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26 September 2025
Meet Tara Selter. Antiquarian book dealer. Married to Thomas, who is also her business partner. Lives in a small town not far from Lille. Life is good. On a buying trip to Paris, the day of the 18th of November has gone pretty much to plan, with the only mishap a burn on her hand from a top of a heater. She rings Thomas in the evening, heads to bed — ice cubes against her hand — and wakes in the morning …..of the 18th of November. We meet Tara on #121 of the 18th of November. She is describing listening to Thomas in the house as he goes about his daily routine (extremely routine for her, as she has been listening to this same sequence of events for over 100 days!). Tara has decamped to the guest room — hiding from Thomas, tired of explaining to him again why she is home, unwilling to disturb his peace of mind even though he believes her — when she explains each day that time is repeating. Hiding in her own house, coming out to wash, to grab some food and get clean clothes, or even sit in the house when Thomas is out — she knows exactly when he leaves the house and the time he will return — she turns over the reasons why, the what of time, the sense that if she can only find a chink or a door (not that she believes in portals), she could find a way out of this strange situation. The day for everyone else never changes, for it has not been yet. For Tara she is caught in limbo, in some liminal space. She observes everything, intensely looking at objects, people, the night sky — looking for any changes and trying to decipher whether there is an exact time of repetition. When she was still telling Thomas they would sit together with paper, books and diagrams nutting out theories and debating philosophical explanations. (All of which would, of course, be forgotten by Thomas the next same day.) There is a wonder and a dread in her puzzling. She writes to record, to write herself into existence. “Because I am trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” As time goes by for Tara, there are inconsistencies — her hair grows, what she eats does not return to the cupboard or to the supermarket, some things stay with her, others return to their day. Why some objects stay close is a mystery. It’s fascinating to observe Tara in all her many reactions to her predicament. There is shock, then paralysis, philosophical delvings, experiments (some aimed at tricking time), rationalising, despair — the days are fog, abandonment and carefree enjoyment of being outside of time’s restraints, but mostly a desire to harness this strange beast. She contemplates herself as a monster, then maybe a ghost. She sees Thomas as a ghost, finally unreachable. Despite the times when they are intensely together, she senses the chasm that has opened between them. As the year turns, she returns to Paris to seek a resolution. We stand at the edge, waiting for Volume 2. Balle’s writing is brilliant; hypnotic. The pacing in the book changes to fit Tara’s mood, the revelations build through each sentence, through the episodic pieces, which often repeat and loop enhancing this sense of time being elusive. And like Tara, you are thinking what is this existence? Who am I in my everyday life? If I started to observe, like this woman, what would I see, sense? Is time real or a fabrication? Are we really all going along together in sync or are we each in our own world or one of the many possibilities? As you read On the Calculation of Volume: 1 questions bubble away, ideas surface and you will find yourself trying to look around edges attempting to fathom the question of individual existence and the relationships we have to each other and in the wider world.
“Art is always an overreaction,” writes Yoko Tawada in her lithe and compact novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel ); this statement being in itself an overstatement, as all statements are overstatements. Did we not learn at school, he pondered, that every overreaction provokes an equal and opposite overreaction, that the impact of each overstatement causes another overstatement to leap out at the end of the line, and so forth back and forth until the Newton’s cradle of the mind is finally still if it ever can be still. Does any movement towards certainty destroy the very certainty towards which it moves? Is that for which we reach inevitably destroyed by the reaching? This is no way to start a review, he thought; in his search for clarity he has produced a wash of vague sensations barely distinguishable from life itself, so to call it, a fractality of precisions more complicated than disorder; what is literature for, after all, if not to make life more wieldable, or our thinking about it more wieldable at least? No such luck. If the words for things can be used as substitutes for things, they are subject to linguistic forces and relations to which the things themselves are not subject. There’s an illness in all of this, a linguistic illness, or an illness of consciousness, that blurs, ultimately, or penultimately, or by something preceding the penultimate by one or several or many steps, the distinctions between words and their objects and between words and other words, a blurring that allows for or entails the febrile reconfiguration of language into new forms, he was going to write new and less useful forms, but the utility of language is no measure of its other functions (its other pathologies, he almost wrote). The narrator of Tawada’s novel refers to himself as ‘the patient’ and refers to himself in the third person (“third person is a form of salvation” (as we know)) and gives an account of the stayings-in and goings-out that are constrained by the vagaries of his illness and the vagaries of the illness of the world at large, if these are not one and the same: “The patient leaves the house as seldom as possible, and every time he is forced to go out, he first checks to see if the coast is clear. The coast is seldom clear, hardly ever.” If he ever does go out. He meets and befriends one Leo-Eric Fu, who shares with Patrik (Patrik is the name attached by others to the one who calls himself the patient; the patient's name as he approaches the collective world (plausibly a kind of healing (“A person who can continue to distance himself from home, one step farther each day, is no longer a patient.”))) a love and knowledge of the work of Paul Celan, a poet who made from German, a language broken by the trauma of hosting the Holocaust, a new language of beauty and possibility made entirely of the marked, traumatised and broken pieces of that language, and with whose work this novel is a form of conversation (please note that it is not necessary to the appreciation of the novel to be familiar with the other pole of that conversation, though the novel may lead a reader towards that pole). For the patient it is, we assume from the deliberately inconclusive evidence, the trauma of the Covid 19 pandemic that has broken language, either because of the collective circumstances in which he finds himself or also because he himself is actually in addition to metaphorically ill. I am not unfamiliar, he thought, as he attempted to continue with what was intended as a review but was suffering from an illness which made it both not really a review and very hard to sustain, with the linguistic deliria induced by fever, with the disintegrative and recombinatory compulsions that reveal something about language and are in fact structurally inherent in language but usually suppressed for reasons of utility or ‘health’. Any illness will remake language, given the chance to spread. In the delirium of the novel, the patient’s illness (“an autoimmune disorder of the mind”) attacks the distinctions between the binaries it posits: isolation/connection, illness/health, internal/external, uncertainty/comprehension, experience/identity; and attacks all borders generally: those between persons individually and those set between groups and nations. There are no contradictions. “People say I'm sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.” The forms of thought that gave rise to the illness, whatever it is, are broken and remade: “I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge. These are the fields in which I'll find my role.” It is possible, even probable, he thought, that the entire book takes place within the patient’s head, if such a place exists (“What if Leo-Eric isn't really sitting here and this is all just taking place in my imagination?”), although, towards the end, the Patrik-impulse begins to gain a little ground from the patient-impulse, and the possibility that the idea of Patrik and also the ideas of Patrik could exist in the minds of others begins at last to emerge. Language, ravaged by trauma and isolation, begins to adopt new forms. Is this healing? Illness, we begin to see, is entangled in time: “The present is a constant deferment.”
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm”. "Heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”. And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and political essays, through today.
All your choices are good! Choose your next books from our selection of NEW RELEASES. Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies, and we will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades $35
Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby. Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a “book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays”, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. “It’s not what she says,” writes Edmeades, “but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.” Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap. [Paperback]
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for uneven terrain by Rebecca Solnit $40
This book's title is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away — logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through — but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change. In her latest essay collection, she explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women's rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible. [Hardback]
”A book of fierce and poetic thinking — and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world.” —Merlin Sheldrake
”With her deep sense of the movement of history, her agile intellect, hope in the possibilities of action and nimble prose, Solnit continues to surprise and delight. This new collection of essays is a tonic in dark times.” —Lisa Appignanesi
>>Flair and capacity.
>>Indirect consequences.
