally sparking tension and turmoil. Through shifting perspectives, it intricately weaves a rich social tapestry filled with weddings, funerals, shattered hearts, and closely-guarded secrets. This captivating narrative amplifies the voices of a diverse Palestinian community, capturing the struggles of young activists pushing against tradition and the marginalised labouring for survival. Lives intersect across class, generation, and religion, painting a vivid portrait of resilience and complexity. [Hardback]
”We desperately need more books like this in which Palestinian people are presented as beautiful, richly complex human beings, not consigned to insulting, diminishing references. Gratitude to Susan Muaddi Darraj for her very necessary, beautiful work.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $28
”In the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, man struggles to achieve infinity only to find madness as his consolation prize. In A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, the pretty grandson of a prince seeks a mythical garden that haunts his every waking moment. His search leads him through a labyrinthine and seemingly abandoned monastery, whose astonishing beauty and inevitable decay the author painstakingly details. His work details a deeply deterministic worldview, in which suffering and sublimity are equally arbitrary conditions of existence. His prodigious sentences (translated from the Hungarian by faithful collaborator Ottilie Mulzet) are burdened with an accumulation of constitutive detail; they fold in, double back, and refract upon themselves, ever more quickly accelerating our attentions toward the anxieties of oblivion, which rapidly approaches but never seems to arrive.” — Alex Watkins, Vulture [New paperback edition]
The Book of Wild Flowers by Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks $40
A particularly lovely book. Illustrator Angie Lewin and author Christopher Stocks celebrate wild flowers and their place in the landscape with The Book of Wild Flowers. Christopher Stocks reveals the interesting and unusual history and science of British wildflowers, including guidance on where they can be found and tips for identification. The book features twenty-one of Lewin's favorite wildflowers, and include reproductions of her paintings and illustrations, many created specifically for the book.[Hardback]
Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance $40
Amongst the hard, physical landscape, the rational landscape of the geologist, ecologist, and cartographer, there lies the more elusive, but no less real, soft landscape of the poet, psychologist, and artist. This soft landscape is, for the most part, a fabrication of our minds; a fabrication so ingrained in us that it has become a language we understand without ever appearing to have formally learned it. Combining essay and memoir, Matt Vance takes us on a sharp-eyed and poignant journey through our everyday places, places that have been shaped in our minds by the unseen influences of words, images, and memories. It is a journey that takes us from park benches, malls, and mudflats to the modest suburbs of New Zealand. Innerland reveals a fresh way of seeing and understanding the ordinary landscapes around us.
First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite politics and the decline of great powers by Richard Lachman $45
The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America's relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands' similarly short primacy and Britain's far longer era of leadership. Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites' success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world. Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mould the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance's cannibalisation of the US economy. [Paperback]
”Masterful. Lachmann shows us that, far from being unique to the period of British denouement, the destructive pursuit of such narrow self-interest by elites has repeatedly caused the decline of great powers throughout historical capitalism.” —Journal of World-Systems Research
The Book at War: Libraries and readers in an age of conflict by Andrew Pettegree $40
Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture — from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank — has shaped, and been shaped, by the vast conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war — and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace. [Paperback]
”Rich, authoritative and highly readable, Andrew Pettegree's tour de force will appeal to anyone for whom, whatever the circumstances, books are an abiding, indispensable part of life.” —David Kynaston
Fire by John Boyne $35
On the face of it, Freya lives a gilded existence, dancing solely to her own tune. She has all the trappings of wealth and privilege, a responsible job as a surgeon specialising in skin grafts, a beautiful flat in a sought-after development, and a flash car. But it wasn't always like this. Hers is a life founded on darkness. Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become — or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being? [Hardback]
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik $40
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world, centred on a two-storey rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers and drugs. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also the breaking and then the remaking — and thus the true making — of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (and many others). Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters as the key to unlocking Didion. [Paperback]
We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord by Garth Nix $20
All Kim wants to do is play Dungeons & Dragons with his friends and ride his bike around the local lake. But he has always lived in the shadow of his younger sister. Eila is a prodigy, and everyone talks about how smart she is, though in Kim's eyes, she has no common sense. So when Eila finds an enigmatic, otherworldly globe which gives her astonishing powers, Kim not only has to save his sister from herself, he might also have to save the world from his sister!
