Read what the judges said about each of the books on this year’s short list, and then click through to our website to find out more and to get your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Flashlight by Susan Choi
Judges’ citation: ”Flashlight is a sprawling novel that weaves stories of national upheavals with those of Louisa, her Korean Japanese father, Serk, and Anne, her American mother. Evolving from the uncertainties surrounding Serk’s disappearance, it is a riveting exploration of identity, hidden truths, race, and national belonging. In this ambitious book that deftly criss-crosses continents and decades, Susan Choi balances historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance. We admired the shifts and layers of Flashlight’s narrative, which ultimately reveal a story that is intricate, surprising, and profound.”

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Judges’ citation: ”This novel about Indians in America becomes one about westernised Indians rediscovering their country, and in some ways a novel about the Indian novel’s place in the world. Vast and immersive, the book enfolds a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story. We loved the way in which no detail, large or small, seems to escape Desai’s attention, every character (in a huge cast) feels fully realised, and the writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.”

Audition by Katie Kitamura
Judges’ citation: ”This novel begins with an actress meeting a young man in a Manhattan restaurant. A surprising, unsettling conversation unfolds, but far more radical disturbances are to come. Aside from the extraordinarily honed quality of its sentences, the remarkable thing about Audition is the way it persists in the mind after reading, like a knot that feels tantalisingly close to coming free. Denying us the resolution we instinctively crave from stories, Kitamura takes Chekhov’s dictum — that the job of the writer is to ask questions, not answer them – and runs with it, presenting a puzzle, the solution to which is undoubtedly obscure, and might not even exist at all.”

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits
Judges’ citation: ”When Tom Layward’s wife cheated on him, he stayed for the children but promised to leave when his youngest turned eighteen. Twelve years later, Tom drops his daughter off at college, but instead of driving back to New York he heads west. What follows is a remarkably satisfying road trip full of strangers, friends, and self-discovery. It’s clear author Ben Markovits has spent time teaching. This novel speaks like a much-loved professor, one whose classes have a terribly long waitlist. It’s matter of fact, effortlessly warm, and it uses the smallest parts of human behaviour to uphold bigger themes, like mortality, sickness, and love. The Rest of Our Lives is a novel of sincerity and precision. We found it difficult to put it down.”

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Judges’ citation: ”In the depths of Britain’s coldest winter, two neighbouring women forge a friendship in the countryside. It’s 1962 and they have both just become pregnant. Around them, the men are struggling: maimed by father figures, haunted by the past, hampered by the destructiveness of their own desires. As a winter storm wreaks havoc on their lives, these characters become pivotal figures in a community precariously balanced between history and future: between the damage wrought by the war and the freedom for women that lies ahead. In beautifully atmospheric prose, Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history.”

Flesh by David Szalay
Judges’ citation: ”David Szalay’s fifth 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.”

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.

The Threshold and the Ledger by Tom McCarthy $32
Since her death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit — or boundary — state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann's centenary year, McCarthy's book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself. [Paperback]
”A dizzying invitation to explore the poetry and prose of German author Ingeborg Bachmann. McCarthy’s work is an invigorating and inspiring incantation: Readers will not only marvel at how the author reads but also at his ability to articulate that experience into something both erudite and accessible.” —Kirkus
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Style is also substance.

So in the Spruce Forest by Ali Smith $45
Then the voice from nowhere carried on talking about Munch, like my mother of all people knew about Munch, like she knew I was looking at a picture right now, like she knew about the power crisis and the international unrest and the climate ruination in a world she'd left thirty years ago. Like she knew it all.
In Ali Smith's So in the Spruce Forest, the author's deceased mother returns as a persistent voice, intent on sharing with her daughter insights into Edvard Munch's intense renderings of trees and stones charged with life. Through an imaginative essayistic format, Smith weaves together probing visual analyses, personal stories and reflections on ecology and politics, linking Munch's art to both the present moment and other realities. With 20 colour artworks by Edvard Munch. [Cloth-bound hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>So much more than ‘The Scream’.

Kings of this World by Elizabeth Knox $30
When Vex and her friends are kidnapped and held to ransom it sets off a terrifying chain of twists and turns as they struggle to survive and try to find a way to escape. Vex is used to people being afraid of her power, the ability to persuade others to do what she wants. But when she arrives at a new school, it is packed with people who have the same power, and who might even like her. There is her roommate Ronnie, a coolheaded high achiever; and Ronnie's friend Taye, who is recovering from a brain injury. There is witty, lordly Hannu, whose father happens to be a billionaire. And then there's Ari: troubled, blessed, honourable, terrifying Ari. Vex is enchanted by her new friends when, five weeks into term one, they are kidnapped. They find themselves chained in the basement of an abandoned factory, trying to figure out how to escape, all the while tormented by questions like: Why were they taken? Why do the kidnappers seem to hate Vex, and at the same time want to recruit her? Can Vex and her friends save themselves? And if they do, will they ever feel safe again? What kind of reckoning will they face afterwards? And will Vex once again feel responsible for all the bad things that happened? Knox’s gripping new YA novel is full of ideas, speculations and pivotal experiences. [Paperback]
”Elizabeth Knox's Kings of This World is at once a boarding school story, a crime thriller, and a complex fantasy, all shaped by the star-busting imagination of a singular mind. It's a brilliant return to the Southland of Dreamhunter and Mortal Fire, with both a new era and an expanded world, sure to attract a new generation of fans.” —Rachael King
”The world is lucky to have Elizabeth Knox. Once again she's given us an entirely unique, thrilling, deeply thoughtful book that is alive with P for precision. Kings of this World is a thrilling return to the world of Southland where questions of power are entangled with questions of volition, and questions of seclusion, and questions of fear. Knox's young adult characters are alive, electrifying and as nuanced and complex as their readers are. A punchy addition to the genre of dark academia: sleek, unwavering and unputdownable.” —Claire Mabey
”Any new Elizabeth Knox novel feels like breaking into the house of a great enchanter, only to hear the front door lock behind you, as you realise you have stumbled upon something much deeper and more dangerous than you bargained for. Kings of This World is magic at its deepest. A psychologically forensic campus thriller, which keeps you guessing until the very last page. P for perfection.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
>>Both dangerous and dreamy.

The Deserters by Mathias Énard (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell) $37
A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness — he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald.The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and — pulled together in Mathias Énard's enchanting, brilliant, erudite prose — time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the immense stakes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival. [Paperback with French flaps]
”All of Énard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age.” —Joshua Cohen
>>Walking on two legs.
>>The time of return.

Gertrude Stein: An afterlife by Francesca Wade $45
”Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,” wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding — and contested — writers of the twentieth century. In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography — a veritable celebrity. Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories — especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible. This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human. [Hardback]
"Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life." —Sheila Heti
"Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope." —Tom McCarthy
>>Devotion to the cut.
>>Charlatan or genius?
>>Not everyone got the joke.

That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi (translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney) $28
Nineteen-year-old Lea is from a village that is out of time, out of jobs and out of hope. She and her friends, however, are vivid and electric with life. They yearn, they dance, they fuck, they fight. And around them, a world that isn't quite our own vibrates with strangeness and threat. Now Lea is here, sitting on a bench, telling a silent stranger her life story. Because yesterday, change was finally unavoidable. A novel of rural entrapment and coming of age, Elisa Levi's That's All I Know bears the traces of Beckett and Lorca, rings with the echo of folktales and has a fierce, unapologetic vitality at its heart. Startlingly odd and deeply moving, it is the work of a profound and singular talent. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Funny and strange, quirky and heartbreaking, voice-driven and philosophical, magical and very real. As Little Lea tells her tale of family, home, and the end of the world, she casts a quiet spell over me.” —Rebekah Bergman
”A brilliant feat of authorial control; Elisa Levi has created a devastating delight.” —Maya Binyam
”A book about the inability to leave the place where you were born. It reminded me of Miguel Delibes's The Way and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. it is very beautiful.” —Miqui Otero

The Possession by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Anna Moschovakis) $25
”The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city — the whole world — with a person you may never have met.” These first words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of her need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved's life. Ernaux's writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive. Being numb is worse than being in agony.” —Genevieve Gaunt, The Spectator
”The most intimate human experiences — grief, greed, fear, sickness and lust, along with other kinds of private ‘primordial savagery’ — are laid bare throughout the prolific French author's works, sometimes in shudderingly explicit detail, and The Possession is no exception. Far from seeming dated, this tiny tome is even more pertinent in our digital age, capturing the exact feeling brought on by a social media algorithm producing the precise thing you want to ignore.” —Ceci Browning, The Times
”Raw and resonant, Annie Ernaux's newly translated novella The Possession offers up a stream of fixations and divulgences that the narrator treats with utmost openness. Ernaux creates a voyeuristic world that briefly but totally immerses readers and shares a piece of herself through the primary emotion that drives this book: jealousy. Through a stream of confessions and recollections, Ernaux weaves experiences of obsession, addiction and insecurity into the human fabric of being.” —Maria Farsoon, The Skinny
>>Other remarkable books by Ernaux.

