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8 August 2025
"It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off”: the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt.
Kirsty Gunn can write, she really can, but do I want to read these stories? Yes, with caution! In Pretty Ugly Gunn confounds us with the sublime and the rot. Here what seems too good to be true is just that. Not good. The opening story, ‘Blood Knowledge’, lets us wander in a beautiful garden with a successful author. We warm to the narrator’s voice, her frustration with her role as wife and mother, as an author with a predictable and highly sort after series. Her next book is overdue and as we read on we sense a festering sore. A scab picked at. This isn’t a nice suburban story, not a success story except in the warped mind of our narrator. Yet it’s compelling in its horror, has catches of humour, and observations that capture society’s double standards. Ultimately it’s horrific, but getting there raises questions which deserve consideration. The human condition examined with the sharp edge of Gunn’s pen leaves us exposed and sometimes guessing — piecing clues, trying to catch the unsaid — reading between the lines; we enter the stories with a sense of innocence and leave with a shudder. Pretty Ugly fits in the New Zealand gothic tradition, with the likes of The Scarecrow (Morrison) and Sydney Bridge Upside Down (Ballantyne). Here the edges press in. Gunn from here and living elsewhere (Scotland) has lost none of the sense of the impending gloom, the darkness of wild and unfettered places, and here she uses nature’s darkness to unsettling good effect, double-dosing not only with environment but with the dark corners of the psyche. Each word is necessary in Gunn’s writing, and each encounter slippery — our narrators unexpectedly draw us in and repel us. Pretty Ugly is intriguing, questionable, and razor sharp.
Is a River Alive? is an exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days.
Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has.
‘ A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.’ — Elif Shafak
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The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson $70
This deeply researched and beautifully presented book traces the origins of early Waitaha and Kāti Māmoe, and the later migrations, conflicts and settlements of the hapū who became Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on tribal knowledge, early written records and archaeological insights, he details the movements, encounters and exchanges that shaped these southern regions. He shows how people lived seasonally from the land and sea, supported by long-distance trade and a deep knowledge of place. These were the communities that the first Europeans encountered, as whalers, sealers and missionaries made their way around the coast. New edition, greatly expanded and updated. [Hardback]
”The Welcome of Strangers is, I believe, the best ethnohistory produced in New Zealand to date. Underpinned by whakapapa and methodical research, it provides solid evidence of our Ngāi Tahu past and sets it firmly in its context. The work of an accomplished scholar and longtime associate, the revised edition is strengthened and sharpened with new research, biographical detail and rich imagery of people and place. It is pleasing to have this scholarly yet accessible volume available to a new generation of New Zealanders – and even more so, Ngāi Tahu whānui, both scholars and at the flax roots.” —Sir Tipene O’Regan ONZ, Chair, Te Pae Kōrako; Upoko, Te Rūnaka o Awarua
”With one eye on the universal and the other on the particular, Atholl Anderson reveals how culture and nature shaped one another in southern Te Waipounamu for some five hundred years, down to the mid-nineteenth century. Born from the head of a world-leading archaeologist and the heart of a much-loved son of Kāi Tahu, this is a signally important text in the canon of Māori history.” —Michael Stevens, Professor and Director, Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha / University of Canterbury
>>Look inside!
Girlbeast by Cecilie Lind (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $38
Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless? With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal — a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times. [Paperback]
”Girlbeast is a fever dream of a novel that put a knot in my stomach. A provocative, vulgar and tender fable about the uneasy ruin of girlhood.” —Lucy Rose
>>Read an extract!
Lexicon of Affinities by Ida Vitale (translated from Spanish by Sean Manning) $39
With entries as varied as 'elbow', 'Ophelia', 'progress', the painter Giorgio Morandi, 'chess', 'Eulalia' (a friend of the author's aunt), and 'unicorn', Ida Vitale constructs a dictionary of her long and passionately engaged artistic life. Taking the reader by the arm, she invites us to become her confidant, sharing her remarkable 20th century as a member of a storied generation of Latin American writers, of whom she is the last remaining alive. It's a compendium of friendship, travel, reading, and the endless opportunities she found for 'the joyful possibility of creation.' Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its exuberant, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Vitale's prose is drop dead gorgeous." —Jeremy Garber
"Extraordinary. Giving due attention to Vitale's prose will bring you reassurance and optimism." —Lunate
"A vibrant and playful memoir-in-dictionary-form. A joyous celebration of a life well lived, with entries that range from the simple to the titanic." —Literary Hub
"Indispensable. Vitale's language has a precision that reminds us that memory exists: that today precision is an act of distinction and recognition." —Letras Libre
>>Something of a refuge.
>>”One hundred years don’t weigh me down.”
