Read our latest newsletter.
11 July 2025
A second-person fictional autobiography, Now, Now, Louison creates its own genre. Jean Frémon — art critic, curator, novelist, poet and essayist — has painted a portrait in words of the artist Louise Bourgeois; a story of a life in memory: his memory. Frémon first met Bourgeois in the 1980s and curated both her first European show at the Galerie LeLong in Paris in 1985 and her final Parisian show decades later. He visited her in New York over 30 years until her death in 2010, saving snippets of conversation and eavesdropping on her life and work. He started this writing project in 1995, so while he states that this is from memory, and the ‘novel’ was published in French well after her death in 2016 ( and translated into English by Cole Swensen and published by Les Fugitives press in 2018), there is something of the voyeur in this telling. The narration moves from ‘you’ do this, 'you’ do that as the observer Frémon, to 'I' am, 'I' do, 'I' remember as the central character Louise. It is as if Jean Frémon has thought so intently about the artist he has moved his mind and his words into her mouth, into her head, so that the two superimpose each other. You are here, as the reader, the observer and the observed, as well as the being within the artist’s mind, the curator of your own destiny. This shouldn’t work as a device, but in fact it does, and remarkably well thanks to the prowess of Frémon's writing — subtle and exacting. The prose is like a making process — building patterns and rhythm, building a form — a sculpture chiselled out of pain, love and contradiction. It is a compelling way to tell a life, to create an understanding of a sharp and brilliant — as well as a reclusive — artist, an artist completely bound up in her own work, with an incredible sureness and, at the same time, a devastating doubt. Louise Bourgeois’s work is now well known, especially her giant spiders, her fascinating drawings, and her textile works of the body and female sexuality. In Now, Now, Louison we are given a glimpse into her life, her family and feelings of abandonment, her fraught relationship with a mother who died too young, and with a philandering father who wanted her to be someone other than who she was; her ‘escape’ to America, and the life she carved out for herself. Her ongoing art practice, mostly unnoticed during her lifetime — she was well into her 60s when the world started taking notice of her work — marks the pages in description and explanation in an emotionally charged and psychological way: Frémon does not so much describe as reflect the atmosphere of Louise Bourgious, creating, through his subtle use of language, through repetition of themes and fragments of knowledge, an essence of the woman who sculpted, painted and stitched. This is not a biography, not a work of fact. It is purposely a novel, yet Jean Frémon in this short work creates an intensely interesting portrait of an intensely interesting person. This is a book that takes the reader to a point of maybe understanding, but more importantly to a place in which to be with Loiuse, the artist, the young girl, the elusive woman and the intellectual. In the words of Siri Hustvedt, “She is here in this book, the artist I have called 'mine’ because I have taken her into my very bones, but I did not know the woman. I know her works.”
We all have times when things are too much, when we fall out with friends, or we have to be brave even when we are scared. For children, story-telling can be a perfect way to recognise emotions, articulate feelings, and unpack complex situations. These books, which are wonderful stories — the best of which employ humour as well as heart — open doors to conversations, understanding, and empathy.
From the pen and brush of the excellent Bomb and Dazzlehands, comes A Guide to Rocks. This is the best picture book I’ve come across about feelings and how to unpack them.
Charlie has a rock. It’s a beautiful pink crystal, but there’s something about it which worries Dad. As Dad tries to instruct Charlie on the way to deal with his rock — hide it, ignore it, deflect attention from it — it just keeps getting bigger! Eventualy the rock gets so heavy and large it joins with many others and pushes Dad and Charlie apart. It’s going to take some effort to turn this rock over, but possibly together they can do it. This is a stand-out picture book. The text is great, Dad and Charlie are excellent characters, and there’s plenty of heart and humour. The illustrations are delightful, full of the same energy and humour as the award-winning Bomb. Clever, funny, honest, and also useful. A Guide to Rocks lets children (and parents) knows it’s okay to vulnerable, to express your fears and doubts, and that you are not alone.
Also available in te reo Māori: Te Taonga te Toka
Another wonderful author/illustrator duo does it again in Twigs and Stones. Joy Cowley is always excellent, and teamed with the excellent Gavin Bishop, the ‘Snake and Lizard’ series has been a favourite with young readers for several years. The latest is a picture book about friendship. Snake and Lizard are friends, but sometimes that’s friends with a big ‘F’ and at other times a small ‘f’. What starts as a good plan becomes a joke, and then not so funny after all. As Lizard works away, Snake dozes, and that ‘f’ becomes a little smaller. When the task doesn’t quite go to plan, Snake doesn’t see the funny side, and takes revenge. But revenge isn’t sweet! Will the two friends make up? This is a charming story about being friends, falling out and making up. Twigs and Stones is a story about the joy of friendship, and why knowing when to back down, move on and be kind are great skills. Words can be mean, and they can also be meaningful.
And one for the brave or about-to-be-brave. Here’s a twist on a classic fairytale. Anna Höglund, inspired by the Swedish author Elsa Beskow’s Tripp, Trapp, Trull, brings us a tale of bravery, audacity and cleverness. The Stone Giant is beautifully illustrated ( copperplate etchings and watercolour) and the heroine is the best — resourceful and determined.
A child is left to fend for herself when her father, a brave knight, has to leave to confront the giant. After some time goes by, and all the chores are done, the child tires of wistfully watching for her father’s return, and sets out to find him. There’s a long journey ahead. But she never gives up. With a little help and guidance she continues on to a land of stones and the giant herself! What can a small child in a red dress do? You’ll be surprised! A wonderful story, with just the right amount of danger for a young audience — and a happy ending.
A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations. Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat. In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish. Recommended!
”In Mountainish, Gahse directs her reader through 515 notes, making it clear with great elegance and wit that an escape to the mountains is not an escape from the self; that the unconscious is bound to landscape and reverberations; that words haunt like ghosts; that the echo of self cannot be avoided. Each note is a story and each mountain or what is like a mountain is a language; it is a matter of orientation.” —Sharon Kivland
A selection of biographies from our shelves that show innovations in literary form.