>>Other books by Rebecca Solnit.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride $38
”So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.” It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love. Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud? Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face. [Paperback]
"An immersive battle between the faultlines dividing us and the bonds which unite us. McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure." —Claire Kilroy
"The natural heir to Joyce and Beckett: she is one of the finest writers at work today." —Anne Enright
"Supple, unexpected, funny, libidinous. A work of fierce intimacy, fearless in its descriptions of the inner lives of its characters, racked as they are by desire and hurt." —Naomi Booth
"McBride is a writer with the courage to reinvent the sentence as she pleases, and the virtuosity required to pull it off." —Literary Review
"[This is] McBride at the pinnacle of her craft. McBride is at her most virtuosic in this novel when excavating forbidden emotional depths too dark to be confronted outside the pages of fiction. With its vividly realised characters, lurid plot and lyrically compacted prose, The City Changes Its Face is a typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher." —Financial Times
"It's a rare feat to encounter a writer whose work feels both entirely original and timeless, but Eimear McBride is just that." —AnOther
>>Space. thought, and sanity.
>>Each book has its own requirements.
>>Radical empathy.
>>Other books by Eimear McBride.
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga $28
In New York City, an Albanian interpreter cannot help but become entangled in her clients' struggles, despite her husband's cautions. When she reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions, his nightmares stir up her own buried memories; while an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator's marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not. Ruminative and propulsive, Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely gorgeous. Taut as a thriller, lovely as a watercolour.” —Jennifer Croft
”Deft and insightful. Exceptional.” —Idra Novey
”Xhoga interprets our brave, new multicultural world with a sly, benign wit. Read her novel. You'll be glad you did.” —Tom Grimes
”A heart-stopping, emotional thriller. Violence hovers in the book's borders. I loved it.” —Rita Bullwinkel
”Compelling, startling, original.” —Priscilla Morris
>>There is nothing you can see that is not a flower.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Homeland: The War on Terror in American life by Richard Beck $69
To see America through the lens of this important book is to understand the United States like never before. For years after 9/11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time, with all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home. Richard Beck grippingly explores how life took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people s sense of themselves, their neighbours and the strangers they sat next to on planes. He describes the NFL games fortified like military bases in enemy territory. The surging sales of guns, SUVs and pickup trucks. The racism and xenophobia, erosion of free speech and normalisation of mass surveillance. A war launched to avenge an attack committed by two dozen people quickly came to span much of the globe. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused or endorsed the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time under standing themselves as patriots. It is a drastic oversimplification to say that the war on terror betrayed US values. In many respects, it embodied them. This is a fascinating and defining account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America. [Hardback]
”Homeland is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. It is impossible not to admire the nerve and scope pf Beck’s treatise.” —Washington Post
”Describes, with a beguiling mix of intellectual precision and passion, and from a novel perspective, the sinister mutations in American life induced by the war on terror. Everyone interested in the fate of democracy, or simple how violence abroad comes home, should read it.” —Pankaj Mishra
>>The righteous community.
Love Forms by Claire Adams $38
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Dawn tries to carry on with her life - a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce - but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been. Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn's long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer? [Paperback]
”The story, heartbreaking in its own right, comes second to its narration. Dawn’s voice haunts us still, with its beautiful and quiet urgency. Love Forms is a rare and low-pitched achievement. It reads like a hushed conversation overheard in the next room.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Reads like a Claire Keegan short story expanded by Elizabeth Strout.” —The Times
”From very first page, I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. An utterly arresting tale of love and grief, of the wounding and healing powers of family, of the many guises of a mother's love. It's an absolute triumph.” —Sara Collins
”Exquisitely written. A compelling and tender story of what-and who-is hidden in almost every family that feels as old as the hills and yet acutely contemporary.” —Monique Roffey
”An arresting voice that made me think of silk: its delicate beauty belies its intrinsic strength.” —Claire Kilroy
>>Missing pieces.
>>A deeply mysterious bond.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked toward Darkness by Irene Solà (translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)
Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women's stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Joana who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Sol explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory. [Hardback]
”A heady, exhilarating, compact tale that seems as old as the Catalan mountains and as fresh as a newly plucked chicken. Solà beautifully aligns past and present. Exuding a kind of alt-magical realism, the novel refuses to distinguish between bewitcher and bewitched: this is its triumph.” —Financial Times
”The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Solà's serious attention to the nonhuman makes most contemporary realist literary fiction feel narrow and timid, wilfully deaf to the other forms of life with which all human drama is interdependent.” —Guardian
”Forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book.” —Catherine Lacey
”Irene Sola is unlike any other writer — she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book.” —Daisy Johnson
”Solà's imagery is beyond arresting — it burns itself into your retina as you read.” —The Skinny
>>Memory and oblivion.
>>Rural damnation.
>>”The tide carries my books from my head.”
Good Things: Recipes to share with people you love by Samin Nosrat $70
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the transformative Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
”Once I hand them off to you, these recipes are no longer mine. They're yours, to do with as you please. And maybe, in the act of receiving, a little thread of connection will be woven between me and each of you.”
How can a recipe express the joy of sharing a meal in person? This is the feeling that Samin Nosrat sets out to capture in Good Things, offering more than 125 recipes for the things she most loves to cook. You'll find go-to recipes for ricotta custard pancakes, chicken braised with apricots and harissa, a crunchy Calabrian chili crisp, super-chewy sky-high focaccia and a decades-in-the-making, childhood-evoking yellow cake. Nosrat also shares tips and techniques, from how to buy olive oil (check the harvest date) to when to splurge on the best ingredients (salad dressing) to the one acceptable substitute for Parmigiano Reggiano (Grana Padano, if you must). Good Things captures, with Samin's trademark blend of warmth and precision, the essence of what makes cooking such an important source of comfort and delight, and invites you to join her at the table. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
A Wilder Way: How gardens grow us by Poppy Okotcha $45
A Wilder Way is a memoir of a relationship with an ever-changing garden, of setting down roots and becoming embedded in nature, and of how tending to a patch of land will not only grow us as individuals, but can also help to grow a better world. Join Poppy Okotcha in her wild little garden in Devon, where, over the course of a year, she shares the inspiring, the mundane and the magical moments that arise from tending a garden through the seasons, and what they can teach us about living more sustainably. Alongside tips for sowing and growing, wild ingredients to be found and delicious seasonal recipes to make, she shows us how the small joys of engaging with the natural world are imperative for our physical and emotional wellbeing. How the more we look at the world around us, the more we learn and the more we care. Woven throughout are folktales from her English and Nigerian heritage stories with nature at their heart that have inspired her, and will inspire us to live a little more wildly. [Hardback]
”Poppy's fresh-eyed look at her own little corner of the county gave me a renewed sense of wonder and delight at the joys and challenges of loving and (on good days) living off a small patch of land. Plus some truly brilliant ideas for getting the most from it. She had me at worm tea.” —Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
>>”Plants taught me about myself.”
>>Loving winter.
