Please join us our upcoming online discussions of these interesting, well-written books.
Attendance is free if you have bought the book from us (otherwise tickets are $10). Books can be sent to you by overnight courier or collected from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
11 August 2026: TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King). Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.
Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading (put the coffee machine on).
5 June 2026
All attempts to understand the world involve the assembly of fragments into forms.
We feel threatened by experience so we anesthetise ourselves to it through representation.
Story may strive to comprehend experience but more importantly story’s purpose is to make us safe.
Story relieves us of experience by replacing it with narrative.
Memory is a species of narrative. Probably a native species.
Through memory, experience is neither reached nor left behind.
Story has a natural tendency towards schmaltz and is rendered in much the same way.
It is hard for story to resist cliché. But it might be possible.
The search for the particular results in the disintegration of forms.
Experience moves counterclockwise to understanding.
A trauma is misrepresented by forms. Trauma cannot be understood. Trauma is not tragedy.
Trauma is respected only by fragments.
Democracy of detail is preserved in the absence of form. Even though there is no such thing as the absence of form.
Everything is infected by whatever touches it. Could this give rise to a form?
[I found these fourteen notes scrawled on a piece of paper in what seems to be my handwriting in the back of my copy of Erin Vincent’s 14 Ways of Looking. Plausibly, they might be notes I made when reading the book, perhaps intended towards a review. The book, composed of fragments, demonstrates how the death of Vincent’s parents when she was fourteen invested that number with such associative trauma that she still cannot help finding everywhere examples of misfortune connected with it, sometimes directly, sometimes more tenuously. Maybe fourteen is just a bad number. It is impossible to tell how many of these misfortunes are only found by looking.]
If you’re ready to discover new biscuit recipes and fill your tins, then Crumbs: Cookies and Sweets from Around the World will extend your knowledge and please your taste buds. Filling our tin right now are a batch of Maltese Christening Cookies/Biskuttini tar-Rahal. Both delicate and robust these aniseed and caraway seed mouthfuls are perfect with coffee in the evening and the light lemon icing makes them a refreshing choice for morning or afternoon tea. Organised geographically, this book is packed with 300 authentic recipes from 100 countries, from Azerbaijan to Laos to Wales. There are Scandanavian and Middle Eastern treats, Belgian biscuits and shortbread goodness. The introduction sets out what is a cookie, all the tools for making good biscuits, and tips and hints that will take your baking to the next cookie level. While there are American cup measurements, there are also metric weights and following these makes for the best biscuit dough (useful when using our slightly heavier flour). The food photography is reassuring. This is home cooking. The recipes are easy to follow, and while there are some recipes that might require a special ingredient, most are pantry staples. I’m ready to explore Stuffed Maghrebu Loaf Cookies from Tunisia and the ‘Snow White’ Crescent Cookies from Indonesia, as well as perfect sesame rings from the Levant which are packed with fennel or anise seeds. So whether you enjoy cinnamon spiced biscuits, crisp biscotti or chocolate-dipped morsels, there’s a world of choices and plenty of tins to fill or gifts to share. Crumbs unites the world with its similarities across borders and highlights the specific ingredients and particular methods that give each biscuit a home.
In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath’s death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who’ve fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy, but mitigates systemic failure with humanity and courage.
Winner of the 2026 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Judges’ citation: “The panel praised the book’s sensitive yet subversive portrayal of immigrant life in London and the banal cruelty of the British state’s treatment of asylum seekers under austerity. We loved its distinctive narrative voice, which continually wrongfoots the reader’s assumptions, and were impressed by its skilful combination of British and Egyptian literary sensibilities, especially a shared affinity for the satirical and absurd. Lewis is a master of tone, shifting with apparent ease between the poignant and the comic, with the book’s mercurial qualities rendered capably into English in Halls’s wonderful translation.”
”I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It's written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.” —Hisham Matar
”Shady Lewis makes fun of everything and everyone with great humanity: we become attached to these characters who are more lost than crazy, who do what they can keep going. Lewis, with scathing humour and a healthy lightness of touch, examines everything: from the god Khnum to Margaret Thatcher via Karl Marx, freedom of expression, Facebook, romantic breakups, colonization, identity and religious tensions — nothing escapes his acerbic and lucid gaze. A delicious tragicomic novel about contemporary society.” —Nina Chastel, Orient XXI
”This introspective novel delights with its finesse and depth, and invites us to look at reality from the author's sensitive perspective. In painfully beautiful, funny and tragic prose, Shady Lewis skilfully and accurately expresses the difficulty of being excluded and stigmatised because of their difference.” —Nadia Leila Aissaoui, l'Orient litteraire
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Work of Angels by Anisha Sankar $35
The Work of Angels is a meditation on sex, the celestial, and the spectre of communism. These appear where history and subject don’t quite meet; here, the lover (a worker, child, philosopher of history, mystic-astronomer) speaks to her other through a language made possible by losses, thefts, and the wars that constitute politics. Desire—the etymology of which is something like of the stars—is inaugurated by these planetary negations, setting into orbit a conspiracy between romance and exploitation, mysticism and violence, prophecy and ordinary inertia. [Paperback]
Anisha Sankar is Chennai-born and Te Awakairangi-raised. She lives in Toronto, where she’s completing her PhD. She is a member of Al-Rifaq, a Pōneke-based collective that translates and publishes contemporary political analysis produced by the revolutionary currents of Palestine and the Arab world. With Emma Blackett, she is writing a book elaborating a Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of the subject. The Work of Angels is her first book of poetry.