Click through to find out more:
Withstand winter with a book in your hand. Click through for your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
Zombie Proust by Jérôme Prieur (translated from French by Nancy Kline) $42
“Marcel Proust passed away on the 18th of November. It was 1922. One day, I could no longer resist: I went in search of him. I prowled about, I visited the rooms where he had lived, I caught glimpses of abandoned châteaus and haunted places, I walked in his footsteps. I wanted to see what his eyes had seen. I looked at his photographs, I uncovered relics and little treasures. I tried to find out who he had been in life, what he had really been like. I interrogated those among the dead who could still reply: his friends, his confidants, those who had crossed paths with him. Who was he? The dandy who set out for salons as though on a foreign expedition? Or the invisible man who flinched from the light, the character in a thriller? The brilliant writer was concealing a doppelgänger, and I pursued him as though tracking down a missing relative.” — Jérôme Prieur
What is a writer’s life, and above all, what is left of it? This book is not a biography, but a quest; an expedition to unearth what remains of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. What was it like to be in his remarkable presence? What was it like to be inside his skin — especially during his final years of intense reclusive absorption in the writing of his great book? Haunted places and abandoned sets, rare photographs, tinpot relics, half-erased fingerprints, flashes of light, piles of little memories serve as talismans through which Jérôme Prieur materialises the eponymous writer’s body and spirit in short, vivid chapters which resemble prose poems. Rich in detail, wry humour and quirky erudition, Zombie Proust brings back to life the invisible being, recalling his image as one summons a ghost.
“Prieur has succeeded magnificently in bringing his portrait of Proust to life.” —Le Monde
“Prieur explores places, questions traces, lingers on moments of Proust's life, sentences from In Search of Lost Time, images - again and again - like those words, haloed in mystery, which open wide the doors of imagination.” —Télérama
Every page is shot through with the feeling of overwhelming, enthusiastic, affectionate gratitude that readers of In Search of Lost Time feel for Proust the writer and Proust the man.” —Le Matricule des anges
“Scarcely any other book on Proust evades with such effortless skill the classic dilemma of whether to relate everything to the work or to the man. Prieur resurrects them both as a single phantom, in the night time favoured by Proust, perfectly conjuring up scents and tastes, with a love which owes nothing to neurosis.”
—Journal du Dimanche
I Remember by Joe Brainard $30
I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic. Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each beginning with the refrain “I remember”: “I remember that little jerk you give just before you fall asleep. Like falling.” Recollections — jokes, confessions, daydreams and memories — were carefully, lovingly woven together. They were of family and friends; of movie stars; of early heterosexual fumblings and later gay life. Brainard's pared-back prose dodged both self-pity and judgement of others, and was written with an ear for musical cadence and an extraordinary painter's eye. The result is witty, incantatory, profound and wholly captivating. New edition with a new introduction by Olivia Laing as well as the original one by Paul Auster. [Paperback]
”A masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard’s modest little gem will endure.” —Paul Auster
“A relentlessly specific time-capsule of a book, which bizarrely, movingly, seems to slip the confines of time.” —Daily Telegraph
”Buy it, for everyone you know . I can’t think of a more original or lovely book.” —Olivia Laing
”Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.” —Siri Hustvedt
>>Read an extract.
Diary of an Ending by Lina Scheynius (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $45
Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home. Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This book is elegant, honest and compelling. Scheynius masterfully elevates the personal to the universal. The obsessive, internalised circularity of heartbreak is reworked until a portrait emerges of what it means to be human. Diary of an Ending is intimate, impersonal, passionate, detached, anxious, confident, logical, irrational, apprehensive and unflinching.” —Jack Self
”Diary of an Ending is an impressive and immersive composition of raw and unfiltered thinking alongside pages of careful reflection which ultimately demonstrates what grace, generosity and nuance can be found in unflinching vulnerability.” —Gemma Reeves
>>Read an extract!
>>Look inside.
Mātauranga Māori by Hirini Moko Mead $45
Hirini Moko Mead explores the Māori knowledge system and explains what mātauranga Māori is. He looks at how the knowledge system operates, the branches of knowledge, and the way knowledge is recorded and given expression in te reo Māori and through daily activities and formal ceremonies. Mātuaranga Māori is a companion publication to Hirini Moko Mead’s best-selling book Tikanga Māori. Mātauranga Māori is integrated into every activity people engage in. It touches the lives of people in whatever they do, in the way they act, in the way they think, in the way they learn and in the way their knowledge is shared with others. [Paperback]
176 Interruptions by Charles Boyle $35
There is gridlock on the M40 and a banana skin on every pavement. Lovers are disturbed in bed and my father becomes a rain god. Complacency is mocked. Death hovers. Shit happens. How the messiness of life is translated into fiction is considered and no conclusions are reached. Why, anyway, setting out from A, am I so sure that B is where I want to get to? Interruptions push back, disrupting the status quo or derailing progress. 176 Interruptions — a revised and expanded edition of 99 Interruptions, published in 2022 — attempts to take them in its stride. [Paperback]
”As a slim, hybrid collection of thoughts, memories, wisdom, 99 Interruptions may feel slight in the hand but it sits heavily in the heart. Boyle is able to resurrect his father in a way only writers can, allowing him to convey the strange, missing life of his father in unsentimental yet deeply affecting ways.” —Simon Low, Full Stop
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Other books by Charles Boyle.
In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles $25
"I lay strips of pale peach cotton and cloud-printed cloth side by side. Each becomes a strange, asymmetric quilt block. Each block like a sentence, each sentence an island, all the islands loosely touching." In her second book of poetry, Nina Mingya Powles threads together themes of belonging and material inheritance against a backdrop of verse, collage and textile. From shorelines in Aotearoa, the UK and across Asia, this collection moves through words and images to explore water and the body, sewing and artmaking, personal histories and multicultural identities. [Paperback with French flaps]
Wonderland by Tracy Farr $38
Te Motu Kairangi/Miramar Peninsula, Wellington 1912. Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters - seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna - have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets' curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie — famous for her work on radioactivity — comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder. [Paperback]
The Position of Spoons, And other intimacies by Deborah Levy $30
Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, Levy shares the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of her own. Each short essay draws upon Levy's life, encapsulating the precision and depth of her writing, as she shifts between questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is reveals a questioning self. [Now in paperback]
”Under the blowtorch of Levy's attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful. This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial.” —Guardian
>>Delight in the details.