Mad World: The politics of mental health by Micha Frazer-Carroll $31
Mental health affects us all, and yet it remains elusive as a concept. Does getting a diagnosis help or hinder? How is mental wellbeing, which is often incredibly personal, driven by widespread societal suffering? Can it be a social construct and real at the same time? These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be a political issue that needs deeper understanding beyond today's 'awareness raising' campaigns. Exploring the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability and broader liberation movements; alternative models of care; the relationship between art and mental health; law and the decarceration of mental health, Mad World is a radical and hopeful antidote to pathologisation, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination. [Paperback]
”Wow! An honest, urgent and lovingly researched invitation to rethink our assumptions about madness. Mad World is an invaluable toolkit, not just for dismantling oppressive health structures, but for building the systems of care we desperately need. This book is a gift and that gift is hope.” — Aisha Mirza
”An urgent introduction to a new radical politics of mental health which embraces the messy, unruly nature of our collective vulnerability and interdependence. Frazer-Carroll exposes the underlying truth that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with our wellbeing. Mad World teaches us how to transform the ways we understand madness, illness, and disability to build a better world.” —Beatrice Adler-Bolton
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A lot of baggage.

The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to dismantle systems of oppression to protect people + planet by Leah Thomas $28
We cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard. Leah Thomas coined the term 'intersectional environmentalism' to describe the inextricable link between climate change, activism, racism and privilege. The fight for the planet should go hand in hand with the fight for civil rights. In fact, one cannot exist without the other. This book is a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all and a pledge to work toward the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet — an indispensable primer for activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive and sustainable change. Driven by Leah Thomas's expert voice and complemented by the words of young activists from around the globe, it is essential reading on the issue — and the movement — that will define a generation.
[New paperback edition]

Mohua Gold: The history of the Golden Bay goldfields, 1864—1880 by Mike Johnston $100
Mohua Gold is the second of the planned three volumes providing a comprehensive account of the history of the western Nelson goldfields. This volume documents the small-scale diggings in both the Aorere and Takaka valleys. It also covers the advent of reef mining, a largely speculative boom with several promising leads but ultimately mostly proved to yield disappointing returns. The on-going exploration of the rugged hinterland is well outlined, with much of this being the search for a new goldfield. The better fortunes of gold seekers in the Maori-owned Te Tai Tapu, particularly at the Golden Ridge Mine, are documented. This enterprise was developed by the miners themselves rather than by companies based in Nelson or further afield. Other chapters detail the efforts to find a payable coalfield in the western bay, which culminated in the formation of the Parapara Iron and Coal Company and their ambitious plans to create a major industrial complex. This work is the product of over 25 years research and writing, and is generously illustrated with both old black and white and contemporary colour photographs, along with colour paintings, drawings and a wide range of maps. [Paperback with French flaps]

The Kerfuffle by Clotilde Perrin $33
A picture book in which flaps and die-cuts tell a story about getting on together. Kitty and Pup were happy living next door until a misunderstanding caused a real kerfuffle! Now they can't stand each other any longer so start to build a wall between their gardens. The wall goes up and up and up. One day a funny rabbit pops its head over. But whose garden will this new friend play in? Here’s another cause for chaos between neighbors! Finally a better idea for how to use the bricks finds three happy friends sharing the garden after all — until some pigs move in next door… [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other fun books by Clotilde Perrin.

A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

On the Calculation of Volume II

Granta #152

Hiding Places

The Yield

Perfection

Still Life with Remorse

Night Train

Pretty Ugly

Interiors

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

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26 September 2025

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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.

• What to make of the mother who made you.

• A fugitive childhood.

• All of us, everywhere.

• “I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either.”

• Roy reads.

• The mother of big things.

• Perpetually at war with her children.

• From rebel roots to global voice.

• You mustn’t pretend you didn’t know.

• Books by Arundhati Roy.

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.

Books may burn but no book is to be burnt.
A selection from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

Catching Fire

Never Did the Fire

The Burning River

Land of Smoke

A Fire in the Belly of Hineāmaru

Money to Burn

Te Ahi Kā

Panthers and the Museum of Fire

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19 September 2025

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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

• Look inside!

• What the PANZ Book Design Awards judges thought of the book.

• Visit Studio Katie Kerr.

• The other winners at the 2025 PANZ Book Design Awards.

• Carefully exclusionary

• Blind spots and sight lines — an art history

• Polyphonic

• Impressive spotlight

• The contents

• What could be lost.

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!

For adults:

Ngā Hapa Reo

Matapēhi

Tātai Whetū

Poto

Tūmahi Māori

Te Āhua o ngā Kupu Whakaari o Te Kooti

Te Hua o te Reo Māori

Ngā Pēpeha o ngā Tīpuna

For tamariki:

Te Rā

Hineraukatauri me te Ara Pūoro

Ko Whetū Toa me te Tangata Tūmatarau

Mihi

He Taonga te Toka

Tiare Tangaroa me te Taipō Moana

Taku Puka Tohutao Tuatahi

Te Pukapuka ka Kore e Pānuihia

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.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our latest newsletter!

12 September 2025

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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. 

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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:

• Insider/outsider.

• Read an extract.

• A general crisis in the idea of progress.

• Does he really want anything or is he told what he should want?

• A living body in the world.

• Read the third chapter.

• Acknowledging failure.