“Like Clarice Lispector and Aimé Césaire before her, Anisha Sankar twirls history, myth, and ordinary relation into a shining wing that hovers above the void. Elegant, intelligent, and tender, this book does something that only poetry can do.” —Sholto Buck, author of Light Film (Pilot Press, 2025)
Granta 174: Therapy edited by Thomas Meaney $37
When Sigmund Freud died, Auden wrote ‘he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion’. Something similar could be said for therapy today. We live in a therapeutic age. It is generally accepted that the world of subconsciousness plays into all of our thoughts and actions, and that, in the hands of experts, it can be directed along more fruitful pathways. But as a science and a practice, therapy has always been fraught with dilemmas and crises. It has been bound up with power and manipulation, though its finest practitioners and participants counter that it contributes to human liberation. This issue of Granta explores all of these dimensions of therapy. Featuring non-fiction by Jesse Barron, Dushko Petrovich Córdova, Sheila Heti, Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Keegan and Deborah Levy. New fiction by Camilla Grudova, Benjamin Kunkel, Anne Serre and Missouri Williams. Conversations between Christopher Bollas and Granta, Juliet Mitchell and Lidija Haas, and Jonathan Lear and Benjamin Y. Fong. Art and photography by Louise Bourgeois, Rinko Kawauchi, Musuk Nolte (introduced by Guadalupe Nettel) and Nigel Shafran. Poetry by Olive Franklin, Robert Hass, Victor Heringer and Natalie Shapero. [Paperback]
>>The animal side of life.
>>Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings.
What We Remember, What We Forget: A memoir in memory by Siobhan Harvey $35
”We are our memories. They are a repository of our lives.” What We Remember, What We Forget is a personal narrative and poignant meditation on the power and peril of remembering — as well as of forgetting. Moving between childhood, early adulthood, imagination and the present, Harvey writes with honest intimacy about trauma, family and queerness; harm, silence and survival. Interweaving life story with reflections on philosophy and psychology, Harvey considers how memory both wounds and sustains, and how it may be safely carried so as to create the life one wants. Elegantly written, this is a powerful work about attention, language and the hard but fruitful labour of understanding. What We Remember, What We Forget asks: how should we retrieve our memories, and how can we trust what we find? “Memory is a creative endeavour: memory, the director’s cut; memory, a book of collected poems; memory, an exhibition of curated portraits; memory, a Surrealist retrospective.” [Paperback]
”The work is less autobiography and more a mosaic of fractured glimpses that catch the light as Harvey privately studies them. The experience feels less like witnessing a final version of a story, where every word and emotion have been decisively fixed in place, but observing the process of shifting and rearranging memories, constructing meaning and selfhood, and attempts at healing in action. The result is deeply intimate, vulnerable, and painful, at times almost overwhelmingly so.” —Sara Bucher, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
Immortal Thoughts by Christopher Neve $28
”Painting exists and exults in immortal thoughts.” —William Blake. In 2020, as the spread of Covid-19 causes pandemonium worldwide, an elderly artist returns to his childhood home to watch the transcendent beauty of the seasons and reflect on the final work of the artists he most admires. It seems to him that in their final art works — their late style — that they have something remarkable in common. This has more to do with intuition and memory than with rationality or reason and comes from trying to write about painting itself. Immortal Thoughts is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with short accounts of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that are closely intertwined. From Cézanne's last watercolours to Michelangelo's final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists' late ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context of Time and mortality. As much art history as a discussion of great art in the context of the Dance of Death, Neve writes with renewed passion about Bonnard, Michelangelo, Morandi, Poussin, Soutine and many others in his distinctive style. Introduction by John Banville. [Paperback]
”Completely and utterly marvellous.” —Max Porter
”From Titian and Michelangelo to Cezanne and Soutine, from Velazquez and Chardin to Bonnard and Pissarro, Neve sketches out the final periods of artists' lives in lilting, lyrical prose. His painterly style, his eye for detail and colour, is all the more powerful for the way that he juxtaposes it with the news of the outside world. His approach amounts to a kind of emotional ekphrasis.” —Times Literary Supplement
Pepeha Portal by Ariana Tikau $30
Rooted in Kai Tahu identity, the collection chronicles a homecoming and offers a moving account of memory, place and belonging. Born and raised in Otautahi Christchurch, Tikao left the city after the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In 2023 she was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury and returned to live in a place that was both deeply familiar and astonishingly new. Written largely during this period, Pepeha Portal is shaped by stories embedded in the landscape - many long erased by colonialism and only recently exposed by cultural, as much as geological, shifts. Responding to suburban landscapes and tipuna places, personal memory and ancestral voice, Pepeha Portal considers how language, whakapapa and whenua act as portals to belonging. [Paperback]
”There’s breathtaking scope and emotional depth in this collection, so much whakapapa wisdom, and finely hued poetry. He taoka toikupu.” —Robert Sullivan, New Zealand Poet Laureate
”Tikao sees the world from a clear and compelling Māori perspective. Pepeha Portal is one of the most polished and forthright poetry collections I have seen for years.” —Nicholas Reid, NZ Listener
E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett $35
The debut collection of poetry from Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) is a series of goodbyes and attempts to slow the shedding. It's a group of teenagers sparking up as they watch the great Pacific garbage patch catapult into space and become a second moon, it's endless conversations with Grandmama about stars, it is the constant rebirth of whakapapa and learning that silence isn’t the best part of her. [Paperback]
The Typing Lady, And other fictions by Ruth Ozeki $40
A story collection about the lives we almost lived, the people we can't quite forget, and the stories that shape us. A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife's ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, railing against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter's romantic life — and sets in motion a deception she can't control. Spanning eras and geographies, The Typing Lady is a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we become. [Paperback]
”Delightful, moving, and profound, The Typing Lady is a book of love stories of every kind. It is a book of great treasures.” —Lily King
Tupaia, Captain Cook, and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A material history edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll $74