>>Language is her plaything.
Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron (translated from French by Frank Wynne) $35
It is 1981. As a wave of puzzling medical cases sweeps across the US, a Parisian doctor is presented with a rare case of a disease long thought to be eradicated. It marks the beginning of a race on both sides of the Atlantic to make sense of a deadly virus that will define a generation. Miles away in rural France, Anthony Passeron’s family are dealing with a crisis of their own. Their small village is gripped by another epidemic — heroin addiction. Anthony’s uncle Désiré, once the pride of the family, has become one of its many ‘sleeping children’. Often found unconscious on street corners, he is a stranger to his family. As Désiré’s life descends into chaos, the thunder of the AIDS crisis grows closer. These two stories — one intimate, one global — are about to collide. Sleeping Children is a moving and eye-opening book about shame and the slow poisoning of a family by the secrets it keeps. Exploring the stories of the heroic few who fought for a cure for AIDs and for justice for a community abandoned, it is a radical vision of a history reshaped, retold and remembered. [Paperback]
”Without ever raising your voice, you have shattered the family silence that scabbed over tragedy and produced a work so powerful, so moving that it lingers long after reading. Magnificent!” —Annie Ernaux
Air-Borne: The hidden history of the life we breathe by Carl Zimmer $40
Every day we draw in nearly eight thousand litres of air — and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments, and meet NASA scientists who send balloons even higher, to search for life in the stratosphere. Zimmer chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of biological weapons designed to spread anthrax and smallpox. Air-Borne prompts us to look at the world with new eyes — as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind. Weaving together history with the latest reporting on airborne threats to global health, this masterwork makes visible an invisible world. [Paperback]
”A fish doesn't know it's wet. And we rarely recognize that we are bathed in air, air carrying multitudes of microbes. Air-Borne chronicles the history of this insight. With Zimmer's usual superb writing, it is filled with fascinating science, visionary scientists who were often completely wrong, and poignant moments reflecting the vast human suffering caused by such microbes. And throughout is the dread that makes Air-Borne a page-turner — the knowledge that the air eventually carried SARS-Cov2 and may yet bring something worse. Air-Borne is deeply important and unsettling.” —Robert Sapolsky
The Nile: History’s greatest river by Terje Tvedt $44
Terje Tvedt travels upstream along the river from its mouth to its sources. This book is a travelogue through 5000 years and 11 countries, from the Mediterranean to Central Africa. This is the fascinating story of the immense economic, political and mythical significance of the river. Brimming with accounts of central characters in the struggle for the Nile — from Caesar and Cleopatra, to Churchill and Mussolini — and on to the political leaders of today, The Nile is also the story of water as it nourished a civilisation. [Paperback]
Bear by Kiri Lightfoot $28
Jasper Robinson-Woods is not okay — his name is too long, his mum has an annoying boyfriend, he never sees his dad, and he can't sleep because of a terrifying nightmare! Oh, and to top it off, his goldfish is dying. Jasper is overwhelmed with bad thoughts. Are they a sign of disaster to come? The only place Jasper feels safe is in the tree in his front yard. But then the unimaginable happens: the nightmare he's been having comes to life and follows him to school. Bear is a moving, often laugh-out-loud funny story about a young man and his journey to confront his nightmare and what it represents, while learning that even when you hit rock bottom, you never know what, or who, is around the corner. [Paperback]
Finalist in the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
”I really enjoyed this story. I absolutely adored Jasper — what a great character and such a brilliant narrator — so smart and funny and flawed. This is such an important story and I hope it finds its way into the hands and hearts of so many young people. It is such a tender and wickedly humorous exploration of mental illness and grief and anger and how we define ourselves.” —Karen Foxlee
1. I sit down to write a review of Charles Boyle’s 176 Interruptions, but I no sooner put finger to keyboard than I urgently need the right word to describe the book’s appealing smallness. Is it a duodecimo or a sextodecimo, I wonder. I count the leaves, check the binding, trawl the internet. This is an out-of-date question, I realise eventually, and not really an interesting question anyway.
2. To any given task the potential interruptions are infinite, but they do seem to fall into two categories: interruptions with an external source (family members, a cat fight in the back garden, a caller from Porlock) and interruptions with an internal source (useless questions about book format, random alerts from some malfunctioning mental appointments calendar, concerns about the underlying cause of various pains, the endless rephrasing of an imperfect conversation). Not that I really think there is a distinction between an internal and an external, I don’t believe in either after all, but it helps to halve infinity sometimes.
3. I will just interrupt the practical demands of my life to read this book, I thought, but the practical demands of my life, so to call them and so to call it, repeatedly interrupt my reading, even though the book is short. Two sets of interruptions grapple with each other over my attention. There are perhaps only interruptions (and interruptions to the interruptions).
4. Sometimes the interruptions come even before whatever it is that they interrupt, in which case they are perhaps not interruptions to that activity but interruptions to the preconditions of that activity, to the preparations that are I suppose themselves some sort of activity but not identifiable as any activity in particular. Is most of my life these days lived in this state of velleity?
5. The first time I sat down to read the earlier version of this book, 99 Interruptions, I was interrupted by finding a surprising quotation on the first page I came to, and then by finding that I had to check the source and context of that quotation. This time, I am interrupted by not finding this quotation.
6. Without interruptions there is no story, Boyle shows. The interruptions are the story. An interruption disrupts the natural tendency to oversimplification (which is indistinguishable from nonexistence).
7. An interruption is the assertion of the particular against the pull of the general and the abstract. It is the prime quality of fiction.
8. An interruption breaks a continuum and causes two realities to mingle. I frequently find this irritating but at least my irritation is real irritation.