Is It Asleep? by Olivier Tallec $30
Squirrel and his best friend, Pock the mushroom, sit on the old stump, watching birds fly by. When they’re tired of this, they take the path to the yellow meadow to listen to the blackbird sing. But today, the bird’s not there. The friends look everywhere. Finally they find it on the path, all stretched out and quite still. It must be sleeping. They sit down quietly and wait for the bird to wake. This true-to-child story of a natural encounter with an animal that has died is both dryly humorous and a profound example of how to manage the comings and goings of life. The book ends with birdsong. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
My Bohemian Kitchen: A nostalgic guide to modern Czech cooking by Evie Harbury $45
My Bohemian Kitchen is a charming collection of Czech recipes with roots in nostalgia and a surprisingly modern take on seasonality and sustainability in the kitchen. Welcome to the food of Evie Harbury, whose Bohemian kitchen bridges the Czech Republic of her heritage and her home in East London. The book brings to life her long summers spent at her granny's mill in South Bohemia with her personal stories about Czech food and culture. As Evie's childhood memories simmered alongside more recent days spent with friends and family in Bohemian kitchens, Evie realised how much of the Bohemian spirit lives through hospitality and knew she had to write about the cultural ties between this unique country and its relationship with food. Alongside the snapshots of this food are her deliciously simple recipes that capture the influences of the Czech Republic's neighbouring countries. Even if you know nothing of this region, there's so much to discover and enjoy. The quaint and quirky chapters include: A Bit(e) of History Granny (Babička) Beer Snacks such as Marinated Cheese (Nakládaný Hermelín) Soups such as Chanterelle and Dill (Kulajda) The Main Event such as Beef Goulash (Hovězí guláš) Meatless Mains such as Lucky Lentils (Čočka na kyselo) Something Sweet such as Strawberry Dumplings (Jahodové knedlíky) Bohemian Baking such as Honey Cake (Medovník). [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
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19 September 2025
What is the relation, he asked himself, or anyone who would listen, between humour and the horrible? Surely, the best humour, without going into what constitutes best, arises from the horrible, is a way, perhaps of withstanding what would otherwise be intolerable. Perhaps that is what humour is for, or at least what it does, if that is not the same thing. Without the horrible, humour would be lacking in what we could call seriousness; a tickle for the comfortable, an irritation really. Humour arises when all else is lost, no, not all else, I find no humour in genocide, he thought; humour gets its agency from hope, however slim that hope, but for there to be humour, he thought, there must be at least some hope. Percival Everett has (again) written a very funny novel that is also a very horrible novel (his 2021 novel, The Trees, is a hilarious police procedural about racism and lynching). In James, Everett matches (and outdoes) Mark Twain’s special mixture of humour, meanness and social critique and takes the template of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to tell a deeper and more horrible story that is largely hidden by the limited perspective of Twain’s narrator, Huck. Where Twain, for all his ‘humanising’ of the runaway slave, Jim, perpetuated many of the racist tropes that persist in portraying Black people as simple and somehow ludicrous, Everett turns this on its head, making James the narrator of his story and suggesting that the modes of speech of the Black characters in Twain, and attributed to Blacks in much of American culture, is actually a kind of camouflage, faked for the oppressors’ ears. The ultimate disguise is to ‘pass’, not as White but as the Whites’ misconception of Black. To what extent, he wondered, might a stereotype that is put around an Other like a fence also provide some space for those inside to be free at least from being seen by those who put them there? Running throughout the novel, this reflexive mechanism of ironic mimesis (or ironic mechanism of reflexive mimesis) reaches its crescendo of irony when James falls in with an itinerant troupe of Blackface minstrels that includes a Black man ’passing’ as white. James isn’t ‘Black’ enough to meet the audience’s expectations, so has to apply boot polish before he appears on stage: “Ten white men in black face, one black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown black man painted black in such a way to appear like a white man trying to pass for black.” The irony folds in on itself with great delicacy and horrible precision. When the minstrels in Blackface mock the Cakewalk Dance performed by slaves they are seemingly unaware that the Cakewalk Dance is itself a mockery of white dances and mores. “‘Double irony,’ I said. ‘That is amusing. Can one irony negate another, one cancel out the other?’” What then are we left with? As soon as a slave achieves even the slightest agency, their relationship to their circumstances is ironic. Is the relationship of anyone to their circumstances ironic, he wondered, to the extent that their liberty is constrained by these circumstances? In James’s case, mortally ironic. Although race is a fiction, slavery is a terrible physical reality, and it seems that all the trees along the Mississippi have their branches worn smooth by lynchings. Everett shows how identity is constructed or imposed but relation is absolute; how prejudice is attitudinal but power is practical; and how these modes of harm make an unbridgeable divide between the powerful and the powerless. Slavery is a very thorough expression of Capital. James, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is an adventure novel, and perhaps adventure novels are all about their protagonists’ relation to the horrible. Such novels without the horrible would not be adventures but rather romps, so to call them, for want of a better term. But this is no romp: Huck’s involvement in the story he tells, though not without its hazards, is infinitely more carefree than that which James can narrate. As a runaway slave, the degree of freedom he maintains is the degree of mortal danger in which he finds himself. “Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anxiety, but at that moment, I felt anxiety. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I felt anger.” Adventure novels protect their protagonists by the momentum of the narrative: they are carried onwards past the dangers that beset them; and this is to some extent true in James: James survives improbably to catalogue the fates of slaves. The adventure exhausts itself at the end of the book when James arrives home, seeking his wife and daughter, to the ultimate dehumanising full stop of the slavers’ rationale. At this point, the appealing, gentle individual character of James that we have come to love is subsumed by the horrible circumstances and he becomes an instrument of the entirely understandable but brutal response that the brutality of the horrible requires. Will freedom follow? Just look at the world. James has written his story in a pencil that cost the slave who stole it for him his life. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here,” he writes. “But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
If you’re like me, and have been late to get to this award-winning novel, bring it to the top of your pile immediately. In James, Percival Everett does that rare thing — he compels you to read a story in spite of its horrific content. This is a brilliant novel about power and the ability to write yourself into being. Set in America just prior to the Civil War it follows Jim and Huck’s adventure as runaways. Unlike in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, our narrator is the slave Jim. Huck is there and well played, and the relationship between man and boy is strongly developed to the point where Jim will have to choose who to save — the boy Huck or his fellow traveller? But before we get here, there is a great deal of travel and, dare I say it, adventure. For Everett takes the adventure trope and wrings out of it all that is good but presents it with a sting in its tail and the darkest humour. Humour often at the expense of the masters, foolish townsfolk, the wealthy and the opportunistic. Here is a story of expectations, of the powerful and the disenfranchised (at its most extreme); of revelation and revenge, and of love. At the centre of this is the man, James, striving to be free. Free in body and mind. His internal conversations with philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire pepper the pages, his joy at acquiring a small pencil and stealing a notebook palpable, his ability to read and write are actions which propel him forward towards a different possible ending. One which excludes the master. Yet, James is trapped. Trapped by circumstance — he needs to free his wife and daughter and there is no easy road to this; he’s a wanted man who will not be given a fair trail for the sin of escaping but instead has a noose awaiting him; trapped by his appearance in a society that judges him for how he looks and his worth as a chattel; and trapped by the violence which breathes down through every pore of his story and the story of slavery. In James there is hope and humour, but the horror tells us all that history cannot be swept away by guilt or forgiveness, by blindness or ignorance. There is no absolution. We must look at the past straight on to understand its impact on our lives now. Percival Everett gives us the gift of James to help us see.
This beautifully produced and thought-provoking book has just won designer Katie Kerr the Best Book award in the 2025 PANZ Book Design Awards. Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists. From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa.
How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, alongside Kirsty Baker, Sight Lines is waiting for a place on your art library shelf.
“An exceptional book. Thoughtfully conceived, well written, timely and significant. It manages to be both scholarly – informed by the state of art writing in the present – and accessible to a general readership interested in art, women and feminism in Aotearoa.” — Peter Brunt, Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka
All your choices are good! Take your pick of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $38
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death — with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech — was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place upon which a whole universe pivots, a novel that interweaves vignettes of history, recipes, gossip, and mythology, reminding us that the stories of any place, no matter how humble, are fascinating and boundless, and await any of us with the imagination to seek it. [Paperback]
>>Also available in this edition (stock due soon!)