Centring priest and navigator Tupaia and Pacific worldviews, this richly illustrated volume weaves a new set of cultural histories in the Pacific, between local islanders and the crew of the Endeavour on James Cook's first 'voyage of discovery' (1768-1771). Contributors consider material collections brought back from the voyage, paying particular attention to Tupaia's drawings, maps, cloth and clothes, and the attending narratives that framed Britain's engagement with Pacific peoples. Bringing together indigenous and Pacific-based artists, scholars, historians, theorists and tailors, this book presents a cross-cultural conversation around the concepts of acquired and curated artefacts that traversed oceans and entwined cultures. Each chapter draws attention to a particular material, object or process to reveal fresh insights on the voyage, the societies it brought together and the histories it transformed. Authors also explore animal iconography, instruments and ethnomusicology, and performances and rituals. This work challenges colonial museum collections and celebrations of Cook's voyages, using materials old and new to make connections between past and present, whilst reinforcing Tupaia's agency as both a historical figure and a contemporary muse. Tracing overlapping folds of symbolism, this book draws together a picture of the diverse materials and people at the centre of cultural exchange. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
”The book provides an enlightening alternative prism through which we can rediscover the Pacific agency in Tupaia, beyond the gaze of the dominant colonial history, which often revolves around Captain Cook's view of the world. It is a must-read collection of narratives woven together into an intellectually illuminating tapestry of cultural history with a strong Pacific flavour. A highly recommended text.” —Steven Ratuva, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
”This rich and wonderful book exemplifies the explosion of research, reflection and creative practice around European maritime exploration over the last thirty years. Building especially on the work of Anne Salmond, commemorative studies of celebrity navigators such as Captain Cook have been succeeded by critical inquiry into cross-cultural voyaging, the deep histories of collecting, projects to return artefacts from institutions such as the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge to Australia, Aotearoa and Tahiti, and art practices that re-imagine encounters towards postcolonial futures. The Society Islands priest, artist and navigator Tupaia has been at the heart of these studies. This book offers a key set of debates and contributions that will be widely valued.” —Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK
”This set of essays does not result in a history, nor in a re-evaluation of previous histories but instead it is a tapestry of relations, of conversations and reflections on the Ra'iatean navigator Tupaia. This contemporary engagement with Tupaia redresses thin colonial understandings of his role with layers of social fabric that emerge from the multivocality of the volume's authors, including established and emerging artists, scholars, filmmakers and composers. From multiple vantage points, the authors reveal that the strength of material culture, in this case the cloaks of Tupaia and Cook, is in their relationship to the intangible, the cross-temporal, the sonic, the performative, and how these make kin of all involved.” —Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Director of the Bill Holm Center, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and Associate Professor of Native Art, University of Washington, USA
The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: a history of collaboration by Stephan Malinowski $50
The disappearance of the Hohenzollern family from the history of Germany in November 1918 as the Kaiser fled into Dutch exile is one of the most startling, rapid instances of a once all-powerful royal family becoming almost overnight irrelevant and marginal. Except this is not exactly what happened. Stephan Malinowski's book is an extraordinary work of recovery. It suited both the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to view the Hohenzollerns with contempt, and yet the royal family's hatred of the former and approval of the latter were for millions of Germans a significant factor in their own view of their country and its government. With forensic and often shocking detail, Malinowski shows that, far from being ridiculous, marginal figures the Hohenzollerns lay at the heart of Germany's ongoing nightmare. Despite formally losing power, the members of the royal family remained prominent, catastrophically allowing many other conservative Germans to stay distanced from the new republic and to eventually betray conservative traditions and values. Battered from both left and right, the Republic collapsed in 1933 in part because conservative forces, fearful of both Communism and Fascism, had abandoned their own principles just as much as the leading members of former royal family had, who were themselves beguiled by and fooled by Hitler. This is an important and shocking book, as well as a devastating picture of an inadequate and trivial royal family painfully underequipped to fulfil its role. [Paperback]
”A highly detailed and scrupulously researched book. Malinowksi's work is a near-masterpiece, relating a story not synthesised in this way before, and about which any number of self-serving myths exist. He presents a devastating case why, with regards to their conduct during the Third Reich, the Hohenzollerns were the authors of their own misfortune.” —Simon Heffer
Lipstick by Eileen G'Sell $23
From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself. Who wears lipstick today as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous and contentious tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Brilliant, biting, and irresistibly stylish, Lipstick treats beauty as the serious subject that it is. With deep insight, lyrical precision, and humor, Eileen G'Sell examines how painted lips expose the tensions between conformity and self-expression, beauty standards and personal agency. Less a book about makeup, and more about what we make of ourselves, this is cultural criticism at its most relatable and relevant.” —Zahra Hankir
”What if pigmented wax was one of humanity's oldest technologies of honesty? In this homage to the form, Eileen G'Sell gives us a lipstick for all. Her elegant book not only lays out the cultural evolution of the object, but points to the expansively feminist ethics and latently utopian politics of colorful mouths. Pucker up, dive in, and dispel your femmephobia today.” —Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.
Pasta for the People: A joyful cookbook for pasta lovers by Imogen Royall $45
Pasta is comfort — easy, familiar, endlessly satisfying. But too often we get stuck in the loop of the same recipes: a trusty bolognese, a jar of pesto, the reliable carbonara. What if pasta could be more? This book is an invitation to rethink pasta: to explore fresh flavours, global influences, and unexpected pairings that bring new joy to the table.This cookbook shares many of Imogen Royall’s recipes alongside favourites from celebrated chefs and food creators, including: Max La Manna's Zesty Radiatori Summer Salad, Olia Hercules's Rigatoni from Napoli via Genoa & Odesa, Izzie Cox's Miso Gochujang Pumpkin Rigatoni, Helen Graham's Tomato & Tamarind Gigli, Tom Jackson's Slow-cooked Courgette Casarecce, Saliha Khan's Desi Meema Rigatoni. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Try a few of the recipes.