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine $38
Three women from very different families are brought together when their sons are accused of assaulting a young woman whose social standing they see as far below their own. Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed. Brutal, tender and intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, multi-voice presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny. [Paperback]
”This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens. Erskine — a gifted short story writer — deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters. For all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice.” —Robert Collins, Sunday Times
”This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys' parents. Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy.” —Guardian
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke $30
The first of our organs to form, the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of all that makes us human: as long as it continues to beat, we hope. One summer day, nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident. Though her brain and the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira's parents and siblings agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max had been hospitalised for nearly a year with a virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max's parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family. This is the unforgettable story of how one family's grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of Keira's heart and explores the history of the remarkable medical innovations that made it possible, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”The best narrative non-fiction I've read in years. Rachel Clarke has written a profound piece of investigative journalism and wrapped it up in poetry.” —Christie Watson
Juice by Tim Winton $38
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism. [Now in paperback]
”A barnstorming, coruscating work of fiction, a heavyweight literary novel that sits squarely in the growing canon of ‘climate fiction’ and it feels to me to be an instant classic of that genre. I strongly recommend it.” —Emily H. Wilson, New Scientist
”Juice, Winton has said, means ‘human resilience and moral courage’, and there is that in spades in this complex, riveting book already being hailed as a masterpiece..” —Sydney Morning Herald
”This is page-turning stuff, gripping and awfully gratifying. Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time.” —Rachel Seiffert, Guardian
The New Age of Sexism: How the A.I. revolution is reinventing misogyny by Laura Bates $40
Step into a world where: Little girls dressed up as women dance for an audience of adult men. A pornographic deepfake image or video of you exists on the internet and you just don’t know it yet. Men create ‘perfect’ AI girlfriends who live in their pocket — customised to every last detail, from breast size to eye colour and personality, only lacking the ability to say no. This isn’t an image of the future. Sex robots, chatbots and the metaverse are here and spreading fast. A new wave of AI-powered technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, is putting women everywhere in danger. In The New Age of Sexism, author and campaigner Laura Bates takes the reader deep into the heart of this strange new world. She travels to cyber brothels and visits schools gripped by an epidemic of online sexual abuse, showing how every aspect of our lives — from education to work, sex to entertainment — is being infiltrated by ever-evolving technologies that are changing the way we live and love forever. This rising tide, despite all its potential for good, is a wild west where women’s rights and safety are being sacrificed at the altar of profitability. [Paperback]
>>Misogyny in the Metaverse.
The Secret Green by Sonya Wilson $25
It's almost a year since Nissa Marshall was found alive after miraculously surviving a month lost in the vast, dense, isolated bush of Fiordland. Strange, magical things happened when Nissa was lost in the wilds but was it actually real? Or had she made it all up in the forest inside her head? When the mysterious forest creatures come for Nissa again, she discovers that Fiordland is under threat. What are the sparks so afraid of? What is the secret they're so desperate to protect? And why do they think a thirteen-year-old kid can save them all? This thrilling sequel to Spark Hunter crackles with the magic of the ancient forest. It's a high-stakes adventure through a vast wonderland with a great green secret hidden from humans for thousands of years. [Paperback]
”Perfectly pitched for middle fiction readers, Spark Hunter weaves history, culture, conservation, humour, tension and adventure into the story of Nissa Marshall, who has always known there is more to the Fiordland bush than meets the eye. While leaning into the fantastic just enough to encourage the imagination, the inclusion of archival excerpts will spark keen readers to hunt out their own discoveries within the mysterious history of this corner of Aotearoa. Making this story's light shine bright is te reo Māori blended throughout and a cast of supporting characters that are easily recognisable as classmates, teachers, and friends.” —New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults judges’ citation for Sparkhunter
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four women who wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff $30
In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles. [New paperback edition]
I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally $42
A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about his stint as a child actor, his travels along the hippie trail, his wives and children, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety. [Paperback]
>>The least hospitable man.
Indian Kitchens: Treasured family recipes from across the land by Roopa Gulati $60
Gulati travels through India and celebrates the wonderfully varied food that makes up a nation, making pitstops at the homes of the people who cook it every day. From dals to masalas, and quick and easy suppers to feasts for a crowd, the easy-to-follow recipes are bursting with authentic flavours using ingredients found in your local supermarket. Recipes include aubergine pakoras with onion and tamarind relish, potato and paneer tikki, sweetcorn bhajis, Tandoori sea bass, home-style Punjabi chicken curry, Kashmiri lamb with saffron, cardamom and red chillies, cumin potatoes, Bengali-style butternut squash with tamarind and jaggery, channa dal with spinach, black eye beans in garlic tomato masala, phirni with honey, orange and saffron syrup and pistachio and cardamom biscuits. From the monsoon-washed backwaters of Kerala to the crowded markets of Mumbai, and from remote kitchens in Gujarat, with shelves stacked high with pickle jars, to the old French quarter of Ponducherry, where lunch is served on banana leaves picked fresh from the garden, this celebration of regional cooking will bring the sights, sounds and flavours of India to your table. [Hardback]
”Roopa's masterpiece. I want to make and eat every single thing in it.” —Bee Wilson
>>Look inside.