>>Other books by Olga Tokarczuk.
A Potent Way of Talking: Colin McCahon and the Urewera triptych edited by Hamish Coney $90
In 1974 Colin McCahon was commissioned by the National Parks Board to create a mural, which forced him to grapple with Tūhoe history, and the limits of his own understanding of Māori spiritual concepts. A Potent Way of Talking charts a course deep into the Ureweras to Maungapōhatu, the scorched earth years of the 1860s, the arrest of the prophet Rua Kēnana, the formation of the vast national park and Tūhoe’s attempts to assert their agency as mana whenua. As artist and iwi sought a resolution to McCahon’s work, all of these threads collide. Text by Hamish Coney, Laurence Simmons and Linda Tyler + an interview with Gary Langsford. Photographs by David Cook, John Miller, Max Oettli, Peter Quinn, David Straight and Ans Westra. [A beautifully presented hardback]
>>Look inside!
The South by Tash Aw $35
When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one. Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete. At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change. [Paperback]
”Tash Aw presents a world as timeless as the worlds brought to us by Turgenev and V. S. Naipaul, and yet catches the subtle and unstoppable changes each generation faces. Reflecting the human entanglements that come with home, land, and homeland, The South is a shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate novel.” —Yiyun Li
”Tash Aw's The South is a mesmerising tale of love, courage, and endurance. Like any significant novel, it's also infused with humour, longing, and other aspects of humanity too subtle and pervasive to be named by me. And, like any significant novel, it's both heartbreaking and joyful.” —Michael Cunningham
”The South is a sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present.” —Edouard Louis
”Everything about this novel is heartstoppingly vivid: its physical and emotional and social landscapes are rendered in sumptuous, shocking detail, while its meditations on desire and family are ecstatic and devastating all at once. It's exquisite.” —Oisin McKenna
Granta 171: Dead Friends edited by Thomas Meaney $37
Dead Friends brings vital figures from one's past momentarily back into focus. Eschewing dewy-eyed remembrances and dry obituaries, features include Fernanda Eberstadt on Andy Warhol, Aatish Taseer on V.S. Naipul, Tao Lin on Giancarlo DiTrapano, Michel Houellebecq on Benoit Duteurtre, William Atkins on a new method to dispose of mortal remains, an interview with Renata Adler, as well as new fiction from Marlen Haushofer, Yasmina Reza and Gary Indiana (among others). [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper by Roland Allen $33
We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine. On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world. [Paperback]
Liars by Sarah Manguso $28
”A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.” When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including — a few years later — all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it's not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John's ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane's career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her. Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes. [Paperback]
”Painful and brilliant — I loved it.” —Elif Batuman
”I was spellbound, entranced by Sarah Manguso's deceptively simple but fathoms-deep storytelling. There's an incredible force that underlies this work, propulsive and wild and a little bit scary.” —Emily Gould
”A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be. Any spouse that has ever argued about money, time, work and childcare should read it.” —Nick Hornby
>>A cultural sore spot.
>>One painful revelation at a time.
>>Writing out of rage.
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid $40
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time. With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child's teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer. In Between Two Rivers, Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later. [Paperback]
”Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.” —George Monbiot
”I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves. There are beautiful descriptions of what it is to be pregnant, to give birth, to have small children, to love a dog. I love the way in which she's not just writing about priests or kings, but is giving us a clay tablet on which a little child has bitten, so you have the imprint of his teeth. It melts away the sense of time.” —Tom Holland
”A tender, moving and vivid history of ancient Mesopotamia and how it still speaks to us. This is so my jam.” —Robert Macfarlane
>>The stories we tell become the world we inhabit.
>>Cuneiform explained.
Journey from the North: A memoir by Storm Jameson $38
After a lifetime of writing a novel every year, Storm Jameson turned to memoir with the ambition 'to write without lying'. The result was an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her childhood in Whitby, shadowed by a tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and her decision to leave her young son behind while she worked in London; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always marked by the struggle to make money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany. In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, and travels across Europe as fascism was rising. Throughout, she writes with electric candour and immediacy about her own motivations and psychology. Reissued with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, Journey from the North is one of the great literary memoirs: an uncommonly vivid account of a woman making a life for herself through the great shocks of the twentieth century. [Paperback]
”Her frank voice is as relevant today as ever it was in her own time - and it may still speak to many of our own anxieties around freedom, democracy and the future of liberal thought.” —TLS
To the Moon by Jang Ryujin (translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert) $37
In Seoul, three young women meet while working mundane desk jobs at a confectionary manufacturer. They become fast friends, taking their conversations out of the group chat as they bond over their 'average' employee report cards, the incompetence of their male team leader and a mutual longing for financial freedom amid mediocre raises. Eun-sang, the eldest of the group, is always looking for ways to earn extra money, but faces trouble at work after she opens a mini mart at her desk. Jisong, the youngest, dreams of a perfect romance with her Taiwanese boyfriend and spends her low salary on trips to Taipei. Meanwhile, Dahae searches endlessly for a better apartment - albeit one she can actually afford. One day over lunch, Eun-sang announces a plan to make enough money to quit her job, by investing her life's savings in cryptocurrency. What's more, she thinks the others should join her. All they need to do, she says, is hold on tight and wait for the price to skyrocket . . . to the moon. But as the market begins to fluctuate and spiral out of their control, the fate of their friendships — and their futures — soon hangs in the balance. [Paperback]
”To the Moon is an offbeat slice-of-life novel that welds the low-key eccentricity and camaraderie, frustration and routine of office work to the much more dramatic absurdity and arbitrariness of high-risk speculation. Jang's relatable tale of workplace friendship transforms into a financial rollercoaster, shining absurd light on how much more money capital makes than workers do.” —Sydney Morning Herald
>>Not passing midnight.
Linger: Salads, sweets and stories to savour, together by Hetty Lui McKinnon $50
”My culinary life began with salad. A charred broccoli salad, to be specific. Crispy florets tossed with chickpeas and cooling mint, flecked with red chilli pepper and zested lemon peel, bathed in a garlicky caper oil. That salad inspired me to consider possibilities. It ultimately led me here.” From her salad-delivery days in Sydney to her current career as a food writer and bestselling cookbook author in New York, Hetty Lui McKinnon has long known the power of salads to connect and create community. Salads are meant to be shared; they are what you bring to a gathering of friends or family, the ultimate comfort food. With Linger, Hetty has come full circle. Rather than delivering salads to members of her community, this time, she has invited friends into her home, to share salads, sweets and stories around her dining room table. Linger documents these intimate gatherings, with vegetable-laden, loosely seasonal menus enjoyed and photographed in real time. Through her inventive recipes for meal-worthy salads, smaller bites and simple sweets, McKinnon invites you to become a part of an unforgettable shared experience of community, food and friendship. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
Do Dogs Have Chins? And other questions without answers edited by Sarah Manguso, illustrated by Liana Finck $35
Does the rain know that people love to play in the rain? Why does a ghost wander? Are bubbles in drinks their thoughts? Do dogs have chins? Where does the dark go when the light comes on? How will it feel on the last day I'm a child? What's the best question a kid ever asked you? When Sarah Manguso posted this question online, she immediately received hundreds of answers. Gathering more than one hundred of the best questions from this poll and bringing them brilliantly to life with illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, Do Dogs Have Chins? ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime — encompassing birth, death, love dinosaurs, and everything in between — to show us the wit and wisdom of children in all their wondrous glory. [Hardback]
”This book is for anyone who has secret questions in their mind they are too embarrassed to ask out loud. In other words, this book is for everyone.” —Lemony Snicket
“A terrific book for anyone who has ever been around kids, or has been a kid themselves.” —Roz Chast
>>Look inside!