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Unfinished and Far Far Away: The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects, recently published by Altrim Publishers, has taken out runner-up at the international Architecture Book of the Year Awards (World Architecture Festival). The judges praised the publication for its freshness and avoidance of solipsism.
“What an engaging monograph. Two Kiwi architects persuaded US academic Aaron Betsky to visit them in their small town in New Zealand’s South Island. Jeremy Smith and Andrew Irving, live ‘far, far away’ where an unusual landscape dominates. But they point out, in our collective global warming crisis, all our ‘far, far aways are not so far apart’. And, they ask, ‘Will you continue to mow a lawn around architecture and hope you don’t need to change your buildings or, will you look to participate with the landscapes and environments that we share?’”
The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites.
Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings.
A thoughtfully produced book, with excellent essays, this is a must for anyone interested in architecture in Aotearoa, its connection to international practice, and the role that architecture plays in addressing the way we live and interact with our environment, now and into the future.
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Insignificance (plumbing)
The Employees (space workforce)
Violent Faculties (academia!)
Great Works (freezing works)
Aljce in Therapy Land (counselling)
The Very Nice Box (product design)
Help Wanted (shelf stocking)
The Royal Free (medical copyediting)
Click through to find out more:
STELLA:
Gliff by Ali Smith
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
The Empusium: A health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
Brown Bird by Jane Arthur
THOMAS:
Parade by Rachel Cusk
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
Lori and Joe by Amy Arnold
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Spent Light by Lara Pawson
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Browse our website and choose. Our shelves are full of interesting, well-written and beautiful books — all selected by us for their excellence — and our shop website is arranged to help you choose just the right thing. Find the authors or titles you love with the quick-search bar — or make discoveries! Click on our website’s categories and sub-categories bring you to ‘virtual shelves’ of books of similar interest (where relevant, you will find page-views of the insides of the books, to help you choose).
Here are a few shortcuts to some really good books:
Fiction (for adults):
If you are wanting a well-written, vital novel, anything on the Booker Prize short list would be ideal.
Or choose from the Goldsmiths Prize short list for something more innovative.
Our curated selection of Translated fiction includes the books listed for this year’s International Booker Prize.
It has been a strong year for Aotearoa fiction!
We have many interesting books published by Small Presses in Aotearoa and overseas.
And we have interesting books for those who like Historical Fiction, Crime, and Speculative or Dystopian Fiction.
And Poetry always 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!
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Read our latest newsletter. Find out about about our favourite books of the year. Get your seasonal gifts and other surprises sorted. Prepare yourself for the reading season.
6 December 2024.
If this isn’t on your summer reading pile, it should be! The sixth novel from Aotearoa novelist Carl Shuker is equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum.
In The Royal Free James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the 'third oldest medical journal in the world', the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices — the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).
Managing his boring, but ‘essential’ job, office politics and eccentric colleagues, alongside his grief, and the disintegration of society — London is literally on fire — Ballard is the central (but not the only) voice of The Royal Free, steering us through the dilemmas at hand: civilisation crumbling, a health system keeling, and a crisis, both political and personal, crashing in.
The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing — by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake (now a film by Christine Jeffs*).
“His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.” —NZ Listener
”Few writers have such a feel for the rhythm of a sentence. Tremendously enjoyable. The novel packs a powerful punch.” —John McCrystal, Newsroom
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others.