A Dim Prognosis: Our health system in crisis — and a doctor’s view on how to fix it by Ivor Popovich $38
A gripping expose of New Zealand's failing health system This compelling tell-all reveals the realities of working as a doctor in New Zealand. Fast-paced and darkly funny, it chronicles ten years of working in medicine and sheds a light on where and why the health system is failing. From bullying and toxic culture to under-staffing and mismanaged priorities, this is a clear-eyed account of a health system on its knees. [Paperback]
”Brave, funny and heart-rendingly sad. Every healthcare worker in Aotearoa will feel seen.” —Dr Emma Wehipeihana, author of There's a Cure for This
”A must-read for all who care about the future of publicly funded healthcare in Aotearoa.” —Dr David Galler
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1 August 2025
“Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” states Manguso in one of the 300 aphorisms and ‘arguments’ (as in ‘the argument of the story’ rather than a disputation) that comprise this enjoyable little book. Indeed the whole does feel as if it bears some relation to another considerably longer but nonexistent text, either as a reader’s quotings or marginalia, or as a writer’s folder of sentences-to-use-sometime or jottings towards a novel she has not yet written (“To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say that it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer”). Many of the aphorisms are pithy and self-contained, often dealing with awkwardness and degrees of experiential dysphoria, and other passages, none of which are more than a few sentences long, are distillates or subsubsections of stories that are not further recorded but which can be felt to pivot on these few sentences. Some of the ‘arguments’ reveal unexpected aspects of universal experiences (“When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief” or “Hating is an act of respect” or “Vocation and ambition are different but ambition doesn’t know the difference”) and others are lighter, more particular (and, I'm afraid, a few do belong on calendars on the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms). Some of the arguments are just singular observations: “The boy realises that if he can feed a toy dog a cracker, he can just as easily feed a toy train a cracker” or “Many bird names are onomatopoeic — they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.” To read the whole book is to feel the spaces and stories that form the invisible backdrop for these scattered points of light, and the reader is left with a residue similar to that with which you are left having read a whole novel.
May’s been made redundant from her Human Resources job. She trained the AI too well. She’s the main breadwinner for the family. Her husband Jem does gig work. He had been a professional photographer. Now he catches mice and other pests for the wealthy. Lu and Sy are kids in the world of climate anxiety, measuring the air quality and doing disaster drills. With no work on the horizon, May’s ex-boss tells her about a trial programme that pays well. A trial that changes your face, just slightly, with high tech tattooing. A procedure that makes her unreadable by the surveillance cameras. She doesn’t ask why the Hum are interested in this research — she’s desperate for the money. She’s also desperate to give herself and her family a special experience. An experience from the past when trees grew and the air was clean. A past reminiscent of her childhood walking through the forest (all burnt now). A family ticket to the Botanical Gardens is on the top of her list, even though it is wildly extravagant for this middle class family. This is a gated retreat — a curated space. (As I was reading Hum, I came across an article in The Guardian about manufactured wilderness spaces.) Set in the near future, this is a dystopian novel that is close to the bone. (It’s not so distant considering the speed of change, and Phillips references current articles and research at the close of the novel.) There is AI — the Hums are well developed. The climate crisis is at an elevated pitch. Many traditional human work roles have disappeared. This could have been a hard-edged doom-scrolling novel, but it is far from this. Hum is set in a world where relationships within families matter and the Hum are not hard cold machines. They are all-knowing — clue privacy issues here — but also highly empathetic to the humans. They understand you like no one else, they are observant, caring and they know how you tick. Frightening and reassuring. May and Jem’s children are hooked on their Bunnies — Alexas on steroids — and all the family members are enchanted by (addicted to) their Wooms: cocoon-like high-tech places of refuge and privacy, if you don’t count the pervasive advertising and the recording of your every desire/search/interaction. The internet plus plus. The trip to the Botanics is dreamy until the children get lost. They inadvertently leave the sanctuary via a utility door, and without their Bunnies (which May has ‘ripped off’ their wrists prior to the holiday) they are untrackable. Yet the lost children are not the climatic scene in this novel. Phillips is more interested in what comes next. Internet shaming, family services alerted, suspicion and blame, love and understanding. This is a novel about how technology can change us, and how we may affect it. The Hum will surprise you. It’s a novel about connection, about how to find connection as a parent, in your most intimate relationships, and with yourself in a world flooded with distraction and pervasive change.
Educator Welby Ings is concerned that our overemphasis on ‘measurability’ and the ‘correct’ recall of facts has resulted in too narrow a view of Intelligence, effectively sidelining a significant portion of the population whose minds work in different but no less gifted ways. Too often, children are ‘written off’ both by schools and by their parents even though they are naturally curious and engaged (good markers of intelligence), resulting in poor life outcomes and behaviour problems. Ings’s insightful and helpful book helps us to broaden our idea of intelligence and to support young people to flourish at school and in their wider lives. A broader and more inclusive approach to education will have benefits for us all.
A selection of books from our shelves that use the accumulation of fragments as a literary form.
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When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back
All your choices are good! Choose from our latest selection of new releases and click through to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose $40
Women in Dark Times begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women, bound together by their struggles against iniquity, blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century — revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream — and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Bringing to the surface the subterranean depths of history and the human mind that dominant political vocabularies cannot bear to face, pioneering critic and public intellectual Jacqueline Rose forges a new language for feminism. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to 'honour' killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.” —Ali Smith
”A rigorously argued and at times breathtaking book. Many paragraphs contain a controlled explosion; her analysis of men's fear of and fascination with female sexuality, born from the boy's early proximity to the mother's body, is one of them. The book closes with a clarion cry: "Women have been reasonable for far too." Her reasoning, ironically, is as tight and sinuous as a constrictor knot. It is a time to be afraid of the dark.” —Frances Wilson, Telegraph
”The kind of restless and confrontational thinking of Women in Dark Times's feminism is essential, yet it is up against a vast apparatus of material power opposed to letting it take root. For all its interest in the darkness of our minds, the feminism of Women in Dark Times seems profoundly hopeful and generative, always leaving the gap between who a person is and who they can be. Transformation is always possible.... It may be easy to deem the exploration of one's inner life as privileged navel-gazing, but Rose's scandalous feminism takes that as a basis to create a new world: one that puts our vulnerability at its very core.” —Rebecca Liu, ArtReview
Invisible Intelligence: Why your child might not be failing by Welby Ings $45
In Invisible Intelligence, educationalist, filmmaker and best-selling author Welby Ings considers how schools measure intelligence and shows how narrow definitions of literacy and numeracy can lead to bright students being described as ‘behind’ and positioned as problems, when they are not. Ings mixes poignant, humorous and insightful storytelling with current research to explore the ways that some children’s intelligent approaches to problem-solving are dismissed or ignored, with devastating consequences for individuals and society. Yet Invisible Intelligence offers hope. Written with wisdom, experience and compassion, it is the kind of book that ‘puts an arm around the shoulders’ of those who love and work with kids whose intelligence is not recognised because they don’t learn the same way as other children. Pragmatic, wise and helpful, Invisible Intelligence shows what we can do better in education, and why it’s so important that we do. [Paperback]
>>Other ways to demonstrate intelligence.
>>Obsessed with assessment.
>>Disobedient Teaching.
Children of Radium: A buried inheritance by Joe Dunthorne $45
this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis. When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. "I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles," he wrote. "I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience." Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection-first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz. Armed only with his great-grandfather's rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg — a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil — to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family's past. [Hardback]
”The best book I've read in the past year. Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man's depression, ‘washing dishes as if trying to drown them’. A masterpiece. . It will be huge.” —Andrew O'Hagan, Financial Times
”A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story. The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness.” —Observer
”Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful. Joe Dunthorne infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book's final quarter more profound. Remarkable.” —The New York Times
>>A dark legacy.
Solenoid by by Mercea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter) $33
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history — the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript —Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the present. Winner of the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. [New paperback edition]
"Solenoid is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist's cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of Garcia Marquez and Bruno Schulz's labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu's anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel's sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature he also affirms the possibility inherent in the 'bitter and incomprehensible books' he idolises. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself." —New York Times
Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu $30
A collection of poems that speak to the complexity of family, identity, and the importance of te reo and ta ao Māori. The poems of Mettle echo through past and present lives — memories are recorded and futures imagined. Te Whiu draws on stories from her childhood and a lifetime of listening and learning about her whakapapa. Te Whiu’s poems are a lens through which to look 'now' straight in the face, without shame or fear, and to acknowledge that while trauma is transmitted generationally, so too are the gifts of resilience and fortitude. [Paperback]
”Te Whiu's poetic voice is bright, and new. As well as vividly poetic storytelling the humour here is mordant. In the best spirit of a bustling diverse indigenous poetics, it excels.” —Robert Sullivan
”A stunning debut, threading land, ocean and heart together in an expansive Māori tapestry that speaks to our present, shared moment. Mettle is alive with ancient knowing, breathing possibilities into every line. An outstanding read.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with recipes by Caroline Eden $65
Beginning in Armenia, moving northwards through Georgia and ending at the Black Sea, Green Mountains weaves together the enchanting geography and the cult of the kitchen that prevails within these two countries. Tales of testing hikes and unpredictable terrain are punctuated by the foods Eden eats for respite - citrus, herbs, flatbreads, nuts, apricots, mountain greens and magical cheeses - the recipes she shares and the stories she uncovers. Sharing both the deep comfort and satisfaction of a meal served after a long walk, and the unique relationships she forms with her hosts, Eden offers readers rare insights into the culture and food of these two countries. With meticulously researched histories, a catalogue of more than 30 recipes from her travels, and rich, compelling stories, this is an enjoyable journey! [Hardback]
"There is nobody writing about food at the moment who's committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line." —Tim Hayward, Financial Times
>>Look inside!
>>Green mountains, red chairs.
Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel $35
Stories of Ireland is a compendium of mid-century Irish experience from one of Ireland's outstanding writers, Brian Friel. Demonstrating all of Friel's instinct for voice, scene, and the uncanny mystery found in the everyday, these tales tell of struggle, beauty and discovery — from the drowning of a man in the bog-black waters of Lough Keeragh, to the camaraderie of teenage potato gathers in County Tyrone, and from the careful work of the German War Graves Commission in Glenn na fuiseog, to trawlermen's talk of sunken gold off the coast of Donegal. Selected by Friel himself, and introduced by Louise Kennedy. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A solid gold treat from top to tail. A tremendous set of stories by the great Irish playwright.” —John Self, The Observer
”There is a touch of spring about this collection and I find myself curiously helpless in front of them. The funny stories are a complete joy. The serious stories are concerned with the subtlest nuances of human emotions and relations which can neither be described nor directly expressed.” —The Irish Times
”Some of the best stories ever written. They are everything short stories should be — deft, skilfully written, funny and quite often breathlessly sad.” —Edna O'Brien
”As natural and as beautiful as you can imagine — full of vitality, full of life.” —Kevin Barry
Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) $48
From the author and translator of the International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand comes a kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured society, loosely based on the gathering violence that led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992. Against this backdrop, Shruti, a writer paralysed by the weight of events, tries to find her words, while Sharad and Hanif, academics whose voices are drowned out by extremism, find themselves caught between cliches and government slogans. And there's Daddu, Sharad's father, a beacon of hope in the growing darkness. As they each grapple with thoughts of speaking the unspeakable, an unnamed narrator takes on the urgent task of bearing witness. First published in Hindi in 1998, Our City That Year is a novel that defies easy categorisation — it's a time capsule, a warning siren and a desperate plea. Geetanjali Shree's shimmering prose, in Daisy Rockwell's nuanced and consummate translation, takes us into a fever dream of fragmented thoughts and half-finished sentences, mirroring the disjointed reality of a city under siege. Readers will find themselves haunted long after the final page, grappling with questions that echo far beyond India's borders. [Paperback]
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on survival and resistance by John Berger $29
From the 'War on Terror' to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Hold Everything Dear is a meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering. These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself. [Paperback]
”John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel, how to stare at things till we see what we thought wasn't there. But above all he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity.” —Arundhati Roy
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer $28
Annie is the perfect girlfriend. She has dinner ready for Doug every night, wears the outfits he buys for her, and caters to his every sexual whim. Maybe her cleaning isn't always good enough, but she's trying really hard. She was designed that way, after all. Because Annie is a robot. But what happens when she starts to rebel against her stifled existence and imagine the impossible — a life without Doug? [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.
”An intense, compelling tale that, like all good stories about robots, is ultimately about the human condition.” —Guardian
”A smart dive into big questions about identity, autonomy and power. Packs an impressive punch.” —The Times
”Slyly profound — a brilliant pas de deux, grappling with ideas of freedom and identity while depicting a perverse relationship in painful detail.” —New York Times
Woman’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell $39
Scrutinising the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Women's Estate describes the organisation of women's liberation in Western Europe and America, locating the areas of women's oppression in four key areas — work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children. Through a detailed study of the modern family and a re-evaluation of Freud's work in this field, Mitchell paints a detailed picture of how patriarchy works as a social order. A searing analysis first published in 1970, with a new preface by the author. [Paperback]
”Juliet Mitchell's brilliant book from 1970 knew in advance that movements of liberation are linked, that economic analysis alone cannot fully explain women’s oppression.” —Judith Butler
The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Niho Satake $20
The fierce little woman lived in a house at the end of a jetty. She knitted socks in blue and green wool to sell to sailors who had got their feet wet. But when there were no ships at her jetty, she was quite alone.
One stormy day, a pirate came to the house on the jetty. He stood on his toes, and starting tap-tap-tapping on the window… After a battle of words through the jetty trapdoor, these two windswept heroes find they are suited after all. A new edition of an old favourite, with new illustrations. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
Human Nature: Nine ways to feel about our changing planet by Kate Marvel $45
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and researcher whose work on climate change led her to grapple with strong, complicated emotions. Initially, she resisted those feelings, afraid they would interfere with her objective scientific judgement. But over time she realised that there is no one way to think — or feel — about climate change. To live on and care for our changing planet, we need to embrace the full spectrum of human emotion. As Marvel argues, we need every emotion we can muster if we're going to counter the usual myopic perspectives on climate change and care enough to make better decisions. And this book is a dazzling call to care. In Human Nature, each chapter uses a different emotion to illustrate the science behind our changing climate. We feel the wonder of being able to use climate models to predict the future. We feel anger at those who have knowingly destroyed the planet for profit. We feel love for our beautiful Earth, the only good planet. With Marvel as our guide, we get to feel it all — and we can begin to turn our strong feelings into strong action. Human Nature is a hopeful look at climate science that prioritises feelings — and in doing so charts a path forward for life together. [Paperback]
”This is the best climate book I've ever read. It's magnificent — both planetary and personal, saturated with electric metaphors, incisive vignettes, legitimately funny jokes, and an unflappable, knowing love for Earth, our home.” —Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Read our latest newsletter and find out what you’ll be reading next!
25 July 2025
Léger was commissioned to write a short biographical entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopaedia but ended up writing a very interesting and quite unusual book. Loden directed one film, >>Wanda (1970), about a woman who leaves her husband and who, passively and therefore pretty much by chance, attaches herself to a man who is planning a bank robbery for which, following his death in a police shoot-out and despite her lack of initiative and her not even being present at the robbery (she took a wrong turn in what was supposed to be the getaway car), she will be sent to jail for twenty years. The book operates on many levels simultaneously: it is ‘about’ Léger’s attempts to excavate information about Loden, principally beneath the ways in which she has been recorded by others, notably her husband the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who also wrote a novel in which Loden features, thinly disguised; it is ‘about’ Loden’s making of the film Wanda; it is ‘about’ the character of Wanda in that film, a character Loden played herself and with whom she strongly identified personally; it is ‘about’ the tension between the “passive and inert” Wanda character with whom Loden identifies and Loden as writer and director, and about the relationship between author and character more generally in both an literary/artistic and a quotidian sense; it is ‘about’ Léger’s search for and discovery of the true story that inspired Loden to make the film, a botched 1960 bank robbery after which the passive and inert Alma Malone politely thanked the judge for handing her a twenty-year sentence; it is ‘about’, therefore, the relationship between inspiration and execution, and between actuality and fiction; it is ‘about’ portrayal and self-portrayal and ‘about’ who gets to define whom (“To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.”); it is ‘about’, cumulatively, the way in which, as she delved more deeply into the specifics of another whom she sought to understand, Léger come up more and more against the unresolved edges of herself so that the two archaeologies became one (she also ended up learning quite a lot about her mother and the imbalanced mechanics of her parents’ relationship). When Wanda was released in 1970, it was disparaged in many feminist circles for its portrayal of a passive woman. Léger shows the film to be a useful mirror in which to recognise passivity as not only an impulse for self-erasure on a personal level but as part of the wider social mechanisms by which women are erased and colonised by projections, and in which the feminist critique and frontline necessarily become internal and self-reflexive. There is also in this book a strong sense of the inescapability of subjectivity, that in all subject-object relationships the subject perceives only and acts only upon a sort of externalised version of itself (the object being passive and without feature (effectively absent, effectively unassailable)); and also that when attempting to be/conceive of/portray oneself one has no option but to use the template of that with which one identifies but which is not in essence (whatever that means) oneself (except to the extent that one’s ‘self’ perhaps exists only in the mysterious act of identification). Oh, and Léger‘s writing is exquisite.
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.
Fair is a satirical, refreshing and playful book about learning the art of translation, being a book-worker in the publishing industry, growing up, family, and class. Loosely set in an imagined book fair/art fair/fun fair, in which every stall or ride imitates a real-world scenario or dilemma which must be observed and negotiated, the book moves between personal memories and larger questions about the role of the literary translator in publishing, about fairness and hard work, about the ways we define success, and what it means — and whether it is possible — to make a living as an artist. Fair is also interested in questions of upbringing, background, support, how different people function in the workplace, and the ways in which people are excluded or made invisible in different cultural and creative industries. It connects literary translation to its siblings in other creative arts to show how creative and subjective a practice it is while upholding the ethics and politics at play when we translate someone else’s work. Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction, satire and polemic, Fair is an inventive and illuminating book (and a lot of fun to read).
A selection of books from our shelves on film, film-making, and film-watching. Click through to find out more:
God and the Devil: Ingmar Bergman
All your choices are good! Click through to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
A Voice for the Silenced: Stories from inside and outside the cells of Aotearoa/New Zealand by Harry Walker $35
The title A Voice for the Silenced indicates the intention of these narratives is to give a platform, a taumata kōrero, a paepae, to those who have been marginalised and oppressed. It aims to share the kōrero, the stories, experiences, and perspectives of people who have been silenced by societal and systemic injustices. These narratives are from individuals and their families who have faced colonial heritage, racism, oppression, and the punitive realities of incarceration. These vignettes seek to amplify their voices, highlighting their struggles, resilience, and the ongoing and pernicious effects of trauma and alienation. ”If any person reading these vignettes suspects, or comes to believe any of these narrators might be them, or someone they know, or that the narrative is about them, whoever they may be, they are right. It is them, or a member of their whānau, hapū, or iwi. It is about them and hundreds like them. It is also about me and mine. It is about nobody, anybody, and everybody. It is about the voiceless, the silenced. It is about them and theirs. It is about us.” Incarceration is a lens through which we could, if we chose, see much that needs addressing in our society but that is hidden from most of us by dominating narratives that invalidate the experiences and whakapapa of others. Without this understanding, however, we will not be able to even perceive the injustice, racism, oppression and prejudice that serve the interests of some by denigrating the interests of others and creating the deep personal, social and cultural wounds of which crime is just one symptom. This important book collects stories of prisoners and relatives of prisoners and gives great insight into the traumatic effects of unjust power, especially for tangata whenua. [Paperback]
>>Lived experience.
>>Who cares about the people in jail?
A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 stories by Tomoka Shibasaki (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $40
In these stories of human connection in a contemporary, alienated world, people come together to share pieces of their lives, then part. We meet the women who share a house after the outbreak of war before going their separate ways once it is over; the man who lives in a succession of rooftop apartments; the diverging lives of two brothers who are raised as latch-key kids by factory workers; the old ramen restaurant that endures despite the demolition of all surrounding buildings; people who watch a new type of spaceship lift off from a pier that once belonged to an island resort; and more. These 34 tales have the compulsive power of news reports, narrated in a crisp yet allegorical style. [Paperback]
"Tomoka Shibasaki paints a piecemeal portrait of her Japanese homeland, an ekphrastic collection of tales whose spare language and flashing brevity muralise and memorialise Japan — its countrysides and cityscapes, its competing ascent/descent into modernity." —Alex Crayon, World Literature Today
"Shibasaki makes us think about the way stories are told, what we expect, and what we think we know. She is very good at giving us the pleasure of wondering how things are going to happen rather than what is going to happen, and then she reverses this." —Brian Evenson
>>Little moments are the most important.
Precarious Lease by Jacqueline Feldman $40
In her extraordinary work of non-fiction, Jacqueline Feldman tells the story of Le Bloc, a legendary squat situated at the far edge of Paris, near where the banlieue begins. Opened in 2012, the squat took in artists and activists as well as immigrants from around the world. They lived and worked within its labyrinthine structure, continually threatened with eviction and existential as well as financial precarity. Over many years Feldman, a reporter from the US, follows a cast of itinerant, displaced characters, tracing the fate of a counterculture under austerity while investigating the trending use of a legal device by which squatters could receive a reprieve from eviction but were reduced in status to property guardians. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and other chroniclers of Paris, she draws on its revolutionary and bohemian history while sounding issues of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, creativity and precarity, ecology and utopia. With candour and journalistic precision, Precarious Lease is a exploration of late-stage possibilities for co-existence in the ruins of a capital city. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Rigorous and arresting. Feldman has thought deeply about the ethics of her work and the result is a beautiful and important book which, through its meticulous focus on a self-consciously marginal milieu, strikes at the centre of one of the urgent subjects of our time.” —Max Liu, Financial Times
”Feldman's Precarious Lease is marked by erudition, astringence, biting wit, and the perspicacious awe of a seasoned examiner of our time, attributes bound to be hallmarks of her work for years to come. Diving under the rubble of social and class collapse, Feldman deftly maneuvers between investigative reportage and essayist forays while weaving through this tapestry a tone so sharp yet compassionate, so personal, it feels like a friend delivering dire news from the front lines of the world.” —Ocean Vuong
”In Precarious Lease Jacqueline Feldman follows her curiosity about alternative forms of living into the heart of north-east Paris's squat scene, and takes the reader with her, asking fundamental questions about how we live together under late capitalism, and the relationship, in France, between freedom and bureaucracy, marginality and the state. It's completely fascinating, an American in Paris memoir like no other.” —Lauren Elkin
”Jacqueline Feldman's Precarious Lease offers an enthralling immersion into the confluence of 2010s-era social and political activism, Parisian and French real estate and the margins of the global artworld. Multimodal in its storytelling, encompassing critical journalism, social history, the precision of documentary writing, and more, Precarious Lease also holds up a mirror to our current capitalist moment and suggests other ways of imagining our world.” —John Keene
>>Navigating the space.
Dealing With the Dead by Alain Mabanckou (translated from French by Helen Stevenson) $37
Suddenly dead at the age of twenty-four and trapped forever in flared purple trousers, Liwa Ekimakingaï encounters the other residents of Frère Lachaise cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death. Unwilling to relinquish their tender bond, Liwa makes his way back home to Pointe-Noire to see his devoted grandmother one last time, against all spectral advice. But disturbing rumours swirl together with Liwa's jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to pursue the riddle of his own untimely demise. A phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community and forces beyond human control, Dealing with the Dead is a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the foremost chroniclers of modern Central Africa. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Africa's Samuel Beckett.” —The Economist
”Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect.” —Booker International Prize judges
”We should all be reading Alain Mabanckou right now. His brilliantly imaginative novels throw a rope across borders and between people. A glorious, funny, surreal novel, set in communist Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s.” —Alex Preston
Rural Hours: The country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker $30
In Rural Hours, Harriet Baker tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the countryside and was forever changed by it. We encounter them at quiet moments — pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann emerge before us as the passionate, visionary writers we know them to be. Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Baker's subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making a home; slowly, they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living that would resonate throughout the rest of their lives. In the country, each woman finds her path: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing. [Paperback]
”In this warm, perceptive, eloquent study, Harriet Baker collects some overlooked moments in these women's lives, and with great honesty and empathy, captures what it felt like to live and write through them. Like Baker's protagonists in their countryside boltholes I felt ‘socketed’ by this book. I know I'll return to it again and again.” —Lauren Elkin
Smørrebrød: Scandinavian Open Sandwiches by Brontë Aurell $45
Brontë Aurell has gathered more than 50 recipes for delectable Smørrebrød — definitely the apogee for bread-based dining. From traditional toppings to modern innovations and ingredients, this book is a testament to the enjoyable tireless quest for the best flavour combinations. Something for everyone and every occasion. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Our new blog post on Nordic cookbooks at VOLUME.
Tūmahi Māori: A pathway to understanding Māori verbs by Hone Waengarangi Morris $45
This indispensable book shares the teaching strategies of one of the most experienced teachers of te reo Māori in Aotearoa. Its explanations and structures, set out in both te reo Māori and English, reflect a Māori perspective that will improve understanding and accuracy in the use of te reo Māori. As Hone Waengarangi Morris guides users through the correct uses of verbs and particles via useful examples and activities, they will become more accurate, more skilful and more confident in their grasp of the best approach to grammar in the te reo Māori space. [Paperback]
>>A new perspective.
The Cat Operator’s Manual: Getting the most from your new cuddle unit by Queen Olivia III $35
A fresh and quirky guide to understanding your cat, complete with assembly, warnings, insights into all of your Cuddle Unit 5(TM)'s features and modes, and a bonus sticker sheet. We recommend that you read these operating instructions thoroughly to quickly become acquainted with your Cuddle Unit 5(TM) and enjoy all of its features. In these pages, you'll find many useful tips and information concerning your safety, how to care for your Cuddle Unit 5(TM), and how to maintain Cuddle Unit 5(TM)'s interest in you, including: Decipher your Cuddle Unit 5(TM)'s Mood Mode Indicator; Understand when your unit is in Eco Mode and when it's time for Solar Charging; Learn more about how Turbo Mode is activated; Read up on how your Cuddle Unit 5(TM) will interface with robotic vacuum cleaners and recreational catnip. With tongue-in-cheek advice and spot-on illustrations that feel just like browsing a real user manual, this book gets two opposable thumbs up. We hope you enjoy your Cuddle Unit 5(TM) and wish you safe and pleasant petting. Thank you for choosing Cuddle Unit 5(TM)--we value your trust in us. [Paperback]
>>Find out more!
>>Read Lucy’s review.
The Mess of Our Lives by Mary-Anne Scott $29
Jordan Baxter, a talented songwriter and musician is determined to keep his home life a secret. His mother has a hoarding disorder which means he and his sister, Tabitha, must live in a dirty, cluttered environment. Jordan sleeps in an old caravan on the property to avoid the filth. When Tabitha is injured, the family is thrown into the spotlight making Jordan even more determined to be free of the mess. At the heart of this novel for teenagers and adults are big questions concerning mental health and creative ownership, but this is also a story about love and honesty. Sometimes acceptance is at the heart of freedom. [Paperback]
Finalist in the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
The Names by Florence Knapp $38
Tomorrow — if morning comes, if the storm stops raging — Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps, and this is her real concern, she'll formalise who he will become. It is 1987, and in the aftermath of a great storm, Cora sets out with her nine-year-old daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband intends her to follow a long-standing family tradition and call the boy after him. But faced with the decision, Cora hesitates, questioning whether it is right for her child to share his name with generations of domineering men. Her choice in this moment will shape the course of their lives. Seven years later, her son is Bear, a name chosen by his sister, and one that will prove as cataclysmic as the storm from which it emerges. Or he is Julian, the name his mother set her heart on, believing it will give him the opportunity to become his own person. Or he is Gordon, named after his father and raised in his image — but is there still a chance to break the mould? This is the story of three names, three versions of a life and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. [Paperback]
”This year's buzziest debut lives up to the hype. The high concept is carried off with flair, in a tender, clear-eyed portrayal of the horrors of domestic violence and joys of family life.” —Guardian
>>Why your name matters.
>>Crackling.
Among Friends by Hal Abbott $38
Amos and Emerson have been friends for more than thirty years. Despite vastly different backgrounds, the two now form an enviable portrait of middle age: their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. They share an unbreakable bond, or so they think. This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson's birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments which erupt in a shocking act of violence, one that threatens to shatter their finely made world. In its wake, each must choose: between whom and what they love most. [Paperback]
”In the way that a forceful intelligence or an infectious voice or a fresh vision can alter how we observe and answer the world, Among Friends brought me into its cool environs and made me engage my days differently. It's no small accomplishment for a first novel, or for any novel.” —Richard Ford
”Among Friends is a masterly debut. Hal Ebbott ranges from the most exquisite, Jamesian discriminations to the graspable, all-American solidities of Updike and Richard Yates. This is a writer to watch, with excitement and the highest expectations.” —John Banville
How to Lose Your Mother: A daughter’s memoir by Molly Jong-Fast $40
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of Erica Jong, author of the feminist autobiographical novel Fear of Flying. A sensational exploration of female sexual desire, it catapulted Erica into the heady world of fame in the early 1970s. Molly grew up with her mother everywhere — on television, in the crossword puzzle, in the newspaper. But rarely at home. How to Lose Your Mother is Molly's delicious and despairing memoir about an intense mother-daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and how that can really mess you up. But with her mother's heartbreaking descent into dementia, and Molly's realization that she is going to lose this remarkable woman, it is also a story of love, of loss, of confusion and of deep grief. [Paperback]
”Mesmerising, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating. Beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.” —Anne Lamott
”Conveys the mess, terror, loneliness and glory of familial love, in all its riveting complexity.” —Claire Messud
In the Bookstore: 1000-piece puzzle by Giacomo Gambineri $40
A very enjoyable puzzle. A peek inside a large busy bookshop, this puzzle contains many layers: each room is devoted to a genre and teeming with activities: people solving mysteries in the crime section; couples falling in love in the poetry section, and little ones climbing the bookshelves in the children's section. Filled with special details and inside jokes all bibliophiles will love. Back in stock in time for puzzle season! Recommended. [Boxed]
>>The puzzle is almost done! (at home).
>>Other winter-suitable literary jigsaw puzzles.
Whether a cuisine is in your genes, or whether you just like good food authentically made, a new cookbook is a passport to a world of flavour experiences, histories, and nourishment.
Have a look at our selection of Nordic cookbooks, and choose which one(s) will get you to where you want to be:
The Nordic Baking Book by Magnus Nilsson. “This wonderful book contains recipes for many of the things I remember my Danish grandmother making (and me eating) when I was a child, but also hundreds of other cakes, breads, pastries and biscuits, with regional variations and Nilsson’s personable and illuminating commentary. It is an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pleasures, and one of our most frequently used cookbooks.” —Thomas
“Nilsson’s The Nordic Cookbook (which we also have) is similarly comprehensive, and provides insight into a wider swathe of Scandinavian food culture, with, again, hundreds of recipes and variations (and many more dishes from Farmor’s repertoire).” —Thomas
Wander through Christine Rudolph’s and Susie Theodorou’s Copenhagen Cult Recipes and take your pick from the relaxed, mouth-watering, quick-to-prepare food eaten today in the Danish capital. Nicely presented.
Brontë Aurell has gathered more than 50 recipes for delectable Smørrebrød: Scandinavian Open Sandwiches — definitely the apogee for bread-based dining. From traditional toppings to modern innovations and ingredients, this book is a testament to the enjoyable tireless quest for the best flavour combinations.
Simon Bajada’s Modern Nordic: Contemporary recipes from a Scandinavian kitchen takes typically Scandinavian ingredients (that can be widely found elsewhere, too) and combines them in Scandinavian ways to create interesting, modern dishes to be enjoyed anywhere — all entirely achievable in your home kitchen.
In his eponymous restaurant, Niklas Ekstedt cooks everything by fire, and he is an expert at using wood, smoke and charcoal to achieve just the right flavour effects. Ekstedt: The Nordic art of analogue cooking will take you deep into this ethos of elemental cooking, and introduce you to regional Swedish and Sámi cuisines.
Slippurinn: Recipes and stories from Iceland is the result of massive research into local ingredients and traditional dishes. Chef Gísli Matt built his restaurant in a historic shipyard building of a small town whose landscape was changed forever by the lava flow from a 1973 erupted volcano. In this land of ice, hardy plants and plentiful fish, Matt has created a menu that both respects the local and traditional and pushes the boundaries of contemporary cuisine.
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18 July 2025