9. Is the fragment the only authentic contemporary literary form?
10. Boyle remarks that, although most fiction is written in the past tense, a reader or critic invariably relates the narrative as happening in the present, “as if everything … is still happening and there’s no end in sight.” I hadn’t thought about this before, and thinking about it now is interrupting my progress through the book.
11. Fiction interrupts time by the introduction of a completely other thread of time, allowing the reader to jump between the two as inclination or interruption dictates. Before it is anything else, fiction is a sin against time, an interruption or eruption.
12. In most situations I tend to feel that my presence is an interruption of whatever would otherwise be the case. This is probably not a very healthy way to think, but I cannot find a way in which it is not true.
13. I am actually writing a review, if you can call it that, but I am interrupted by that little repeated stifled sound coming from the headphones that S is wearing so that I am not interrupted by the music she is listening to. I won’t interrupt what she is busy doing over there on account of this; it is about time I accepted that the membrane between writing and real life (so to call it) is always entirely permeable. No wonder I never get anything done.
14. Would it be possible to welcome every interruption into the work itself? To create a work entirely of interruptions? (Like Boyle’s!)
15. Be that as it may (does this construction even make sense?), the work is ultimately interrupted by its deadline.
Warm yourself with a bit of poetry in the depths of winter. We are extending a 20% discount on all books in our poetry section — only until 15 July. Just enter the code SNAP when checking out.
(This offer extends only to books that we have in stock. Single copies only are available of most of these, so be quick. Books already discounted by more than 20% will be sold at that cheaper price.)
Books can be dispatched by overnight courier or collected from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Revitalise your reading pile! 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.
The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) $37
A young Vietnamese woman is invited to travel from Ho Chi Minh City to speak at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. On her arrival, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on 'Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism', she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town on the western side of the Berlin Wall. There she falls under a strange spell of domestic and sexual boredom with her abductor, until one night she manages to escape on a train to Moscow... but mistakenly arrives in Paris.
Alone, penniless, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) wanders the fringes of society, meeting a sex worker, another Vietnamese immigrant, a theatre troupe and other shadowy characters. But at the centre of her new life is Catherine Deneuve, the iconic film star whose films she loses herself in and who becomes the object of her obsessions. [Hardback]
''Tawada's prose is light on its feet, informal while still feeling deliberate, providing delicate and straightforward descriptions of events that are often complicated and bizarre.'' —New York Times
''Tawada disrupts our perception and reveals the terror and beauty of our world as we get lost in it, and regain our footing through reading her novels.'' —Kit Fan
''Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives new senses in return.'' —Madeleine Thien
''Reading Tawada is an immensely fun and occasionally bewildering experience. A blisteringly imaginative writer.'' —Guardian
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’:
Molloy (with an introduction by Colm Tóibín) $25
Molloy, a sordid, bedridden vagrant, recalls a long bicycle ride in search of his mother. He describes sucking on stones, falling in love, getting arrested, killing a dog. Moran, a private detective, sets out to look for Molloy. But as Moran's physical and mental state deteriorate, his narrative starts to mirror Molloy's in mysterious ways. [Paperback]
Malone Dies (with an introduction by Claire-Louise Bennett) $25
Malone, a decrepit old man, lies naked in his bed, scrawling bitter observations in an exercise book. He is fed on a bed-table, his chamber pot is emptied, he hooks items with his stick, he looks out of the window. He tells the story of a man, looked after by nurses, taken for an ill-fated picnic on an island in the sea. As his mind disintegrates, so does the novel. [Paperback]
The Unnamable (with an introduction by Eimear McBride) $25
The Unnamable is a voice. Is it curled up inside an urn, on the point of being born, or is it about to die? Haunted by visitors, it weeps. The Unnamable sifts disjointed memories, grapples with the problem of existence and ultimately perpetuates itself through an endless stream of fragmented words. [Paperback]
>>Read Thomas’s review.
These three novels comprise one the great ‘pivots’ of the modern novel and contain within their rigours many new paths both for reading and for writing. Indispensable. Inexhaustible.
Elaine by Will Self $38
Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders ...Is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction. [Paperback]
”An extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20th-century misogyny, Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian
”In magnifying her voice so we too can hear her screams across the decades, Elaine is a son's spectacular attempt to give his mother the agency and freedom she was denied.” —Lucy Scholes, Telegraph
>>Just too heavy.
>>Spun into a novel.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the making of history by Selena Wisnom $80
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal's library to the ground — yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity's first civilisation: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe. [Hardback]
”Selena Wisnom's book is a great work of revelatory history, but I was also unexpectedly moved by its measured optimism about the future — for the preservation of the heritage of Mesopotamia, for the ways history rhymes across millennia, and for the library as the heart of any culture worth remembering.” —Emma Smith, author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers
”Fascinating and rich in detail, this book provides an excellent survey of Mesopotamian literary classics, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ways in which they influenced later cultures and texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. She also offers snippets of daily life, including an account of Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, getting into a panic because a mongoose had run under his chariot (was it a fatal omen?) and the actual agenda of a meeting.” —Bijan Omrani, Literary Review
”In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquity's great monuments to knowledge: the Library at Nineveh. As she surveys the clay tablets that were buried in a blaze millennia ago, a lost world of learning and literature comes back to life.” —Sophus Helle, author of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic
The Shetland Way: Community and climate crisis on my father’s islands by Marianne Brown $48
This is one woman's story of how her quest to make peace with her father's death brought her straight to the heart of a challenging debate about how we save the planet. When Marianne Brown arrived in Voe, Shetland, to attend the funeral of her father, she had packed enough clothes to last a short trip. But this was February 2020, just weeks before the UK's first lockdown, and she would be unable to leave for another six months. Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and culture. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to export energy to mainland Scotland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side supports the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenges the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population. As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable energy that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward, and she soon finds herself on a transformative journey into the heart of a debate that mirrors global concerns about how we save the planet. [Hardback]
”A fascinating insight into a unique place that holds past and future in uneasy tension, written with clarity and rooted in deep affection - not only for the islands but for the broader land and elements on which we all depend.” —Observer
”As she weaves her clear love of Shetland lore and history with the clear-sightedness and functional gaze of a climate expert.” —The Times
The Forest of Noise by Mosab Aby Toha $28
Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid and lyrics about the poet's wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather's oranges and his daughter's joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination - even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering. [Hardback]
”A glimpse into life in a besieged Gaza and what it's like to survive and find care, even hope, under the most dire of conditions.” —New York Times
”If literature has any power to change the world or resist injustice, I think it must lie in the astounding poems of Mosab Abu Toha.” —Noreen Masud
Human/Nature: On living in a wild world by Jane Rawson $36
Everything we think about nature is deeply cultural. And much of what we imagine is based on outdated, irrelevant, or out-of-place beliefs. How are these ideas affecting the way we live in the world, and do we have any hope of changing them? If you've ever asked yourself whether humans are ruining nature, whether there's a better way for us to belong, or whether it's possible to love both the environment and your cat, you're not alone. This lyrical, contemplative book is for anyone who has ever wondered where they fit in the natural world. [Paperback]
”In this funny, provocative and profoundly moving book, Jane Rawson brilliantly unravels the myths about the boundaries of the human and the non-human, the natural and the unnatural, and love and death that shape our thinking about not just the environment, but our history and the future that is already overtaking us. Read it: it's utterly marvellous.” —James Bradley
”Idiosyncratic and wily, big-hearted and brave, Human/Nature is an exhilarating deep dive into what is deemed ‘nature’, what is worth saving, and who gets to decide. Part confessional, part philosophical inquiry, part lament, this book takes us on a rollicking ride.” —Jessie Cole
>>A book of questions.