>>Deceptively small things.
Kia kaha te reo Māori! Two selections from our shelves — one for adults; one for tamariki!
All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima (translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) $37
Mitch and Yonko haven't spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo — but ever since the sudden death of Mitch's brother, they've been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster. Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they've kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it's all around them. Like history, it repeats itself. Tsushima's sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth — a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Tsushima evades any label, her fiction focuses on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.” —Japan Times
”A brilliantly layered commentary on postwar Japan. Despite the grave subject matter, the novel's tone, preserved faithfully in Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda's expert translation, is gentle and warm, suggesting the author's abundant optimism for human adaptability.” —TLS
”Subtle and engaging, poised somewhere between a character study and a murder mystery.” —Literary Review
>>Echoes in the dome.
Paper Crown by Heather Christle $37
Paper Crown is Heather Christle's first new collection of poems in over a decade. Throughout these exuberant poems, Christle conjures moments when the world's events — a child's words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinners with friends — alight themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity. With tenderness and verse, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognise that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem. [Paperback]
”I have never before read a book like Paper Crown. In it, Heather Christle opens the doors of her mind as if it is a library where we are welcome to roam so long as we understand that ‘If pages fall from high / enough they can take down a house’. Seemingly domestic in their sly meditations, always exultant in their view of the natural world, these poems clarify the mind of one fully aware of the fear and despair that dwells in and around us in the midst of our desires whether they be erotic or artistic or the desire to be awed by a stunning book. This is a stunning book. I am stunned.” —Jericho Brown
”Heather Christle's Paper Crown renders the precise darts and folds of lyric attention, revealing poetry to be a timekeeping as intimate and exact as that of perfect friendship or the pineal gland: ‘The click of time saying yes’.” —Joyelle McSweeney
>>”My child has gone into the next moment.”
>>In the Rhododendrons.
The Lowlife by Alexander Baron $28
Harryboy Boas is a lowlife gambler. When he's not at the track, he lives in a Hackney boarding house, reading Zola, eating salt beef, pressing trousers and repressing wartime memories. But when a new family moves into the apartment downstairs, his life starts to unravel and Harryboy soon finds himself sinking into a murky East End underworld where violence, guilt and gangsters are the inevitable result for those who cannot pay their dues. A celebrated cult classic, The Lowlife brilliantly evokes post-war East London — dog tracks, sandwich shops, tenements, sex workers, newly arrived West Indians and Jews leaving for Finchley — all seen through the tragicomic eyes of Harryboy, our picaresque rogue hero suffering from 'existential burn-out in the shadow of the Holocaust' (Iain Sinclair) and driven to bet, brad and beg to survive. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The wonder of The Lowlife is that it does justice to a place of so many contradictions. One of the best fictions, the truest accounts of Hackney.” —Iain Sinclair
>>A Jewish East End childhood.
Shifting Sands: A human history of the Sahara by Judith Scheele $55
An expansive history of the Sahara from prehistory to the present that shows how Saharans have, over time, built complex and cosmopolitan lives despite scarcity, conquest, and the relentless challenges of the desert environment. What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home. Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy cliches and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region to the religions, languages, and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this landmark book tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all. [Hardback]
Naked Portrait: A memoir of my father Lucien Freud by Rose Boyt $33
In Naked Portrait Rose Boyt explores her complicated relationship with her beloved father, Lucian Freud, drawing on a diary she kept while sitting for him and which she found five years after his death. Enthralled by his genius, she remembered as uncontentious and amusing all the extraordinary stories he told her to keep her entertained in the studio, but the shock of the truth is profound when she looks back. What emerges is her compassion and love not just for herself as a vulnerable young woman but for the man himself, in all his brilliant complexity. [Paperback]
”Packed to the rafters with wisdom and insight, this immersive account of being the child of a genius is, itself, a work of art.” —Frances Wilson
”Beyond the father–daughter dynamic is an evocative tale of coming of age in London in the 1980s, one marked by grief, bad boyfriends, sexual compromises and camaraderie. So much life worth telling, out beyond the shadows of great men.” —Hettie Judah, The Times Literary Supplement
>>Identity issues.
Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco $38
Washington Territory, 1888. With contacts on the docks and in the railroad and a buyer’s market funneling product their way, ex-detective Alma Rosales and her opium-smuggling crew are making a fortune. They spend their days moving crates and their nights at the Monte Carlo, the center of Tacoma’s queer scene, where skirts and trousers don’t signify and everyone’s free to suit themselves. And Alma, who is living as a hardscrabble stevedore called Jack Camp, knows this most of all. When two local men end up dead, all signs point to the opium trade. A botched effort to disappear the bodies draws the attention of lawmen, and although Alma scrambles to keep them away from her operation, she’s distracted by the surprise appearance of Bess Spencer—an ex-Pinkerton agent and Alma’s first love—after years of silence. Then a handsome young stranger, Ben Velásquez, rolls into town and falls into an affair with one of Alma’s crewmen. When Ben starts asking questions about opium, Alma begins to suspect she has welcomed a spy into her inner circle, and she’s forced to consider how far she’ll go to protect her trade. Katrina Carrasco plunges readers into the vivid, rough-and-tumble world of the late-1800s Pacific Northwest in this genre and gender-blurring novel. [Paperback]
"At once richly atmospheric and finely paced, Rough Trade is a potent and morally complex portrait of queer life and history." —The New Yorker
>>Boxing as research.
Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of the world by Dorian Lynsky $33
As Dorian Lynskey writes, "People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia." In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularised in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods. With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them, from H.G. Wells, Jack London, W.B. Yeats and J.G. Ballard to The Twilight Zone, Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max and The Terminator. Prescient and original, Everything Must Go is a brilliant, sweeping work of history that provides many astute insights for our times and speaks to our urgent concerns for the future. [New paperback edition]
”So engagingly plotted and written that it's a pleasure to bask in its constant stream of remarkable titbits and illuminating insights.” —The Guardian
”So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end — the world, or the book.” —Adam Rutherford
Te Āhua o ngā Kupu Whakaari a Te Kooti by Pou Temara $60
He kōrero hirahira tēnei e wānangatia ai ngā kupu whakaari a Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi – he poropiti, he kaiārahi, he pou nō te Hāhi Ringatū. Ko Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi tētahi o ngā maunga teitei o te wā – he kōkōrangi i ngā rā pōuri, he tokotoko i te awa kōpaka. I tū ia hei toa i te whare o Tūmatauenga, engari ki te Hāhi Ringatū, he poropiti – he matakite nāna i hāpai ngā moemoeā, ngā tūmanako, me ngā wairua o te iwi i ngā tau o te ngarohanga: te whenua, te oranga, te mana motuhake. I tōna ringa matau te pū me te riri, i tōna ringa māui te whakapono, ngā kupu whakaari, me te tohu rangimārie. Nā Te Kooti i hora atu ēnei kupu ki ngā marae o te motu, hei karere poropiti, hei tohu whakatūpato, hei māramatanga mō ngā uri whakatipu. He kupu e kōrero ana ki te manawa, ki te wairua, ki te whenua. Ko tēnei pukapuka nā Tā Pou Temara – he mema o te Kaunihera Tekau mā Rua a te Kuīni, he ahorangi, he tohunga mō te kupu, mō te whakaaro Māori. Ka wānangahia e ia ngā kōrero a Te Kooti: ngā whakakitenga i tukuna ki ngā marae, ngā waiata i tuhia hei huna i te mōhiotanga, ngā kōrero i poipoia i raro i te maru o te atua. Ka pānuitia, ka wetewetehia, ka uia: kua tutuki rānei ngā kupu a Te Kooti? Kei te ora tonu rānei i ēnei rā? Ko ngā whakaaro o Tā Pou i ahu mai i ngā kōrero tuku iho o Te Whānau-a-Apanui, o Te Arawa, o Ngāi Tūhoe – ngā iwi i whakatupu i tōna ngākau kia mōhio ai ki te hā o te kupu, ki te wairua o te whakapono, ki te tapu o te kōrero tuku iho. Nā konā, ka rere mai tēnei pukapuka hei puna mātauranga mō te hunga e kimi ana i te māramatanga ki te Hāhi Ringatū, ki te poropititanga Māori, ki te reo, ki te hītori o te motu – mai i te uma o ngā marae, mai i ngā whakapono o ngā tīpuna, mai i te kore ki te ao mārama.