A selection of books present on our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Dog Days by Emily LaBarge $48
Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident's aftermath. Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences — from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch — LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative. Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving. [Paperback]
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous, and totally original." —Olivia Laing
"Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound." —Lynne Tillman
"Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we've read, what we've seen, and what we've survived." —Anne Boyer
"Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious." —Deborah Levy
"Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself. LaBarge demonstrates that trauma entails its own mystical mode of reading, in which words and images become imbued with supra-rational connection and significance.” —Daisy Lafarge, Frieze
>>What narrative can and can’t do.
>>Refusing ‘The Good Story’.
>>The ordinary extraordinary event.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $38
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>On food, power and structure.
>>Listen to translator Lin King.
>>A Reading.
>>Read an Extract.
>>Author Q&A.
>>The Meta Process.
>>Also available in this edition.
Ghost Stories, A memoir by Siti Hustvedt $40
Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul's cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing — the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1st January 2024. The result is the story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on. [Paperback]
”She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf.” —Literary Review
”All love stories must end as ghost stories. So we are reminded in Siri Hustvedt's tremendously moving portrait of a man, a marriage, and the joys and sorrows of a shared artistic life. Love and grief lie, inseparable, on every page. This is essential reading from an all-time great.” —Sara Collins
”Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared: a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature. For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost.” —Robert McCrum
”Hustvedt is a writer of astonishing range and depth. It seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds. Auster comes across here perfectly as he was: smart, funny, caustic, loving, idealistic — exasperated to the last by the politics of his native land. Hustvedt (who always looks so cool in her photographs, even when not dressed in a jumpsuit) reveals the nerves that co-exist with her grit and wisdom. The delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love: love of life, love of the world, love of family. Ghost Stories deserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know — we all know — are yet to come.” —Erica Wagner, Observer
>>Double tragedy and diagnosis.
>>What exactly is a self?
>>Writing in the first person seems to be therpeutic.
Men in the Sun, And other Palestinian stories by Ghassan Kanafani (translated from Arabic by Hilary Kilpatrick) $27
First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature, and of what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'. Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Their driver, a jaded, fat, former freedom fighter, living with his own compromises and contradictions, makes for a garrulous if cavalier companion. Both the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun see that things grow steadily more stark. The author's ardent politics are apparent throughout, but the novella's characters are their own beings — ambivalent, conflicted creatures of context. While breezily conversational, with disarming, dreamy strokes of lyricism, this short novel delivers a shuddering and grounding dose of true horror. As well as the titular novella, the book features six short stories, including the timelessly resonant 'Letter From Gaza' , Kanafani's first published work, written when he twenty, and the essential 'The Land of Sad Oranges'. [Paperback]
”One of Palestine's foremost intellectuals and leaders. Kanafani's universalism and commitment to Palestine will eternally serve as a model.” —Ilan Pappe
”Every now and then in a reading life you pick up a book that leaves an inexpressible imprint on your head and heart. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is one.” —The Irish Independent
Landfall Tauraka 251 edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
Alongside the finest new writing, art and reviews from across the motu, Landfall Tauraka 251 announces the winner of the Landfall Tauraka Young Writers' Essay Prize, an annual competition that encourages emerging writers to explore the world around them through words. ART: Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith; FICTION: Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright; NON-FICTION: Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan; POETRY: Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright; REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb. [Paperback]
“In an age where we are channeled content via the overlords of the internet, picking up a print copy of Aotearoa’s Landfall Tauraka right now feels like an act of subversion. It’s a quiet act of participation against the dopamine delivering machines we clutch. Somehow, nearly 80 years on from its inception — in today’s testy climate of eyeball harvesting — Landfall’s spring edition, edited by Lynley Edmeades (with a new name Landfall Tauraka) not only pulls this off, but it does so very well. It is dense. It is modern. It contains some of the best of Aotearoa’s new and not so new writers.” —Claris Harvey, Kete
The Odyssey by Homer (a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn) $38
Setting aside the streamlining, modernising approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn reproduces the epic's formal qualities — meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance. His expansive six-beat line, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer's verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result conveys the original’s oral poetics while also bringing to life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer's work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. [Paperback]
”Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically. The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus's heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I've ever read.” —Edith Hall, The Telegraph
”Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they they are looking for.” —A. E. Stallings, The Times Literary Supplement
>>c.f. Emily Wilson’s translation.
Childish Palate by Shariff Burke $32
Childish Palate follows a cast of outsiders in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, searching for hope in a country caught in an identity crisis. A philosophy student makes a striking proposal to the imam of the Kilbirnie mosque; flatmates ignite a flame over a bowl of chicken ginseng soup; an office worker finds a sense of purpose in the brightly lit aisles of Thorndon New World. Across eleven stories, Shariff Burke wrestles with possibility, ignorance and the ways we compromise in order to survive. Childish Palate savours the richness and warmth of community, rejecting easy answers about whose tastes should define our world. [Paperback]
>>Charmed from the very first sentence.
>>This is the real red pill.
The Baker’s Percentage: The simple formula for making perfect sourdough bread at home by Mara Ripani $55
The Baker's Percentage is a formula developed by bread bakers to allow them to create any bread. From a pure white sourdough to a hundred per cent whole wheat loaf. With it, bakers can scale up or down, from one loaf to many and can choose to speed up or slow down fermentation according to their daily commitments. It is completely liberating, yet most home bakers have never heard of it. Unlike making a cake, sourdough bread recipes do not require a strict list of ingredients with precise measurements. It is a process that can be 'felt'. It is malleable. Enter the baker's percentage: a simple set of parameters that allow you to bake bread using one of multiple pathways. With chapters on Flour, Starters & Leaven, Mixing & Kneading, Bulk Fermentation, Dividing, Shaping & Proofing, Baking, and more, this is a thoroughly comprehensive guide to baking bread, whatever way takes your fancy. The Baker's Percentage is unlike any other cookbook. There are no recipes (except fot in a section at the end!). Instead, it encourages the reader to bake bread with confidence, according to their own needs and schedule. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest $38
They were coming back to life. They were free and getting freer. Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind. The past is accelerating towards them- the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne's block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there. Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different. Tempest's first novel in a decade, Having Spent Life Seeking is about family and forgiveness; redemption and atonement; desire and abandon; selfhood and community. The things we seek when we are hiding, and what finds us, if we can let ourselves be seen. [Paperback]
”Kae Tempest brings into the literary realm that which others choose to leave outside. This is a remarkable act of literary bravery. If books can still change the world, this one most likely will. Narrative-driven, stuffed with soul, brimming with brokenness, rife with repair, this is a book for our splintered times. In Tempest's hands, redemption travels faster than the speed of light.” —Colum McCann
”An authentically soothing, powerful thought-provoker.” —Matt Haig
”A truth-speaker.” —Max Porter
”Powerful and merciful.” —Ali Smith
Childhood: A memoir of growing up, parenting, teaching, and discovering what children need most by Brendan James Murray $38
Brendan Murray redefines memoir in this haunting excavation of his own experiences as a child, teacher and parent to discover why imagination is so important throughout our lives. Brendan James Murray's childhood was one of stark contrasts: vivid imaginative adventures but also disadvantage, fear and the shadow of a school he spent months refusing to attend. When a silhouette on a freeway overpass forces him to confront the ghosts of his own childhood, he has a defining realisation about the extraordinary power of imagination to transform lives, and the degree to which it has been neglected. Childhood is a deeply personal investigation into how we can help children find their place in the world, drawn from Murray's perspective as a child, teacher and parent. This haunting, uplifting memoir is a must-read for everyone seeking to understand how the crucial and overlooked absence of a rich inner life in childhood echoes through all our adult years. [Paperback]
Remarkable Animals: 1000 amazing algamations by Tony Meeuwissen $30
One of the most ingenious mix-and-match books ever devised. Based on ten real-life animals, each described in words as well as pictures, it offers 1,000 fantastic variations. Just flip the split pages and see ten remarkable animals become 1,000 crazy creatures, taking on new names and astonishing new identities as their heads, bodies and tails are swapped around. Huge fun. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>It goes like this!
Read out latest newsletter.
29 May 2026
Frank doesn’t like the dark. He’s not so keen on annoying little brothers and not great at sports. He likes books and he likes Alice, his next door neighbour. Apart from Alice and her sweet dog Woof, Frank doesn’t have any friends. He’s shy. So there aren’t many guests at his birthday party, but something unexpected happens when Frank offers the small dog some cake. Woof nips Frank’s finger. The cake is devoured, despite the single drop of blood spreading through the icing. Later…Frank has a dream that he’s runing through the forest on all fours! Waking up he sees muddy footprints all over his bedroom floor. Strange! And things get stranger. Frank’s the monster. A very sweet shaggy white furry monster. One that expands in the mind of the townsfolk to a sharp-toothed, massive-clawed howling terror. Things come to a head one day when Frank heads for the beach sniffing out some delcious food and you guessed it, he’s in his monster form. A part of Frank knows he’s heading towards danger. The townsfolk are ready to capture the ‘terrible monster’, but Frank makes an escape with the help of some unexpected new friends. Here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn. There are new friends to be made, and a watchful owl to meet. A golden key and a library of surprises are sure to play a bigger part in the next two books in this charming series. Mats Strandberg is a writer of horror and mystery for adults and children, and the story moves along with pace when action demands it and as well as quiet interludes for Frank’s reflective thoughts on his situation. There are familar settings as well as the unexpected underworld, humour to keep a young reader hooked and just the right amount of ‘scary’. For anyone feeling awkward, they are sure to feel right at home. The illustrations by Sofia Falkenhem are both whimsical and detailed, and she captures the characters perfectly. Her depicition of Frank as nine year old boy reveals his awkwardness and hesitation, while Frank the shifter in his animal form is all bounding cuteness (i.e. not scary at all). Translated from the Swedish by Julia Marshall. This is a delightful ‘read to’ for 5 to 7, or ‘read alone’ up to 9. And with two more books in the series out this year, Frank the Monster is sure to become a new favourite.
“What are we going to do with all those cats?” Hrabal’s wife asks throughout Hrabal’s book, All My Cats, for there are, over the years, a varying but large number of cats at the Hrabals’ country cottage in Kersko, near Prague, some of whom just arrive and start living there but most of whom are the offspring of other cats already living there, as desexing cats does not seem to have occurred to Hrabal or to Hrabal’s wife, or perhaps was not common practice in Czechoslovakia in the period about which the book was written. Hrabal’s love for the cats is immense and respectful, he is a perceptive and sensitive companion for the cats, he seems to feel greater affinity for the cats than for humans, especially than for his neighbours, but Hrabal is a man who is easily overwhelmed, a man also constantly resisting the urge to hang himself from the willow tree beside the stream, as the fortune teller had told him he would, and he succeeds in this: he died falling from a hospital window, after he had written this book, obviously. The greater Hrabal’s love for all his cats, the greater Hrabal’s feelings of guilt about those times when he has taken certain of his cats and killed them in the old mail sack in the shed, killed them for there being too many of them, for their demands being too great for Hrabal, both practically and emotionally, and Hrabal’s capacity to love ensures that his guilt will never be assuaged, his guilt grows more intense over the years, so much so that he even buys a brown car. How lucky you are, say Hrabal’s friends and acquaintances, to have this cottage at Kersko, bought with the income from your literary success, this cottage at Kersko to which you can go and write, to which you can go and enjoy the mental space and the mental time, the same thing, in which thoughts reveal their clinamen and collide with other thoughts to make that writing happen, but for Hrabal the mental space and the mental time spent in his cottage in Kersko are entirely filled with his cats, with his love for his cats and his guilt about killing his cats, and his time and his space are a torment, Hrabal could have made a torment of anything, the cats are central and everything else, from his accident in his brown car to his attempts to rescue a swan frozen into the river, gain their meaning for Hrabal from their relationship to the love-guilt axis he has with his cats. All of Hrabal’s writing is an elaboration on this love-guilt axis, or on the love-guilt axis of the characters in his books, a love-guilt axis that draws its authenticity from the love-guilt axis of their author. Hrabal shows how the mental space and mental time required for writing is also the mental space and mental time that runs what could be termed a constant existential risk, why else would we construct our normal lives, so to call them, our cultural and social and practical lives, so carefully to minimise our mental space and our mental time, if not to avoid the realisation of an underlying existential void, if not to avoid what we might call, offhandedly, a Kierkegaardian moment of enlightenment, an intolerable recognition of the meaningless, purposelessness and ennui that assail us from all sides and at every moment but which we avoid thinking about by deceiving ourselves. Thank goodness for love and guilt. Do I have enough of either?
“Why do you write?” the organiser of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews — all of them unsatisfactory to the organiser — reveals new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She realsies she has been keeping up a decades-old internal correspondence with her sister, using her writing to fill a silence she barely understands. Inventive yet controlled; wrenching and joyful, in A Truce That Is Not Peace Toews remakes her world and invents an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
A very few of all the books on our shelves. Click through to find out more:
LAND by Maggie O'Farrell, author of the award-winning bestseller Hamnet, is landing ON June 2. We're offering you a special pre-order price: 15% off until the first of June only. Use the code LAND and check out through our website or email us to secure your pre-order copy.
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Witch by Marie NDiaye (translated from French by Jordan Stump) $35
Lucie comes from a long line of witches, powers passed down from mother to daughter. Her own mother was formidable in her powers, but ashamed of her magic. Perhaps as a result, Lucie's own gift is weak: she can see into the future, sometimes — but more often, she can only see the present of some other location. Not very useful. And the worst part? All she can ever see are insignificant details — a scrap of outfit, the colour of the sky. Lucie's own children are initiated into their family's peculiar womanhood when they reach twelve years of age, and in a few short months, Maud and Lise are crying the curious tears of blood that denote their magical powers. Having learned, they take off quickly and fly the nest. Literally. Witty, dreamlike, vaguely unsettling, and utterly enchanting, The Witch brings the mysteries of womanhood and motherhood into sharp relief and leaves us teetering on the edge, unbalanced by questions as seemingly unbreakable relationships break down left and right. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”Family alienation meets suburban witchcraft in this short, fantastical work from one of France’s greatest living novelists, which is finally getting an English translation nearly 30 years after it appeared in France. Lucie, a middling witch, is instructing her two daughters in the family’s matrilineal talent of seeing the future — visions produce tears of blood — but their professionally disempowered father all but approves. As the bitter marriage at the center of the family unravels, the girls embrace their new gift more fully than Lucie could have imagined. This is NDiaye at her disquieting best.” —Vulture
>>Hear an extract.
>>Read an extract.
>>The magical and the banal.
The Light Room: On art and care by Kate Zambreno $30
In The Light Room, Zambreno offers a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world. How will our memories, and our children's, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward possibility. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in close-up.” —Annie Ernaux
”The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing — that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone.” —Jenny Odell
>>”It’s nonwork, but I have to do it.”
The Annotated Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, edited and with an introduction by Merve Emre $67
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." So begins Virginia Woolf's much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been considered Woolf's masterpiece. A pivotal work of literary modernism, its simple plot — centered on an upper-class Londoner preparing to give a party — is complicated by Woolf's satire of the English social system. For decades, Woolf's rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. In this annotated volume based on the original Hogarth Press edition, Merve Emre mines Woolf's diaries and notes on writing to take us into the making of Mrs. Dalloway, revealing the novel's depths and originality. Alongside her perceptive commentary, Emre offers hundreds of illustrations and little-known photographs from Woolf's life in this attractive and informative edition. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Annotating Mrs Dalloway.
>>Emre and Levy meet Mrs Dalloway.