The Living Stones: Cornwall by Ithell Colquhoun $28
British Surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun arrived in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So began a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore — and a place where everyday reality speaks to ‘the world beyond’. [Paperback]
”Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history.” —Art UK
”Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you.” —Stewart Lee Painter
>>Between worlds.
Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s lost theory by Mike Davis $30
Mike Davis spent years working blue collar jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist. Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis's book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth and exploring Davis's thinking on history, labour, capitalism, and revolution — themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. In a time of ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites, Davis explores the question of revolutionary agency — what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order? — and the situation of the world's working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in classical socialist thought, such as clarifying ‘proletarian agency’, before turning to the urgent questions of our time: global warming, the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt, and the city's demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the end of history? [Paperback]
Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Lucy North) $25
”The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, and the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy and bright. The night had only just begun.” In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance. In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing. [Paperback]
”Slippery and unfamiliar places where logic is internal and surreal give the reader the strange sense of being led through a collection of dreams.” —Asymptote
>>Other books by Hiromi Kawakami.
Hineraukatauri me Te Aro Pūoro by Elizabeth Gray and Rehua Wilson $22
This story in te reo Māori charts the journey of Hineraukatauri: a cocoon/chrysalis who has entered a new realm, the human world, without their voice. It’s dark and wet, Ranginui and Papatūānuku have not yet separated or are in the process of having their offspring create space between the two. In visiting each of the offspring, they gift Hineraukaturi a different component or aspect of music, ultimately her voice, represented in the shape of the Pūtōrino. Renowned musician and composer, Hirini Melbourne happens across the shape, and his breath, in playing it, gives life to all the gifts as he makes beautiful music through this instrument. [Paperback]
Listed for the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
>>Look inside.
Salvage by Jennifer Mills $38
Two estranged sisters reconnect in the aftermath of ecological and social collapse, in this work of suspenseful, deeply human literary speculative fiction. They drift in their sleep, waiting for something. The end of the world, or another escape. But the world is still here. There's no escaping it. Jude's life has been about survival. She works on rebuilding — fixes roofs, trucks supplies, transports refugees. Tries to stay free from attachments and obligations. But Jude won't talk about her past. Or her sister Celeste, lost in the tragic failure of a space station that was supposed to save her, and the other ultra-rich, from the wreckage of a dying world. When an escape pod falls from the sky, its passenger near death, Jude knows her anonymous existence can't continue. As the fragile peace of her community is put at risk, Jude must re-examine the terms of her survival — and her exile. Salvage is a gripping novel of literary speculative fiction that asks: what does it mean to care for each other, after the end of the world? [Paperback]
>>A better way of living.
Granta 170: Winners edited by Thomas Meaney $37
It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. Any schoolchild can smell the rat in the adage. Everybody knows a game is not worth watching unless the players are trying to win — unless someone is willing to risk the high tackle, smash the serve, steal the base, or throw the knock-out punch. The winter issue of Granta explores how ideas about winning and competition suffuse modern society. We return to the magazine's tradition of sports writing. Articles include Nico Walker on the rise and fall of American football — from Jim Thorpe to Deion Sanders; Clare Bucknell on the history of tennis; and Declan Ryan's report from a boxing match between British heavyweights Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois. Fiction includes very short stories from Caryl Churchill and Kathryn Scanlan; two stories set in hospitals by Benjamin Nugent and K Patrick; Mircea Cartarescu on an archipelago infested with angels, and Edward Salem on nights out in the West Bank. Photography from the Israeli bombing of Beirut by Magnum photographer Myriam Boulos, from the Isle of Wight by Tereza Cervenov, and of the U.S. military's global adventures by veteran photographer An-My L. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
Read our latest newsletter. Make your world better with a book.