The prophetic sayings of Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi – analysed and explained in te reo Māori by Tā Pou Temara. Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi stands as a towering figure of his time – a storm in dark days, a staff for those adrift. A warrior in the house of Tūmatauenga, yet to the Ringatū Church, a prophet – one who carried the dreams, hopes and spirit of the iwi through years of loss: land, life and sovereignty. In his right hand, the gun of battle; in his left, the word of God. Te Kooti spread these words across the marae of the motu; a messenger, a guide, a beacon of understanding for generations to come. His words speak to the heart, to the spirit, to the land. This book, by Tā Pou Temara – a member of the Māori Queen’s Council of Twelve, a professor, and a tohunga of Māori language and thought – offers a deep exploration in te reo Māori of Te Kooti’s prophetic messages: his visions, teachings and songs. Through these pages, Tā Pou asks: have Te Kooti’s words been fulfilled? Do they still live today? Tā Pou’s insights, grounded in the ancestral knowledge of Te Whānau-a-Apanui, Te Arawa and Ngāi Tūhoe, illuminate the essence of the word, the spirit of belief and the sacredness of tradition. This book is a rich source of knowledge for those seeking understanding of the Ringatū faith, Māori prophecy, the Māori language and the history of the land – from the heart of the marae, from the wisdom of ancestors, from the shadows to the light. [Hardback]
Rites of Passage: Death and mourning in Victorian Britain by Judith Flanders $35
Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally — to modern eyes — bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain. Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving, to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying. This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. [Paperback]
”There is no aspect of Victorian death that does not make it into Judith Flanders's latest investigation into 19th-century life. Flanders's strength has always been to move deftly between micro and macro, the general and the particular, the societal and the entirely personal, to produce that kind of panoramic yet teeming view beloved of the Victorians themselves.” —Sunday Times
>>Beekeepers’ black ribbons.
Anything Could Happen: A memoir by Grant Robertson $40
A fascinating insight into the remarkable life and career of one of the most influential and adroit politicians of his generation. Grant Robertson reflects on the major events in his life, where he grew up in a loving but complex family, through to his highly successful career as a Labour politician and becoming Finance Minister in the Ardern government during one of New Zealand history's most tumultuous times. A natural storyteller and a literary thinker and reader, Robertson writes memorably about his childhood and teen years in Dunedin, from grappling with his sexuality as a teenager, to his passion for music and a fleeting career managing bands, to his emerging political beliefs, and of being told the shocking news that his father had been stealing from his employer and was facing imprisonment. Robertson paints a vivid picture of life inside parliament — including his time in opposition, where he learnt at the feet of Helen Clark, to the responsibility of being Finance Minister, none more so than when the Covid-19 pandemic threatened to decimate New Zealand's economy. In recounting the challenges he faced, Robertson writes honestly about how politics works, and why it matters, and his belief in the uniqueness of Aotearoa and his optimism for its future. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Anything could happen.
Everything but the Medicine: A doctor’s tale by Lucy O’Hagan $40
A well written memoir by a New Zealand GP, reminiscent of the warm wisdom and humanity of the American physician and writer Atul Gawande. Over her long career Dr Lucy O’Hagan has developed deep insights into the profound but often complex relationship between patients and doctors. Reading about her own struggle with what it means to be a truly useful doctor is both fascinating and absorbing. From working with people living on the margins and her own burnout to her efforts to better serve her Māori patients and the humour that’s sometimes needed to get through the day, she keeps her eye on one key question: What is it to be a good doctor in this place? [Paperback]
”Everything But the Medicine is straight out of the trenches. Read it, then call me in the morning. It is very much a medicine itself..” —Glenn Colquhoun
>>Cultures within medical care.
>>Writing the book she wanted to read.
Read our latest newsletter!
12 September 2025
So, what makes you want to write a review of David Shields’s book, The Very Last Interview?
Then why are you writing one?
Every week? Whose idea was that?
Surely at your age, you shouldn’t be so bound by obligation or by expectation, or whatever you call it?
Yes, but do you really care what these readers might think, and do you even believe that there are such people? Aren’t you being altogether a bit precious?
Do you really think that this helps to pay the mortgage, I mean that this makes a direct and measurable contribution towards paying your mortgage? Or even an indirect and unmeasurable but still valuable contribution towards paying your mortgage?
Well, what else would you be doing?
Surely you’re joking?
Okay, we’ve got a bit off the track there. I will reframe my first question. What makes you think that you are able to write a review of David Shields’s new book?
Don’t you think your humility is a bit mannered?
The Very Last Interview is a book consisting entirely of questions that interviewers have asked David Shields over the years, omitting his answers, assuming he will have answered probably at least most of the questions, and your review, if we can call it that, of this book also consists of a series of questions ostensibly directed at you but without your answers, if indeed there were answers, which is less certain in your case than in the case of David Shields. Is this, on your part, a deliberate choice of approach, and, if so, is it justifiable?
Do you really believe that a review written in imitation of, or in the style of, the work under review inherently reveals something about that work, even if the review is badly written, or should your approach rather be attributed to laziness, stylistic insecurity, or creative bankruptcy?
Has it ever occurred to you that the supposedly more enjoyable qualities of your writing are actually nothing more than literary tics or affectations, and, furthermore, that it might be these very literary tics and affectations that prevent you from writing anything of real literary worth?
Do you think that, by removing his input into the original interviews but retaining the questions, David Shields is attempting to remove himself from his own existence, or merely to show that our identities are always imposed from outside us rather than from inside, or that we exist as persons only to the extent that we are seen by others? Is this, in fact, all the same thing?
What do you mean by that statement, ‘We are defined by the limits we present to the observations of others’?
What do you mean by that statement ‘There is no such thing as writing, only editing,’ and how does that relate to Shields’s work?
Do you think that David Shields, in this book as in the much-discussed 2010 Reality Hunger, sees the individual as an illusion, a miserable fragment of what is actually a ‘hive mind’ or collective consciousness, and that ‘creativity’, so to call it, is another illusion predicated on this illusion of individuality?
You don’t? What, then?
What do you think David Shields would have answered, when asked, as he was, seemingly in this book, “But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature’ that you envision?” and how might this differ from the answer you might give if asked the same question?
Shields was asked if he had written anything that couldn’t be interpreted as ‘crypto-autobiography’, but don’t you think the salient question is whether it is even possible to write anything that couldn’t be interpreted as crypto-autobiography?