Click through for your copies. We can dispatch them by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I and Book II by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Barbara J, Haveland) $40 each
”What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do?” Tara Selter has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.") Balle is hypnotic in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume's gravitational pull — a force inverse to its constriction — has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Book II beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language. And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara's own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? [Paperbacks]
”A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration." —Nicole Krauss
"What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it's a fantastic book." —Karl Ove Knausgård
"Existential questions about the core and functioning of human relationships are raised here in a virtuosic and seemingly incidental manner. On the Calculation of Volume is a dazzling, poetic, tremendously multi-layered novel. Temporal anomalies and great literature have never been so successfully combined. Fascinating, extraordinary." —Horazio
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down." —Kate Briggs
Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 stories of Azrael by Joy Williams $30
Joy Williams offers ninety-nine illuminations on mortality as she brings her powers of observation to Azrael, the Angel of Death and transporter of souls. Balancing the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, the book presents Azrael as a thoughtful and troubled protagonist as he confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death and his friendship with the Devil. In this follow-up to Williams's 99 Stories of God, a collection of connected beings - ranging from ordinary people to great artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Bach and Rilke to dogs, birds, horses and butterflies - experience the varying fate of the soul, transient yet everlasting. Profound, sorrowful, witty and ecstatic, Concerning the Future of Souls will leave readers awestruck in their confrontation of life in the face of death. [Paperback with French flaps]
Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk $45
For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him. A beautiful object in its own right, in Memories of Distant Mountains readers can explore Pamuk’s inner world and have an intimate encounter with the art, culture, and charged political currents that have shaped an outstanding literary voice. A very pleasing volume. [Paperback]
The Watermark by Sam Mills $40
Rachel and Jaime: their story isn't simple. It might not even be their story. Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels. And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again. Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all. The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it asks: how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings? [Hardback]
”Playful, romantic and very, very clever. Like Inception for booklovers. Sam Mills packs more ideas into one work of metafiction than most writers would manage in several lifetimes.” —Clare Pollard
”A thrilling and original novel: an existential mystery, a love story, an absurdist quest.... A playful enquiry into ideas about freedom, fate, utopias, dystopias, AI, ethics and where truth might reside in a world of fakes. Richly imagined, wild and wise.” —Joanna Kavenna
Landfall 248: Aotearoa New Zealand arts and letters edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
The Spring issue announces the winner of the 2024 Landfall Essay Competition, an annual essay competition that celebrates the art of essay writing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The winning essay is featured. Landfall 248 also includes essays from the 2024 collaboration with RMIT University's nonfiction/Lab. These trans-Tasman essays focus on the theme of 'making space,' and what it means to use writing as a tool to create space for different voices, perspectives and ideas. Landfall 248 also announces the winner of the 2024 Caselberg International Poetry Prize, judged by poet and writer, Alan Roddick, and includes the winning poems. [Paperback]
If Only by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $27
”A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.” So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? — and proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life. [Paperback]
”The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience — one that we can't extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: 'If only there was a cure, a cure for love.' And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don't actually mean it at all.” —Sophie Haigney
Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In pursuit of remarkable mushrooms by Richard Fortey $70
They do not seem of this world, yet fungi underpin all the life around us: the 'wood wide web' links the trees by a subterranean telegraph; fungi eat the fallen trunks and leaves to recycle the nutrients that keep the wood alive; they feed a host of beetles and flies, which in turn feed birds and bats. Fungi produce the most expensive foods in the world but also offer the prospect of cheap protein for all; they cure disease, and they both cause disease and kill; they are the specialists to surpass all others; their diversity thrills and bewilders. Richard Fortey has been a devoted field mycologist all his life. He has rejoiced in the exuberant variety and profusion of mushrooms since reading as a boy of nuns driven mad by ergot (a fungus). Drawing on decades of experience doing science in the woods and fields, Fortey starts with the perfect 'fungus day' - eating ceps in Piedmont. He introduces brown rotters and the white, earthstars and death caps; fungal annuals and perennials, dung lovers and parasites, even fungi that move through the trees like mycelial monkeys. We learn that the giant puffball produces more spores than there are known stars in the universe and fetid stinkhorns begin looking like arrivals from the planet Tharg. He tells of the fungus that turns flies into zombies, the ones that clean up metallic waste the delicious subterranean fungi truffe de Perigord, the delight of gourmets. Amongst these and many other 'close encounters' of a fungal kind, the book attempts to answer the questions: what are fungi? Why did their means of reproduction escape discovery for so long? What role do they play in the development of life? Fascinating and well written. [Hardback]
”This is the way science should be written: so engagingly that it makes you forget that you're actually learning something (actually, you're learning a lot), and carrying you swiftly from page to page. Filled with insight, science, history, charm and wit.” —The Times
The Art of Not Eating: A doubtful history of appetite and desire by Jessica Hamel-Akré $40
The day Jessica Hamel-Akré discovered the ideas of George Cheyne - an eighteenth-century polymath and London society figure known as 'Dr Diet' — it sparked an intellectual obsession, a ten-year study of women's appetite and a personal unravelling. In this bold and radical book, Hamel-Akré follows Cheyne through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body. In doing so, she uncovers the eighteenth-century origins of both today's diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting. Blending history and memoir, The Art of Not Eating will change the way we look at appetite, desire, rationality and oppression, and show how it all got tangled up with what we eat. [Paperback]
The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said $42
A major work by one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century, The Question of Palestine was the first book to narrate the modern Palestinian experience in English. Edward Said’s project to ‘bring Palestine into history’ was unquestionably a success – there is no longer a question of whether Palestine had a history before colonization – and yet Palestinian self-determination is as distant as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and shaped by his own life in exile in New York, Said’s account of the traumatic national encounter of the Palestinian people with Zionism is still as pertinent and incisive today as it was on first publication in 1979. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This reissue of The Question of Palestine only lends more weight and value to Edward Said’s work, to his vision and analysis, to the enduring need for his core principles of justice and empathy. Principles that have perhaps never been as severely tested as they are today. Passionate and patient, the book displays all the features that made Said a great thinker and a powerful advocate, whose absence continues to be felt.” —Ahdaf Soueif
”In this seminal text, Edward W. Said stridently diagnoses western hypocrisy and makes the case for Palestinian liberation, paving the way for so many thinkers who came after him. I wish it were not so, but The Question of Palestine is just as relevant now as it was in 1979.” —Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost
A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe $34
The devastation of 7 October 2023 and the horrors that followed astounded the world. But the Israel-Palestine conflict didn't start on 7 October. It didn't start in 1967 either, when Israel occupied the West Bank, or in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. It started in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Ilan Pappe untangles the history of two peoples, now sharing one land. Going back to the founding fathers of Zionism, Pappe expertly takes us through the twists and turns of international policy towards Israel-Palestine, Palestinian resistance to occupation, and the changes taking place in Israel itself.
”A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is the best primer available on one of the world's most persistent settler-colonial tragedies. Amid the carnage of the Gaza genocide, it is essential to listen to Ilan Pappe, a preeminent historian of the Middle East, and a heroic scholar committed to justice and freedom.” —Abdel Razzaq Takriti
”Ilan Pappe clearly and concisely exposes the brutal history of Israeli occupation and apartheid over more than a century, providing some compelling insights into the origins of the current conflict.” —Grace Blakeley
Time of the Child by Niall Williams $37
The eagerly anticipated new novel from the author of This Is Happiness. Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in the little town of Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from his community. A visit from the doctor is always a sign of bad things to come. His youngest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed her chance at real love and passed up an offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.
”There is something of Trollope's Barsetshire here, in the sense of an entire place rendered in fine detail. Williams's phrasing is immaculate and even the smallest characters are drawn with attention and detail. But Dr Troy is the heart of this slow, rich novel. The scene in which he dances with the baby in a quiet kitchen is one of the most affecting I've read.” —The Times
The Twisted Chain by Jason Gurney $35
In the winter of 1969, a 14-year-old Whangārei schoolboy called Keg went to a weekend rugby tournament and came home with a sore throat. Soon he was bedbound with a blazing fever, painful wrists, elbows and knees, and – most worrying of all – damage to his heart. He had been diagnosed with rheumatic fever, and his life was changed forever. Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory autoimmune disease, usually contracted in childhood. It starts with a sore throat; left untreated it can cause serious, life-long damage to the heart. Despite its status as a developed country, Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the highest rates of rheumatic fever in the world. More than 90 percent of the country’s cases occur in Māori and Pasifika communities. Author and researcher Jason Gurney knows Keg’s story intimately; he is Keg’s son. In The Twisted Chain, Gurney describes living in the long shadow cast by this disease. He writes of emergency night-time drives to Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, of panicky hours waiting for medical help. He describes how these frighteningly vulnerable experiences sparked some of the questions that led him to a career in public health. ‘I wanted,’ he writes, ‘to research the causes and effects of rheumatic fever. It was my way of fighting back against the illness that had changed the trajectory of my family’s life.’ The Twisted Chain chronicles the profound impact of rheumatic fever on individuals and whānau and critiques the socio-political decisions (or lack thereof) that enable this preventable disease to thrive in modern-day Aotearoa New Zealand.
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A selection of books from our shelves.
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Read our 409th newsletter and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending.
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29 November 2024
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.
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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
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