4 July 2025
Meet Tara Selter. Antiquarian book dealer. Married to Thomas, who is also her business partner. Lives in a small town not far from Lille. Life is good. On a buying trip to Paris, the day of the 18th of November has gone pretty much to plan, with the only mishap a burn on her hand from a top of a heater. She rings Thomas in the evening, heads to bed — ice cubes against her hand — and wakes in the morning …..of the 18th of November. We meet Tara on #121 of the 18th of November. She is describing listening to Thomas in the house as he goes about his daily routine (extremely routine for her, as she has been listening to this same sequence of events for over 100 days!). Tara has decamped to the guest room — hiding from Thomas, tired of explaining to him again why she is home, unwilling to disturb his peace of mind even though he believes her — when she explains each day that time is repeating. Hiding in her own house, coming out to wash, to grab some food and get clean clothes, or even sit in the house when Thomas is out — she knows exactly when he leaves the house and the time he will return — she turns over the reasons why, the what of time, the sense that if she can only find a chink or a door (not that she believes in portals), she could find a way out of this strange situation. The day for everyone else never changes, for it has not been yet. For Tara she is caught in limbo, in some liminal space. She observes everything, intensely looking at objects, people, the night sky — looking for any changes and trying to decipher whether there is an exact time of repetition. When she was still telling Thomas they would sit together with paper, books and diagrams nutting out theories and debating philosophical explanations. (All of which would, of course, be forgotten by Thomas the next same day.) There is a wonder and a dread in her puzzling. She writes to record, to write herself into existence. “Because I am trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” As time goes by for Tara, there are inconsistencies — her hair grows, what she eats does not return to the cupboard or to the supermarket, some things stay with her, others return to their day. Why some objects stay close is a mystery. It’s fascinating to observe Tara in all her many reactions to her predicament. There is shock, then paralysis, philosophical delvings, experiments (some aimed at tricking time), rationalising, despair — the days are fog, abandonment and carefree enjoyment of being outside of time’s restraints, but mostly a desire to harness this strange beast. She contemplates herself as a monster, then maybe a ghost. She sees Thomas as a ghost, finally unreachable. Despite the times when they are intensely together, she senses the chasm that has opened between them. As the year turns, she returns to Paris to seek a resolution. We stand at the edge, waiting for Volume 2. Balle’s writing is brilliant; hypnotic. The pacing in the book changes to fit Tara’s mood, the revelations build through each sentence, through the episodic pieces, which often repeat and loop enhancing this sense of time being elusive. And like Tara, you are thinking what is this existence? Who am I in my everyday life? If I started to observe, like this woman, what would I see, sense? Is time real or a fabrication? Are we really all going along together in sync or are we each in our own world or one of the many possibilities? As you read On the Calculation of Volume 1 questions bubble away, ideas surface and you will find yourself trying to look around edges attempting to fathom the question of individual existence and the relationships we have to each other and in the wider world.
(We will discussing this interesting novel at our August book group).
Choose your edition.
"How often it pains me not to be some other banal individual, whose life, because it is not mine, fills me with longing. I envy in everyone the fact that they are not me," wrote Fernando Pessoa as Vicente Guedes in what is now considered the ‘first phase’ of The Book of Disquiet, a vast assortment of passages found unedited on variously sized pieces of paper in a trunk after Pessoa’s death in 1935 and variously selected, assembled and translated and made into books by various persons presuming the intentions of Pessoa (though what his intentions were for this material is far from clear). This new and first ‘complete’ edition assembles the fragments in chronological order for the first time (so far as this can be determined), allowing us to take a cast of Pessoa’s thinking in the two ‘phases’ of the book (or, rather, ‘book’). The first phase contains material written by Pessoa as Vicente Guedes from 1913 to 1920, and the second phase contains material written as Bernardo Soares in the early 1930s, possibly intended to subsume the material previously written as Guedes (the Soares material being more descriptive, lighter in tone than the first section, almost glibber, Pessoa-as-Soares writing almost as someone who has read Pessoa-as-Guedes and seeking to make Guedes’s ideas his own). Pessoa contributed to Portuguese literature under 81 identified heteronyms, pseudonyms and personae (see the list here), each with a distinct style and intellectual life. The first ‘phase’ of The book of Disquiet as it now stands is a sustained if dissipated assault on identity, especially as thought of by a person when thinking of themselves. “Your real life, your human life, does not belong to you but to others. In all your real-life actions, you do not live, you are being lived,” writes Guedes. The constraints of identity are imposed from without, are socially determined, are a trap for the spirit. True liberation, for Pessoa (if any opinion can be attributed to Pessoa himself, beyond that of the heteronyms), is only achieved by withdrawal of the actual self from the world (if such a self can be said to exist) so completely as to allow the construction of personae to do the living for them, leaving their author in immaculate isolation and absolute indifference. “I myself don’t know if the ‘I’ I am setting before you really exists. I live aesthetically in another being. I have sculpted my life like a statue made of a material alien to myself. Sometimes I don’t even recognise me, so alien to myself have I become,” writes Guedes. One rather sketchy passage describes the requisite method of progressive isolation, disengagement and intensification of the imaginative faculties (through a stage in which imagining a battle produces “actual bruises”), becomes logically fraught, peters out with the note “Certain difficulties,” and then gathers luminously into the object of the thread of thought, the creation of new selves: “We will be able to create at second hand. We will imagine ourselves a poet writing, and he will write in one style, while another [imagined] poet might write in another, and so on, all of them original,” each creating or accessing a private reality otherwise unachievable. “In the presence of ourselves we are never alone, we are witness to ourselves, and it is therefore important to act always as we would before a stranger. We can never be at ease.” Pessoa writes as another person about the inauthenticity of their identity, of the clinamen of personality, of the heteronyms' creation of further heteronyms that presumably could not have been created by Pessoa himself (and so forth). The outsourcing of the business of living to fictional persons does not come without its “dangers to the spirit”: lassitude, loneliness, boredom, emptiness. A protective ‘mist’ drifts through the book (in ‘real life’, Pessoa supplemented this mist with alcohol). “If the mist dissipates, all hard surfaces bruise the part of me that knows them to be hard. It is as if someone were using my life to beat me with.” But in the absence of authenticity, every fiction is valid, every speculation true, every reality virtual. “I lie recumbent in my life, and I do not even know how to dream the gesture of getting up.”
Whether you are a parent or used to be a parent or might one day be a parent or have no wish to ever be a parent or for any other reason might be curious about the often glossed-over realities of parenthood, Becky Barnicoat’s superb graphic novel is the perfect book for you (or to give to an appropriate person). The necessary antidote to parenting books, this darkly humorous, candid and insightful graphic memoir brings the early years of parenthood to life — in all their chaos, wonder and delirium. Intimate, relatable and very funny, Becky Barnicoat explores everything from the anatomy of the hospital bag to the frantic obsession with putting your baby down drowsy but awake, to the tyranny of gentle parenting. From pregnancy to the feral toddler years, Barnicoat extends a sticky hand to all new parents grappling with the impossible but joyous jigsaw puzzle of their lives.