Is a perfectly delineated absence, such as David Shields approximates in The Very Last Interview, in fact the most perfect portrait of a person, even the best possible definition of a person, as far as this is possible at all?
But do you actually have a personal opinion on this?
Do you think then that you, like Shields, like us all perhaps, are, in essence, a ghost?
Beautifully told and drawn, this story of wartime trauma is delicate and honest. Told through the eyes of Mila as she looks back at her nine-year-old self, it places memory at the centre of the story — both its necessity and its burden. A girl whose life is shattered by war; who has walked a road to escape, who has witnessed things that she couldn’t understand at the time, nor fully assimilate in her adult life, Mila is a thirty-four-year-old woman living in the country her family escaped to, being like any other young woman, but always there is a part of herself that is different. Trauma plays with memory, and memory is unreliable. As she considers the road to the new country, she realises that each member of her small family will have their own telling — their own witness. A reminder to us all, as we witness countless people on the move right now (from our distant remove), seemingly a common story in fact is no more common than our very own existence which we hold dear as our very own. For Mila sees and doesn’t see — she is a witness (and victim of) to the stark tragedy and misery of war, but also protected by her own family and more interestingly by her own psyche. She sleeps and sleeps — an endeavour to keep reality at bay. Told as memory, some elements are removed and others elevated. Objects, in this case the clouds, are used as a tool to articulate this pain, and also as hope for better or more hopeful times. White clouds are to strive towards, away from the black smoke bomb clouds of memory. Cats are to stroke and resurrect gentleness. And perhaps, also innocence. But a new life, even years on, cannot still Mila’s fear of queues or black clouds, but the memory of a brave act can make her smile and look beyond the pain she carries with her. Mario Brassard’s lyrical words and Gerard Dubois's stunning limited palette drawings are an evocative combination.
Szalay uses his signature spare prose to unsparing effect in this novel that aligns surface and depth, style and plot to portray a protagonist unable to achieve agency in a world that expects him to dominate. “You have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific.”
“David Szalay’s novel follows István from his teenage years on a Hungarian housing estate to borstal, and from soldiering in Iraq to his career as personal security for London’s super-rich. In many ways István is stereotypically masculine — physical, impulsive, barely on speaking terms with his own feelings (and for much of the novel barely speaking: he must rank among the more reticent characters in literature). But somehow, using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
Find out more:
All your choices are good! Take your pick from our selection of books straight out of the carton, and click through to our website to secure your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
How to Dave Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand by Geoffrey Palmer $30
Unfortunately we need this book now more than we ever thought that we would — and we need it more by the day. In this timely and provocative book, Sir Geoffrey Palmer draws on his experience as former Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, and Attorney-General to get people thinking about the state of New Zealand’s democracy. Palmer offers rare insights into the machinery of power and its vulnerabilities, and rather than surrendering to pessimism, he presents a roadmap for renewal. At a time when authoritarianism rises globally and the rule of law faces unprecedented threats, Palmer’s message is clear: ordinary citizens hold the key to democratic revitalisation through civic engagement and vigilance. This collection of thoughtful essays challenges readers to reclaim their role in governance. Palmer argues that regardless of which parties hold power, without public awareness and participation, democratic institutions will continue to weaken. [Paperback]
>>Why this book is necessary now.
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy $40
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm." "Heart-smashed" by her mother Mary's death in September 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her." And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today. [Paperback]
>>What to make of the mother who made you.
>>A fugitive childhood.
”Brave and absorbing. In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother. The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren't significant for giving us access to Roy's inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency.” —Guardian
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $42
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place upon which a whole universe pivots, a novel that interweaves vignettes of history, recipes, gossip, and mythology, reminding us that the stories of any place, no matter how humble, are fascinating and boundless, and await any of us with the imagination to seek it. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Also available in this edition (due very soon).
>>Other books by Olga Tokarczuk.
It’s What He Would Have Wanted by Nick Ascroft $25
What would he have wanted? As little fuss as possible. But, reading between the lines: a little help. All the latest gossip and complaints. An arse that is not wrong. Opulence. One leap from the rope ladder. The final word.
It’s What He Would’ve Wanted is the sixth book of poetry from the author of the acclaimed The Stupefying. In this hilarious and affecting new work, Nick Ascroft writes of lost friends, new frailties, new braveries, and being stuck in an organ pipe during a recital and not wanting to bother anyone about it. Yes, there are poems of cycling into dead-end utility holes but also poems of trembling resolve and arriving at work as aged as the night sky after completing the morning school drop-off. One section of the book is titled ‘Just ad nauseum’. This is possibly the best collection yet by one of the most exciting and mercurial poets writing in Aotearoa today. [Paperback]
”Nick Ascroft is good at Scrabble and indoor football. Does this make him an excellent poet? Annoyingly ... yes.” —Shayne Carter
”Ascroft's poems are unsanctimonious, witty, deeply humane comments on the compromises that comprise life, the bargains we make with ourselves, each other, and our egos and neuroses to get through the day.” —Rebecca Hawkes
”Nick Ascroft is a wonderfully adroit poet. They're not always an easy read, these poems, but they're always a rewarding one.” —Harry Ricketts
A Year with Gilbert White, The first great nature writer by Jenny Uglow $65
In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and, at that time, was halfway to completing his path-breaking The Natural History of Selborne. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and sympathy: his spellbinding book has remained in print ever since, treasured by generations of readers. Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, 'the father of ecology', by following a single year in his Naturalist's Journal. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she accompanies Gilbert from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest. Fresh, alive and original — and packed with rich colour illustrations — A Year with Gilbert White invites us to see the natural world anew, with astonishment and wonder. [A very nice hardback]
”Uglow makes us feel the life beyond the facts.” —Guardian
”Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.” —Sunday Times
”Uglow's style is supremely elegant and often amusingly bathetic, her research exhaustive but lightly worn.” —Financial Times
>>Look inside.
>>Other outstanding biographies by Jenny Uglow.
Olveston: Portrait of a home by Jane Ussher (photographs) and John Walsh (words) $85
A large, sumptuously beautiful and lovingly made book about a large, sumptuously beautiful and lovingly made historic house: Olveston in Dunedin. Built in 1907 by David Theomin, a wealthy merchant and one of Dunedin's accomplished Jewish businessmen of that era, Olveston’s opulence reflects the economic power that was concentrated in Dunedin at the start of the 20th century. Theomin and his wife Marie were ‘cultured’ people who travelled a great deal and the house is full of items brought back from abroad, as well as valuable furniture and significant paintings, including by Frances Hodgkins, who they supported early in her career. The beautifully cared-for house is now in public ownership and open for tours. Olveston: Portrait of a home, evocatively photographed by Jane Ussher, documents its exquisite rooms full of treasures. [A beautiful large-format hardback]
>>Look inside the book!
>>Go inside the house.
>>On making the book.