Lucky Creatures by Jospeh Trinidad $35
Trinidad’s essays explore the lessons of his grandmother’s chicken farm and his grandfather’s lucky golden fish; the vibrancy of his home country and its rites of passage such as tuli, beauty pageants and national Boy Scout jamborees; the contradictions of Aotearoa, which welcomes his family’s labour but insists they leave their mother tongues at the border; and his own journey of coming out, along with the hard work of actualisation that follows as he and his partner grapple with the desire to have a baby. Inspired by the creatures of Filipino folktales and migrant touchstones such as FaceTime and 'that one cousin from the States', Lucky Creatures seeks to answer the eternal question: 'Was the move worth it?' Each resulting essay is an unforgettable exploration of life as a queer, Brown, transnational hybrid – filled with the warmth, grace and humour of the lucky creatures who can hear the call of home. [Paperback]
”There’s an entirely original voice in these essays that seems to me created out of a tremendous intimacy. Trinidad is making space on the page for the people in the stories he is telling, their languages, their lives, the money they earned and the money they didn’t, the heartbreak and the connections both.” —Alexander Chee
”Magnificent – the kind of book you can’t help telling everyone about. I was still smiling and laughing long after I put it down.” —Saraid de Silva
”An unforgettable book, with a captivating sense of conviction in the strange.” —Rose Lu
”Lucky Creatures is a vibrant intervention into the literary landscape – a playful and moving collection from one of Aotearoa's most exciting new voices.” —Lana Lopesi
Have This Heart by Lawrence Patchett $38
A story collection about men who are trying to do better. Whether training a rescue dog, starting a bucket chain to put out a raging fire, raising a marquee beside a line of Ferraris, or reporting on a sensitive workplace accident, the men in Have This Heart are striving for more — for connection, for humour, for a way back into the world. Lawrence Patchett's stories are about men at work and what happens when your life doesn't let you hide. These are tightly coiled stories, rich with rough talk and fear-sweat and tenderness. [Paperback]
”On the surface, Lawrence's writing has a rugged, frontier, quality, but underneath, holding it all together, is a delicate web, almost fragile in its nature. There is a rawness on the page that is underscored by a rich emotional intelligence that enables him to capture love and loss.” —Laurence Fearnley
For an Ecology of Images by Peter Szendy (translated from French by Marco Roth) $30
When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an ‘ecology of images’ in On Photography, she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the onslaught of images from advertising and television that she believed threatened our ability to truly see. Today, beyond deep anxieties over a diminishing ‘attention economy’, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed. Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasises the labour and time required to produce and properly view images. His inquisitive mind and sparkling, associative style of writing take us from the animal kingdom to the scientific history of the shadow, the theorems of Pliny to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film and the first aerial photograph. [Paperback]
”Peter Szendy is a dazzlingly original philosopher, as witty as he is erudite. For an Ecology of Images finds him at the height of his powers, as he outlines what he calls the 'shadows' of our future.” —Adam Shatz
”Wide-ranging across the history of science, visual arts, and photography, this short book packs a lot in. Szendy understands the Kabbalistic principle that moving one letter can alter the universe: cosmicomic is cosmiconic, economy is iconomy, ecology is icology. He has shown us how to swim when we are all drowning in pictures.” —John Durham Peters
”This book made me feel wild reverence, joy, and wonder for everything Szendy looks at-like a six-year-old who, having just learned about sharks, corners you to tell you about ‘the coolest thing in the world’.” —The Paris Review
>>Sontag On Photography.
Frank the Monster by Mats Strandberg and Sofia Falkenhem $20
Frank is nipped by a dog on his ninth birthday, and his life turns inside out. His nights fill with mysterious dreams and eery adventures. A wild beast is reported roaming the town after dark. Frightening encounters lead to Frank’s discovery that he is the werewolf. But he can’t understand why everyone is afraid. Frank is still a nine-year-old boy inside—one who feels a strong urge to have his tummy scratched. Forced to own his new identity, Frank learns about the town’s secret underbelly. Beneath the streets live other monsters, cast out of their human families. Perhaps he has found his pack of misfits. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Don’t get bitten by a Woof.
John of John by Douglas Stuart $38
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted. John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. [Paperback]
”John of John has the emotional range and sense of sympathy of his earlier books, but this book is special, it has an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place, the drama of fierce emotion repressed, concealed and volcanically exposed.” —Colm Toibin
”To read John of John is to move to the Isle of Harris and take up residence in the family croft. The novel is so immersive, so all-encompassing, that I felt like I was living in it. Douglas Stuart has written something brilliant and rare.” —Ann Patchett
”John of John is a fierce, glorious sting of a novel. Douglas Stuart has somehow lifted the rocky, windswept landscape of the Scottish Western Isles — as well as its externally stark and thwarted, if internally blazing, characters — and replicated both with utter flawlessness on the page. What an astonishing feat of literary fiction.” —Lauren Groff
The Lost Girls of Autism: The untold story of women on the spectrum by Gina Rippon $45
The history of autism is male. Nearly all the first studies focused on boys. The classic hallmarks of autism, such as avoiding eye contact, are heavily biased towards men. When autistic girls meet doctors, they are still misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, and even personality disorders. As millions of women discover they have the condition later in life, we are only now starting to realise what has been missed. In this groundbreaking book, neurologist Gina Rippon examines why neurodivergence in women has been systematically ignored and why girls have been denied the help and support they need. Raising huge questions about how boys and girls are socialised differently, Rippon reveals the fascinating science behind female neurodivergence and what it tells us about the medical establishment. Exploring the unique challenges faced by women who have lived undiagnosed for years, Rippon argues it is high time for society to recognise and embrace the full spectrum of autistic experience. [Paperback]
”A treasure trove of information and good humour.” —Cordelia Fine
>>What has been missed.
>>Unmasked.
>>Off the spectrum.
A Moon Will Rise from the Darkness: Reports on Israel's genocide in Palestine by Francesca Albanese $36
Israel's genocide in Palestine and the complicity of powerful Western states is undermining international human rights and the UN system. The United States has imposed sanctions on lawyers, UN experts, and Palestinian officials in an attempt to bully and intimidate them into silence. One prominent example is UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has played an important role in documenting Israel's atrocities and those who profit from its oppression of Palestinians. This book compiles Albanese's indispensable and damning reports on Israel's conduct in Palestine since October 2023. First outlining the case that this period should be understood as a genocide, Albanese goes on to explain how the ongoing violence fits into a longer history of Israel's settler colonialism, and finally presents a devastating indictment against the international corporations that treat mass killing and destruction as a business opportunity. [Paperback]
"Francesca Albanese's clear moral voice and expert analysis sheds light on Palestine's darkest moment in history. This book will help to judge those who were on the right and wrong side of history." —Ilan Pappe
"When I came out of Gaza at the end of November 2023, I discovered that Israel was only the tip of the genocidal iceberg. The rest of the iceberg was the enablement apparatus — a system of states, institutions and individuals whose sole purpose was to ensure the longevity of a genocidal project now into its third year. This book dissects this apparatus, shedding light on its constitutive accomplices." —Ghassan Abu-Sittah, trauma surgeon
Silent Coup: How corporations overthrew democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard $33
As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup — namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power. Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup is the result of two investigative journalists' reports from 30 countries around the world. It provides a guide to the rise of a corporate empire that now dictates how resources are allocated, how countries are governed, and how justice is defined. [Paperback]
”Silent Coup is a crime story: a gripping description of the murky legal, and regulatory structures and policy changes that privilege big corporations. It's a tragedy, outlining the terrible consequences for people and nature, for democracy and accountability. It's a lesson in economics, providing fascinating and important insights into the functioning of global capitalism today. But finally it's also a story of hope, about apparently powerless people resisting these trends in the struggle for better and more just futures. Don't miss this.” —Jayati Ghosh
Read our latest newsletter. Find out about our Book of the Week, and about the winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.
22 May 2026
A few years ago, I accidently came across a podcast called Ear Hustle when I was searching for something else. Ear Hustle is a non-fiction podcast about prison life centred around San Quentin State Prison. It’s a fascinating and honest insight into the lives of the prisoners: often sad, sometimes brutual, yet also laced with humour and pathos. It’s eye-opening, as is Asher Emanuel’s brilliant The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City, which shares some of the same attributes. Here, the action focuses on the criminal justice system. The courts, the Hutt Valley in particular (although this could be any district court in Aotearoa), and the systems that intertwine with these courts: social welfare, the police, bailiffs, probation officers, housing services, and rehab, to name a few. I say action, because Emanuel’s reportage style burns with immediacy; with its intimate portrayals and authentic dialogue. The book is predominantly verbatim conversation, and centres around two defendants, Nathan Morley and Rikihana Wallace, and their overworked defence lawyer Lewis Skerett. I dare you to read the first few chapters and not be hooked. The lives are real, the crimes are ordinary, but this is a world many live outside of, and often our knowledge of the justice system is only of sound-bite news items which reveal very little of substance or tend towards the sensational. The Valley avoids this dramatic nonsense, giving instead a direct and sometimes confronting view of what the criminal justice system looks like from the inside, and more importantly from the perspective of those that navigate it, whether they are the defendents, the lawyers or the special courts that attempt to mitigate the glaring problems at the heart of the justice system and the wider welfare system. Asher Emanuel draws us into this world with clarity, calmness and care. The Valley has integrity, and is vitally important. The wider issues of poverty, government policy over several decades, our degraded welfare system, issues with our addiction services, as well as housing supply, all pulse simulatneously alongside the stories of Nathan and Rikihana. If you read one book this year make it this one. (We will be discussing The Valley at our June Talking Books session).
Whether life is worth living or not is not something that can be philosophically contested, but, if it is not worth living, whether suicide is justifiable and well as understandable is perhaps open to examination. Critchley interrogates the standard arguments against suicide and finds them unsupportable (in this he is much aided by an (anticipatory) afterword from David Hume). The general argument in justification of suicide (or, rather, against the proscription of suicide) is one of what I would call ‘possessive individualism’, the assertion of the absolute freedom to dispose of oneself as one chooses. This argument leaves unexamined the easy belief that the bundle of impulses, tendencies and glimmerings of consciousness that we think of as ourselves in fact belong to or ‘are’ us, rather than being mere nodes in a field of impulses, tendencies and glimmerings and indivisible from the other nodes therein. In fact, we find ourselves constantly constrained by the wider consequences of an act of freedom to the extent that this freedom is not free, and thus suicide can never be merely the sovereign removal of oneself from the hole into which one had been consigned. From the individualistic point of view, suicide is both an assertion of oneself as the sole subject of one’s life and the relinquishment of oneself as the subject, a determination to be relieved of an unbearable subjectivity, to stop experiencing the story from the point of view of a character, to become, for the instant that the story ends, the reader of that story, a reader who will perish, as all readers do, in the cessation of the story. Critchley considers Cioran’s assertion that suicide is the recourse of optimists: “Is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”, and makes some concluding attempts to the effect that it is the fact that life is not worth living that makes life worth living. In this he strays near the philosophically unreachable consideration of suicide where it is not possible to make assertions without being at least judgemental if not insensitive. If there is an argument against suicide it is not that life is worth living, but, perhaps, a general one against the possessive individualism upon which our culture, and indeed modern consciousness, depends.
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel has been awarded the 2026 International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
This important book provides unfiltered insight into the workings and shortcomings of the New Zealand criminal justice system by tracing its impacts on the lives of those who experience it first-hand. Written with a novelist’s eye for detail, entirely gripping and told largely in verbatim dialogue (the result of hundreds of hours of interviews over two years), The Valley follows three Hutt Valley men through courtrooms, prison, hospital, rehab, boarding houses, and welfare offices, demonstrating the particular mechanisms, disappointments and frustrations that perpetuate individual and social harm. If this is not already your world, this book is an eye-opener, providing a place of empathy from which to work to make life better for us all.