“This book is a perfect testament to the wild ride of early parenting. It's tender, moving, beautifully drawn and also, extremely hilarious. Parents everywhere: you will feel very very seen.” —Isabel Greenberg
All books are books of something — some declare it in their titles. Click through to find out more about this selection from our shelves:
New books for a new month! Take your pick, 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.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi) $37
In these twelve stories, Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come. [New paperback edition]
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien $38
In ‘The Sea’, a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father. Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read--three volumes in a series about the lives of famous ‘voyagers’ of the past. Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share. These neighbours are Bento (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Baruch Spinoza), a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who was excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher (whose life mirrors Hannah Arendt), a philosopher whose academic promise in 1930s Germany became a quest to survive Nazi persecution; and Jupiter (or shades of Du Fu), a poet of Tang Dynasty China whose brilliance went unrecognised by the state, and whose dependence on fickle patrons barely sustained him while lesser artists thrived. As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends. But it is only when she is finally told her father's account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life. And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future. The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the importance and power of art and intellectual endeavour. [Paperback]
"Deeply humane. In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals. With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance. Try to read without weeping profusely." —New York Times Book Review
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy $37
Mary McCarthy, one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century, skewers her strict Catholic upbringing in this witty and compelling memoir, one of her major works. Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the 1920s, when she was orphaned into a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There was her Catholic grandmother who combined piousness with pugnacity, and her veiled Jewish grandmother who mourned the disastrous effects of a face-lift; there was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul, and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil, and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who inspired her engaging perception, her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous, and her witty, novelist's imagination. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a major work by one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century — witty, scathing, piercingly insightful and stylishly written. New edition, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. [Paperback with French flaps]
”When my friends and I were in our twenties in the 1950s, we read two writers — Colette and Mary McCarthy — as others read the Bible: to learn better who we were and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live.” —Vivian Gornick
”Published in 1957, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is considered by some to be the best of her two dozen books, including eight novels and several volumes of essays, reportage and criticism. Its superiority derives not only from the passionate sense of justice that imbues the depiction of her ghastly Cinderella childhood, but also the singular circumstances of its composition.” —J. Michael Lennon, TLS
”Superb. So heartbreaking that in comparison Jane Eyre seems to have got off lightly.” - Anita Brookner
Hollow Land: Israel’s architecture of occupation by Eyal Weizman $45
In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarised airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualisation of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation. [Paperback]
Capitalism and Nothingness: Critical theory in uncertain times by Peter Fleming $44
Drawing on Marcuse, Adorno, Arendt and a variety of other critical social philosophers, this book introduces us to a familiar character amid the wreckage of the post-pandemic economy: no-dimensional man. A cousin of Marcuse's one-dimensional man, they are a figure so compressed by the unending present of capitalism that they have ceased to be genuinely present in any ethical or political sense. This is Peter Fleming's brilliant analysis of the psychological and institutional mechanisms that drive the demise of capitalist democracies. The scene is set in no-dimensional man's natural habitats — the modern office, the corporate suite, the government bureau and the corporate university. In these treacherous climes Fleming reveals the dark power relations currently shaping the post-industrial system. This deep dive into the post-industrial pit explains the failure of capitalism in terms of its most contagious symptoms, including micro-jobs, multinational spread, shadow banking, financial predation, the working poor, and government by algorithm. Beset by every malaise of modern economic institutions, from cognitive dissonance to bleak performance metrics and almost deliberate vacuity, no-dimensional man is a living mirror image of the new culture of nothingness characterising capitalism today. [Paperback]
”Splicing genres to brilliant effect, Peter Fleming's critically fuelled revolutionary pessimism delivers shards of humour in the midst of a world ruined by feckless managers and gormless agents of industry. Capitalism and Nothingness furnishes diagrams of scenario planning grafted to the shadow of the apocalypse.” —Ned Rossiter, Professor of Communication and Director of Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm $25
Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonisation and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this book, Andreas Malm argues that a true understanding of the present crisis requires a longue duree analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire. Returning to the British empire’s first use of steam-power in war, in which it destroyed the Palestinian city of Akka, Malm traces the development of Britain s fossil empire and shows how this enduring commitment to fossil energy continues to drive Western support for the destruction of Palestine today. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Malm's analysis, which concludes with the current genocide in Gaza and Palestinian resistance against colonialism, offers a new approach towards understanding the role imperialism plays in maintaining the Zionist colonial project and one that may be overlooked due to the more immediate focus on the depletion of Palestinian territory and the Palestinian people themselves.” —Ramona Wadi, Middle East Monitor
The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei $38
Singapore, 1996. Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. Gen and Arin grow up as sisters in Singapore: a place where insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice in the realms of imagination and play. As the sisters struggle toward individual redemption, their story reveals the fault lines of Singaporean society, our desperate need for acceptance, and our yearning to be loved. [Paperback]
”Fiery, funny, and incisive, The Original Daughter is at its core a ghost story. Once, invisibility was the hallmark of the working class, but Jemimah Wei knows in today's world, where an internet connection allows one to walk through walls, be seen, disappear, and haunt from beyond the analog grave, a soulless transparency is power. A societal privilege ironically afforded to most everyone. This novel adroitly, yet playfully, turns the ways we see cultural appropriation, nepotism, and identity upside down. What a wise and wonderful read.” —Paul Beatty
Sicily: Recipes from an Italian island by Enza Genovese $65