Edges of Empire: The politics of immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980—2020 by Francis L. Collins, Alan Gamlen, and Neil Vallelly $50
Since 1980, the peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand have fundamentally changed through new policies and new patterns of migration — from a largely Pākeha population with 10 per cent Māori in 1980 to today's megadiversity, with new residents from Asia, the Pacific and the rest of the world. Immigration has had a profound impact on New Zealand's society, economy, and place in the world. Edges of Empire is an in-depth account of the social, political and economic context within which these transformations in policy and population took place. Drawing on interviews with fifteen former Ministers of Immigration, this book reveals the intricacies of politics and policy-making that have led to New Zealand's relatively open and economically driven approach towards migration. Written by three leading social scientists, Edges of Empire provides an insightful account of who is included in Aotearoa New Zealand and under what conditions. [Paperback]
”Edges of Empire is the first book-length study to chronicle the evolution of migration policy governance in Aotearoa New Zealand in the neo-liberal period, against the backdrop of treatymaking involving Māori and complex external relationships with peoples of the Pacific Islands. It boldly responds to the challenge to migration scholars to attend to the colonial in multiple sites and at different scales. The book is also unique in its use of interviews with successive ministers of migration to centre the analysis. In all these ways, Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly have produced a highly original and timely scholarly intervention.” —Leah F. Vosko, FRSC, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Economy, York University
”Drawing on the personal accounts of successive Ministers of Immigration, Edges of Empire offers a unique analysis of New Zealand's migration policies. At its core, the book outlines how the politics of markets, multiculturalism, and an enduring imperial agenda has shaped migration over the past forty years. It is also one of those rare accounts that threads the Crown's relationship with tangata whenua in unfolding immigration histories. Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly adeptly blend academic thoroughness and storytelling to deliver an immersive and thought-provoking critique of New Zealand's contemporary migration.” —Rachel Simon-Kumar, Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Asian and Ethnic Minority Health Research and Evaluation, University of Auckland
Matapēhi by William Shakespeare (translated from English by Te Haumihiata Mason) $40
He kōrero i whiria ki te pōuri me te toto, e miramira ana i te hiahia tangata: ko Matapēhi, te whakaari a Wiremu Hakipia, kua whakaorangia ki te reo rangatira. Ko te kupu i tīkina rawatia i te ngākau, i te whatumanawa hei kōpaki i te whakaaro o te tangata, ahakoa rere taua whakaaro rā ki hea, he kupu kua āta tāraia e tōna kaitārai. Katoa ngā āhuatanga kua whakarārangitia e Wiremu Hakipia ka rangona mai i ngā kaupapa e ngau tonu ana i ēnei rā. Ko Matapēhi he whakaari mō te mauri whakakite, te hiahia, te tōwhare; mō ngā whaea rangatira me ngā kīngi; mō ngā ruahine taki i te ‘rererua, matarua, maikiroa ē’; mō te ao i kīia ai te kōrero ‘he pai te kino, he kino te pai’. Nā, kua ora mai anō te pakitūroa pōuriuri, whakawai i te hinengaro, kua tuhia ki te reo Māori e te mātanga kaiwhakamāori, e Te Haumihiata Mason. Nāna anō i puta ai Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine, me te reo aroha o Rōmeo rāua ko Hurieta ki te reo Māori. He tamāhine nō ngā maunga tapu o Ruatoki, he atamai ki te raranga rerenga. Nāna i whakahauora ngā kupu a Hakipia kia kawea ake ai a Matapēhi ki tētahi ao hōu. He taonga tēnei mā te hunga kaingākau ki te reo o Hakipia, ki te reo rangatira, ki te korakora hoki ka rere i te pānga o ngā ao e rua. I tēnei putanga reorua, ka takoto ngātahi te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā; e rere tahi ana te ia o te kōrero, me he awa rua: motuhake te ia, tūhono te rere, kī tonu i te mauri o te kupu. He aho mārama kei ia reo, e kitea ai he hōhonutanga hōu i tērā rā. A reo Māori translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: a gripping tale of ambition and betrayal, prophetic visions and dripping blood. Shakespeare’s Scottish play is a tale of prophecy, ambition and murder; of lairds and ladies and kings; of witches, cauldrons and of ‘double, double, toil and trouble’ — all in a world where ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’. Now, this dark and captivating classic is brought to life in te reo Māori by the doyenne of reo Māori translators — Te Haumihiata Mason. The force behind the translations of The Diary of Anne Frank and Romeo and Juliet, a daughter of Rautoki and a master of her craft, she breathes new life into Shakespeare’s language and carries Macbeth to a new realm of rhythm, power and poetry. This book is a treasure for lovers of Shakespeare and te reo Māori alike, and of the alchemy that sparks where they meet. This dual-language edition places Māori and English side by side, moving through the play like twin currents: distinct, entwined and alive with meaning. Each language casts its own light, revealing fresh depths in the other. [Paperback]
My Sister by Emmanuelle Salasc (translated from French by Penny Hueston) $40
One summer's day in 2056 in the mountains of southern France, a warning siren goes off- inside the belly of the receding glacier above the spa-centre village, a large pocket of water under pressure is about to give way-just as it did 150 years ago, when hundreds of people died in the floods of debris and water. This is a novel about fear, an ancestral, collective fear about environmental disaster, and the narrator Lucie's fear about her twin sister Clemence, who has returned after a thirty-year absence. Salasc intensifies the psychological suspense as she tracks the sisters' relationship between the past and the present. Clemence claims she is on the run, but Lucie still doesn't know whether she can trust her sister. The two women shelter together beneath the glacier, waiting for the worst, surviving on dwindling supplies, alone above the evacuated village. Does Clemence's determination to control Lucie mean confronting the ultimate catastrophe? My Sister is a spine-chilling slow-burn story of sibling rivalry and climate change, offering us a profound examination of the future of our relationship with nature — as well as with those close to us. [Paperback]
”With its sparse elegance, psychological acuity, and environmental resonance, My Sister is a novel of remarkable subtlety and power.” —NZ Booklovers
>>By the same author under her previous name.
Rākau: The ancient forests of Aotearoa by Ned Barraud $35
This beautifully illustrated and handsomely packaged guide to the evolution, habitats and variety of the rākau (trees) and ngahere (forests) of Aotearoa for young readers is written and illustrated in Ned Barraud’s hallmark accessible, informative and captivating style. Featuring gatefolds and framed throughout by core mātauranga Māori and the expertise of curators at Te Papa, Rākau takes young readers from pre-history to the present day. It introduces key species and highlights the significance and use of different native trees and the impact of humans on their vitality. Ideal for both the library and home, this engrossing book helps young readers discover what makes our rākau so special and worthy of our care. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration by Charles Ferrall $50
Joseph Kinsey is not a name many of us know — or not as well as we know the name Robert Falcon Scott. But from his base in Christchurch, Kinsey — book and art collector, philanthropist, science enthusiast, businessman — forged deep connections with the Antarctic expeditions and the explorers themselves through his tireless work as the agent for various expeditions. Two other New Zealanders also formed close friendships: Charles Bowen, a former politician, and Wellington lawyer Leonard Tripp, to whom Shackleton declared: 'I love you as David and Jonathan loved.' South by South tells the story of New Zealand's role in 'the Heroic Age', that wave of exploration beginning at the end of the nineteenth century in which men set out to traverse the continent of Antarctica and, if they survived, to bring home their findings. The members of this New Zealander triumvirate were all believers in the British Empire, but the southern voyages were to an uninhabited land. South by South brings to light many letters, newspaper articles, and pieces of official correspondence, much of which has not been published before, during the five expeditions of 1901-1916: the Discovery, Nimrod, Terra Nova, Aurora, and Endurance. In particular, Scott's letters to Kinsey and Shackleton's to Tripp tell of their hope, despair, exhaustion, and deep gratitude for their friendship. What they and the explorers wrote was influenced by nineteenth-century adventure stories which conveyed the Imperialist ideals of the time. If the impending conflict of 1914—18 was a very 'literary war', this was very literary exploration. [Paperback]
Get your head together with this selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Read our latest newsletter and find out (among other things) what our cat is reading.
5 September 2025