From the bustling streets of Palermo to the colourful markets of Cefalu, from arancini to cannoli, Sicily is home to some of the world's freshest, most delicious food. In this collection of recipes curated by Sicilian Enza Genovese, travel the entire island of Sicily in food, learning how to easily prepare the tastiest hallmark dishes of this Italian region, alongside some new favourites, at home. Chapters include: Antipasti: arancini, Nonna's eggplant parmigiana, Sicilian focaccia. Pasta: Casarecce alla Norma, spaghetti with ricotta and pistachios, sardine bucatini. Risotto and couscous: artichoke and pea risotto, Trapanese couscous, lobster risotto. Meat: meatballs in white sauce, pork ragu, vegetable polpettone. Fish: stuffed calamari, swordfish with capers and almonds, tuna millefoglie. [Hardback]
The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada (translated from Japanese by Cat Anderson) $28
Nanako Hanada's life has hit rock bottom. Separated from her husband, she's living between 4-hour capsule hostels and pokey internet cafes in Tokyo. Work is going no better as sales at her eccentric bookstore dwindle. Reading is the only thing keeping her alive. That's until Nanako downloads an app called Perfect Strangers which offers 30 minutes with someone you'll never see again. Introducing herself as a sexy bookseller, she recommends strangers 'the book that will change their life'. In the ensuing year, Nanako meets hundreds of people, some of whom want more than just a book. The Bookshop Woman offers a glimpse into the quirky side of Tokyo in this story about the beauty of free diving into a book and resurfacing on the last page, ready to breathe a different kind of air. [Paperback]
Abundance: How we build a better future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson $40
In Abundance, veteran journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson reveal the structural, economic and political forces that have led to the America, and much of the liberal world, of today: where scarcity and preservation drive the agenda, and we have forgotten how to deliver on big ideas. Decades of slashing immigration, off-shoring manufacture, preventing house-building and stalling ambitious infrastructure projects like high-speed rail means America has a shortage of workers, houses, innovative products and climate-change solutions. It's a story repeated across the Western World. To progress on the greatest challenges of our time, from housing to climate change, healthcare to infrastructure, progressives need a vision of abundance, and the ability and willingness to enact transformative strategies. Here, the authors lay out the barriers to consequential action, and how we can overcome them to actively build a better, more abundant future. [Paperback]
What Art Does: An unfinished theory by Brian Eno and Bette A. $37
Why do we need art? What Art Does is an invitation to explore this vital question. It is a chance to understand how art is made by all of us. How it creates communities, opens our worlds, and can transform us. Curious and playful, richly illustrated, full of ideas and life, it is an inspiring call to imagine a different future. This book can reshape our understanding of how art and our lives are intrinsically linked. These are planet-sized ideas in a pocket-sized package. [Illustrated hardback]
"Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s I wasn't afraid of Art even though my family was poor and undereducated and knew nothing about it. I was excited and wanted to join in, even to be part of contemporary art-making. I lost that confidence along the way. Became scared of Art, felt excluded by it. Reading What Art Does has helped me regain that confidence by reminding me we're all making art all the time. That Art is for us and by us." —Viv Albertine
"Remarkable for its ability to render sophisticated and sometimes slippery ideas in clear, accessible language. The most powerful ideas here present art as conduit to community, as a way to be vulnerable, to surrender. This is a beautiful book." —Peter Murphy, Irish Times
Read our latest newsletter. Improve your world with a book.
27 June 2025
For that about which all that can be said is that it exists, the imperative is to go on existing. There is a voice, desperate to go on (longing perhaps to cease but unable to cease) but conscious of the insufficiency of any attempt to go on. Terrified of each full stop and the cessation it threatens, the voice assumes one character after another, each with a ‘story’ or set of circumstances, but these characters and circumstances are quickly abraded and abandoned, unravelled as quickly as they are knitted, insufficient not through their imperfection but because Beckett refuses to let them conceal the essential nature of the fictive act. That which must speak in order to exist must dissemble in order to speak. In ‘successful’ fictions this desperate underlying impersonal subjectivity is obscured by the characters and circumstances it clads itself in and the reader is scintillated by the provisional ‘reality’ of the story, but in his wonderful stuttering attempts to force the mechanisms of fiction to run against their springs and ratchets, Beckett interrogates the workings of the novel and lays bare the usually unexamined assumptions and motivations that underlie the relationship between writer and reader.
GET THE (SO-CALLED) ‘TRILOGY’ IN THESE NEW PAPERBACK EDITIONS:
“Perhaps the past is always trembling inside the present, whether or not we sense it.” Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s debut novel is a triumph of obsession, self-reflection and love. Obsessed with the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a young mother negotiates her desire to unpick the mystery of this woman as she navigates the daily tasks of her life. “I try to distract myself in my routine of sweeping, wiping, dusting, and scrubbing. I cling to all my little rituals. I hoard crusts.” Out of small spare moments, car trips to historic sites (houses, cemeteries and libraries) with her youngest child and late-night searches on her phone the shape of Eibhlín Dubh’s life is constructed or more accurately imagined. Who was she? What happened to her? Why can this woman’s life not be tracked while her father's, husband's and sons’ lives can? At the heart of the story is a poem—a lament—written by Eibhlín Dubh for her husband Art O’Leary slain by the orders of the English magistrate. “Trouncings and desolations on you, ghastly Morris of the treachery”. The poem becomes a touchstone for the narrator, a place where she can rest, where she can dream—imagine the world of this other woman who is dealing with loss, a woman who is resolute and tough, who will not lie down nor succumb to expectation from either her family nor the authorities. A Ghost in the Throat questions the telling of history—the invisibility of female voices. Scattered throughout the novel is the phrase “This is a female text”, making us aware that stories are told and histories revealed in other ways, through the body and its scars, through cloth and object, through the tasks that make us human, through the words that are sometimes unsaid and in the margins where many do not look. As the narrator discovers the poet, she frees herself along with this woman trapped in time and neglect. Ní Ghríofa writes with bewitching clarity as she describes the daily grind, with dreamlike essence in the moments of childhood memory—the longing and discovery—with realist angst about entering adulthood and motherhood, and with compelling atmosphere as the narrator unpicks the past. Rich in content and language, A Ghost in the Throat is both a scholarly endeavour and an autofiction—endlessly curious and achingly beautiful.
How do we make sense of what we see? The Vast Extent is a constellation of ‘exploded essays’ about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages and scientific scrutiny with a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Greenlaw invites us to observe our world and beyond with a new sensitivity. Beautifully written and deeply thoughtful; both personal and universal.
A selection of books haunting our shelves.
Click through to find out more: