MĀNAWATIA A MATARIKI
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21 June 2025
What happens when objects meet words and words meet objects? Back in 2008 I curated a jewellery project called LIKE. LIKE was an experiment in interpretation: a translation from object to description and back to object. I made a small object, sent it to a poet, and the poem about this three-dimensional form became the basis for nine jewellers to create their own interpretation of the original. Could the artists remake this object using only the poetic description? When the original is hidden and analysis of language is required, what will happen? How did their own making habits assist or hinder the process of creating an object where the only guidelines were a handful of words — a description that was sometimes clear, but often oblique. If the writer had been given the task of writing an instruction manual, a step-by-step guide, the resultant objects would have more alike. But this wasn’t the goal. It was a translation project, an exploration of language and communication. An exploration of both the visual and verbal. Words describe. Visual language — colour, form, scale, texture — also ‘talks’. The poet, Bill Manhire, studied the object, tried to get its measure, and described its appearance as well as its demeanour. There were clues in the poem and at times clarity of description. Yet a problem remained. The object was an alien, difficult to assimilate or easily align with something known. It was something almost familiar, but ultimately foreign. In the language of poetry it became a new thing. For the curator, the words were unexpected. The floor was open. The translation began. For what happens when we are asked to decipher what we see or what we experience? Each telling will be different. Are we more attuned today to our surroundings compared to yesterday? If we glance, what do we miss? If we study with heated concentration do we create a story that does not exist? Are our senses reliable and is our language sufficient? For LIKE, the jewellers needed to read and decipher the words of Manhire; they needed to know how to read this poem pulling from it the ‘clues’ that would be the keys to making. It wasn’t intended to trick or obfuscate, but it did prove challenging. Translation was necessary. It was surprising how various the resultant objects were, yet all expressed elements of the original. They were a family of objects related to each other. The process of translation, although flawed and sometimes deliberately sabotaged, was an experiment in interpretation that captured the essence of the original and held within its translated parts some aspects of the makers/interpreters. (The exhibition catalogue includes all 10 objects, responses from the jewellers about the process, an introduction by Augusta Szark and essay by Louise Garrett, and Bill Manhire’s poem.)
The Japanese language differs from English in having a delineated category of mimetic words which are recognisable as such due to their pattern and use. Polly Barton uses a sequence of fifty of these onomatopoeia, from giro’ to uho-uho, to structure a memoir of her developing relationship with Japanese and with Japan, from going to teach language on a small Japanese Island when she was twenty-one to her eventual career as a Japanese literary translator and now writer. Because language is inextricable from every other aspect of a person’s life in any society, the book, as well as exploring the philosophy of language, so to call it, in a thoughtful, straight-forward and practical way, covers all the other aspects of Barton’s life in this period as well, including her uncertainties, errors, embarrassments, affairs, failings, awkwardnesses, and misfortunes, with unflinching honesty and companionable insight. After all, all stories are stories of language before they are of anything else. Barton found that, as she learned to structure her thoughts in Japanese instead of English, she was undergoing a change of personality as well. “It was as if what had been watching me all the time was my language: I had clung to it as the thing that shaped me, but now I was finding that a looser relationship with the language, perhaps having a looser shape altogether, was strangely healing.” She notes that a survey of bilingual people found that over two thirds attested to feeling like a ‘different person’ when speaking different languages. Language is a social phenomenon more than it is a verbal one, language is “inextricably entwined with behavioural practices and social roles,” and we often forget that the ever-present underlying nonverbal control of exchange is more basic to language than its verbal features. “Language is performative and communal. It is a means of ‘passing’ more than it is a means of expression,” writes Barton “Understanding is not an internal switch flicked that nobody else can see: if you don’t act upon an instruction, if you don’t behave in the required way, you are not understanding. To comprehend within a particular culture means to act upon that culture’s rules for understanding. To mean something by what one says is to be participating in a community-wide game governed by rules.” As she gains proficiency in Japanese, Barton begins to feel a slippage, so to call it, in the idea of herself. “Maybe this original ‘me’ which figured in my thinking was more nebulous, more tied to English than I realised,” she writes. “For the moment, I was saved from total assimilation by the inaccuracy of my mirroring, which was why I was able to feel more or less myself. But if I continued to get better, I reasoned, there might come a time when there was no longer room for the me I recognised.” Language is learned by, and operates through, copying, and has the cultural function of inducing conformity in its members. “Although chameleonship is outwardly derided and disdained, it is implicitly not only accepted but actually demanded.” As Barton shows, language is both a tool and a threat, but more, really, the medium in which we must negotiate the parameters of our individual and collective identities. The immersion in another language can provide insights into both the complexity and the fluidity of those identities.
“Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird tells the story of humanity’s evolution on an epic scale that spans as far into the future as the human imagination could possibly allow. In each of its chapters, separated by eons but gracefully unified under the crystalline clarity of Asa Yoneda’s seemingly timeless translation, a variegated cast of posthuman characters each interrogate what it means to be not an individual or a nation but an entire species, that unit of being we currently and urgently struggle so much to grasp, much to the cost to the planet we live on and our own survival.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation.
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small groups across the planet under the observation and care of AI ‘Mothers’. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the species depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings — but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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Fair: The life-art of translation by Jen Calleja $42
A satirical, refreshing and brilliantly playful book about learning the art of translation, being a book-worker in the publishing industry, growing up, family, and class. Loosely set in an imagined book fair/art fair/fun fair, in which every stall or ride imitates a real-world scenario or dilemma which must be observed and negotiated, the book moves between personal memories and larger questions about the role of the literary translator in publishing, about fairness and hard work, about the ways we define success, and what it means — and whether it is possible — to make a living as an artist. Fair is also interested in questions of upbringing, background, support, how different people function in the workplace, and the ways in which people are excluded or made invisible in different cultural and creative industries. It connects literary translation to its siblings in other creative arts to show how creative and subjective a practice it is while upholding the ethics and politics at play when we translate someone else’s work. Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction, satire and polemic, Fair is a singularly inventive and illuminating book. [Paperback]
”With the singular brilliance, generosity and commitment to formal innovation that characterise her expansive body of work, Jen Calleja has gifted us a wholly indispensable fairground tour. Essential reading for anyone interested in translation, translations and the working conditions of those who write them.” —Kate Briggs
”Fair is both a unique exploration into the role of the translator and a profound meditation on language, nationality, and class. It’s also very funny. Reading it reminded me that a wealth of creativity lies within us all regardless of upbringing or (lack of) societal expectations. Truly inspiring work.” —Susan Finlay
”It is no mean feat to build a fair as inventive, as informative, as inclusive to everyone along the translation experience spectrum, and yes, I’ll say it, as goddamn FUN as this one, but Jen Calleja has gone and done it. Cue the cockroach confetti, cue the very-not-invisible fireworks, and roll up for the multilingual rollercoaster ride of the year!” —Polly Barton
”Jen Calleja has turned the odd life of a literary translator into a startlingly real work of art, as exquisitely and playfully constructed as a novel by Georges Perec. I feel like I’ve just been to an actual fair!” – Anton Hur
”There is no profession in the cultural sphere that is more underappreciated than that of the literary translator. Calleja, more than anyone I know, is working to change that.” —Gregor Hens
Joss: A history by Grace Yee $33
In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand 'chinamen' lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were from the Canton region in south China. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and NSW, and Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a hybrid work of poetry and history. The poems and archival extracts respond to longstanding colonialist prejudices that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss pays tribute to the poet's ancestors, illuminating how they survived and thrived amid 'life's implacably white horizons'. It is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present. [Paperback]
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong $40
In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she's been promised - except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences, with whom a series of seemingly mundane encounters provides her with a hint of what she might be looking for — a hidden meaning to all that surrounds her. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her. She yearns, and continues to endeavour to shape her experiences and environment — a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, the underwhelming men she meets on Tinder, a Mitski song, the dreams she has of Luke's ex-girlfriend — she narrates all as she grapples with questions of embodiment and subjectivity. Set in an unnamed campus in the early 2020s, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one's experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman's sense of self and her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable. [Paperback with French flaps]
”'The book gradually flowers into something extraordinary: a feminist statement of mental unravelling, which is also a plea for the life of the mind. This is marvellously realised as the novel unfolds into a study of interiority and narrative, both an embrace of and a resistance against nihilism. Armstrong has created a form away from such debasing tropes and genres as ‘sad girl’ lit. Armstrong’s work seems both new and utterly timeless.” —The Observer
”To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is the rarest debut: a heart-wrenching literary work that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body. This novel is written in gold — every line is marvellous and perfect.” —Luke B. Goebel
”Armstrong's prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness that keeps you hooked from the first sentence. This is — in its absolute specificity of detail, era, and embodiment — a timeless story of love, yearning and despair. It's rare to read a novel so smart and self-aware which is also so powerfully vulnerable and candid. It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn't dare. In fact I don't think I've ever felt for a character so deeply as the narrator of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies because I don't think I've ever encountered a character so radically and vividly honest.” —Luke Kennard
A Guide to Rocks | He Taonga te Toka by Josh Morgan and Sasha Cotter (te reo Māori translation by Kawata Teepa) $20 | $20
Lately, things have been getting Charlie down. It’s like he’s got a big rock that just won’t go away. He talks to Dad about it, and Dad brings out a dusty old book with a lot of tough rules. The first rule is you don’t talk about rocks (feelings). But the rules make things worse — Charlie’s ‘rock’ gets bigger, and everything feels dark and scary. They need some new rules — fast. [Paperback]
Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal (translated from German by Elisabeth Lauffer) $40
How do power and beauty join forces to determine who is considered ugly? What role does that ugliness play in fomenting hatred? Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan-born author and artist who lives in Germany, has written a touching, intimate, and highly political book. Dense body hair, crooked teeth, and big noses: Hilal uses a broad cultural lens to question norms of appearance — ostensibly her own, but in fact everyone's. She writes about beauty salons in Kabul as a backdrop to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Darwin's theory of evolution, Kim Kardashian, and a utopian place in the shadow of her nose. With a profound mix of essay, poetry, her own drawings, and cultural and social history of the body, Hilal explores notions of repulsion and attraction, taking the reader into the most personal of realms to put self-image to the test. Why are we afraid of ugliness? [Paperback]
"A thoughtful, provocative, playful, and truly original exploration of bodily aesthetics and the factors that define them. A wondrous and important book." —Melissa Febos
"Moshtari Hilal's brilliant (and perfectly illustrated) Ugliness has finally appeared in English. Her rumination on what makes us think that we are ugly, that we don't fit in, that all stare at us or indeed avoid looking at us, provides personal and historical insights into our fantasies about ourselves." —Sander Gilman
"Hilal has managed to distort beauty and to beautify ugliness with her probing narrative and astute gaze. This is a profound, political, engrossing work." —Aysegul Savas
Speaking in Tongues by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos $35
Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe- which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues — taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos — explores questions that have constantly plagued writers and translators, now more than ever. Among them — How can a translator liberate meanings imprisoned in the language of a text? Why is the masculine form dominant in gendered languages while the feminine is treated as a deviation? How should we counter the spread of monolingualism? Should a translator censor racist or misogynistic language? Does mathematics tell the truth about everything? In the tradition of Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'The Task of the Translator', Speaking in Tongues emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time. [Hardback]
The Invention of Amsterdam: A history of Europe’s greatest city in ten walks by Ben Coates $37
When Ben Coates injures his leg and needs to rebuild his strength by walking, he finds himself presented with an exciting opportunity — to rediscover the city he has been working in for over a decade, at a slower pace. He devised ten walks, each demonstrating a different chapter of Amsterdam's history, from its humble beginnings in the early 1200s as a small fishing community through two Golden Ages, fuelled by the growth of the Dutch colonial empire, two world wars, and countless reinventions. Join Coates as he meanders past beautiful townhouses and glittering canals, dances at Pride celebrations, witnesses the King's apology at Keti Koti, attends a WW2 memorial, gets high at a coffee shop, walks through the red-light district, and gazes in awe at Rembrandt paintings, all the while illuminating modern Amsterdam by explaining its past. Blending travelogue and quirky history, The Invention of Amsterdam is an entertaining and sharply observed portrait of a fascinating and complicated city. [Paperback]
Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola $30
A poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform — across oceans and within relationships — told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens. Intimate and erotic, ecological and philosophical, the poems in Strange Beach illuminate the body as a porous landscape across which existential dramas, filial fractures, and sexual reckonings occur. The collection ventures across the same 'Atlantic Ocean' as Claudia Rankine's 'Citizen', which is the same 'Atlantic Ocean' in Lowell's 'Life Studies', to reveal a queer consciousness deeply steeped in poetic traditions of nuanced confession and moving abstraction. Strange Beach is geological in its accumulation of images, emotions and landscapes that stack, revolve and eschew. The resulting work transmutes messages to the mind of the reader with a feeling of cosmic intuitiveness, as emotion and intellect grapple and become forged. “No one can follow you here / not having to become something else,” observes one speaker in this collection that reimagines how we love, grow, travel, and most of all, change. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What do we mean when we read a book and feel that we trust the writer? What I mean when I say that I trust Oluwaseun Olayiwola is that the poems in Strange Beach are as sure in their storytelling as centuries-old myths. These poems explain the world to me, rebuild it in front of my eyes with polysensory images that don't stop moving. And so I stand in the middle of Olayiwola's violent universe — where the sun's arms are broken, where the corpses of sunflowers litter the fields, where 'snow is a skin. Inside it, / violence...' — and watch this incredible journey of survival. This world is like an ocean, erasing Olayiwola's name from the sand with each approach; these poems are Olayiwola's finger, rewriting his name again and again whenever the tide recedes.” —Taylor Byas
Saxophone (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Mollie Hawkins $23
The saxophone is a contradictory instrument that has rooted itself in the soil of pop culture. It's the ‘devil's horn’, it's the voice of jazz an extension of the player's soul it is a character trait of U.S. Presidents, YouTube sensations, and cartoon characters. It has both enhanced and ruined songs, it is sensuous yet abrasive, and it is the only instrument widely excluded from symphonies and orchestras, never quite being taken seriously. As an object that is symbolic of living on the margins of society, the saxophone has never been kind to its players. Blending research, cultural criticism, and personal narrative about her saxophonist father, who lived on the margins until his unexpected death, Mollie Hawkins explores more than just the history of this expressive instrument. She illuminates the dark paths that our passions can lead us down. Saxophone turns the lens around to ask us all — what does it mean to devote your life to such an object even if it kills you? Can music hold such power over us? [Paperback with French flaps]
Sunny Days, Taco Nights by Enrique Olvera and Alondo Ruvalcaba $70
Enrique Olvera is known for the sophisticated Mexican cuisine he serves at his globally renowned restaurants, including the iconic Pujol, in Mexico City. However, his true passion is the everyday taco, which he regards as the most democratic of foods. In Sunny Days, Taco Nights, Olvera presents an in-depth exploration of the taco s history and many different styles, ingredients, and accompaniments, and much more. Equal parts culinary history and cookbook, the book features 100 recipes designed for home cooks, arranged into two main chapters: Classics, which features street tacos; and Originals, which explores Olvera s contemporary reinventions of well-known originals. Classic recipes include Fish Tacos from northwest Mexico; Chicharron Tacos from Monterrey; Chorizo Tacos with spinach; and Steak Tacos common at street vendor tricycles in Mexico City. Contemporary reinventions include Brussels Sprouts Tacos with spicy peanut butter; Ceviche Tacos; Pork Belly Tacos with smoked beans; and Eggs & Green Bean Tacos inspired by Olvera s childhood breakfasts. Visually stunning, with vivid food photography and a palette inspired by native corn in Mexico, Sunny Days, Taco Nights is the definitive book on one of the world s most beloved foods. [Flexibound]
The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb $40
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness. As he counts down the weeks, months, and years of his incarceration, he develops elemental kinships with a tenderhearted cellmate, a troubled teen desperate for a role model, and a prison librarian who sees and nurtures his light. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves? [Paperback]
”Bravo, Wally Lamb. Not that you needed another masterpiece to demonstrate your unerring eye, ear, and signature heart, but may I say The River is Waiting might crown them all." —Elinor Lipman
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie $38
Europe stares into the abyss. Plague and famine stalk the land, monsters lurk in every shadow and greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions. Only one thing is certain: the elves will come again, and they will eat everyone. Sometimes, only the darkest paths lead towards the light. Paths on which the righteous will not dare to tread . . . And so, buried beneath the sacred splendour of the Celestial Palace, is the secret Chapel of the Holy Expediency. For its congregation of convicted monsters there are no sins that have not been committed, no lines that will not be crossed, and no mission that cannot be turned into a disastrous bloodbath. Now the hapless Brother Diaz must somehow bind the worst of the worst to a higher cause: to put a thief on the throne of Troy, and unite the sundered church against the coming apocalypse. When you're headed through hell, you need the devils on your side. [Paperback]
”The Devils is Joe Abercrombie at his best: exciting, witty, vicious. History buffs (like me!) will love the fantasy-historical setting overflowing with brilliant little details.” —Django Wexler"
”Joe Abercrombie is, to me, the undisputed master of creating deep, distinct characters that leap off the page, and never more so than in The Devils. This book is hilarious, profound, tragic, and so thrillingly paced one scarcely has time to breathe between one calamitous adventure and the next. I loved every page, and can't wait to see where the story goes from here. Straight to hell, I hopefully suspect!” —Nicholas Eames
What books will you choose this week?
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13 June 2025
Catherine Chidgey has the ability to pull you into a wonderland before you even have a chance to blink. In The Book of Guilt you will be transported through the words and memories of Vincent to a place that feels familiar, but isn’t: to the story of three brothers who live in a grand old house with three mothers but have no sure footing at all as they travel down the staircase, touching the oak griffin on the newel post each morning for luck. But what are they wishing for? And what lucky event do they seek? It is Margate they dream of. Lawrence, William and Vincent are identical triplets. They live in a Sycamore Home. They are ‘Sycamore Boys’ — different from the children in the village. They must be protected from the illness which racks their bodies. In spite of the care of Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night, the boys are often unwell, and need to take medicine or have regular injections. When they are not forced to lie in their sickbeds they recite and learn from the encyclopaedic Book of Knowledge and debate philosophical conundrums in their Ethical Hour. Yet something is afoot at the home and beyond. As other boys leave for Margate, cured and well, the triplets’ frustrations grow and questions surface. When Vincent unwittingly hears he is a hero and pieces together the reasons why, the facade begins to peel away. As we venture forth through the clever three-part structure — ‘The Book of Dreams’, ‘The Book of Knowledge’, and ‘The Book of Guilt’ — we are confronted with questions about human value, authoritarian states, the willingness of a population to conform, the suspicion of the ‘other’, and the seething violence inherent in a repressed society. There are echoes of Mengele’s experiments and the science of eugenics in this alternative 1970s Britain. What seems innocent is yet another layer of wallpaper keeping the real world at bay. In this world there are other children who have questions, who are held in suspension — in a lie. Nancy, perfect in her frock and newly pierced ears, is the darling daughter of caring, over-protective parents. She’s also the girl who appears in the dreams of the triplets — to Lawrence in sweet innocence, to William as a nightmare, and to Vincent as a warning. (And Nancy has the best line — “Nothing would harm her. She was made from teeth, and she would devour the world.”) Something evil is coming. Vincent knows he must stop it, but can he? When everything you thought was true is a lie, and those you trusted are not what they seemed, you only have instinct — and that may not help at all. The Book of Guilt is captivating, full of intriguing ideas, and wonderful characters. It’s fine storytelling, and like Nancy’s teeth it will hold you even when you would rather look away. Another standout novel from Catherine Chidgey.
You’re soaking in it, he thought, not for the first time. Could he quote David Hume, he wondered, and say, All there is is detail and anything else is conjecture, no, he could not quote Hume, at least not accurately, with that particular sequence of words, though of course he could not be certain that Hume did not say or think such a thing. The thought stands though, he thought, or the words that seemed at least to him to convey the thought, not that anyone reading the words would be in a position to judge the distance, if any distance is possible, between the thought and the words he wrote, but this is a whole other story and already he had come unfortunately quite far from that about which he purposed to write, he carefully wrote. All there is is detail, actually, he qualified deliberately, and we use these details to construct the sad narratives of our lives, or happy narratives, why not, though it would be more accurate to say that the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, neurology will back me up on this, he thought, no footnotes forthcoming, the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, he wrote, living and reading are not so different after all, the damage or whatever to the brain is the same whatever other harms may be avoided. Reality is produced by our failure to reach the actual, he wrote, but who he wondered could he pin this quote on. Anybody’s guess. A novel is more or less full of details, if there’s such a thing as more than full, in fact literature is all detail of one sort or another, supposedly all relevant and chosen by the authority, the reader has no business to think that there’s anything more, but also, he thought, no business to think that there isn’t anything more, in any case in the world of detail that we’re soaking in we assume there is more than those morsels of which we are aware, though in fact there may not be and no experiment can relieve us of this possibility, how claustrophobic, but let us assume for the sake of argument, if you want an argument, or for the sake of the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that is, agoraphobia perhaps, the terrifying infinitude of possibility from which we protect ourselves with stories, to not be overwhelmed, that if we could let down our stories just for a moment we could expose ourselves to other details, unstoried or unstoried-as-yet, which could support quite other stories and all that attaches to those, or whatever. For three days in October in 1974 Georges Perec challenged himself to *merely observe* whatever passed before him in Saint-Sulpice, recording his observations as fast as he could write, except for when he was ordering coffee or Vichy water or Bourgueil. Observing without presupposing a story gives an equivalence to all details, the oridinary and what Perec calls the infraordinary are full participants in a thoroughly democratic ontology, every detail shines with significance even if it signifies nothing beyond its own existence. Almost it is as hard a discipline to stop a story suggesting itself as it is to suspend the stories we bring, although, I suppose, he thought, any story that suggests itself is in fact a story I have somehow brought with me even if I was unaware that I had it on board, which is interesting, he thought, in itself. No conjectures! Of course Perec cannot write fast enough, time, whatever that is, moves on or whatever it is that it does, the moment is torn away before he can catch much of it, the limits of his capacities affect his ability to observe, he is overwhelmed by his task but not destroyed so not in fact overwhelmed, so many details are suppressed by practicality, there must be some story taking place, the story of the observing I, of the capacities and the limitations that make up Georges Perec perhaps. Why these details and not other details given that we generally assume there to be a limitless amount of details *out there*, are we to conclude that every attempt at objectivity is autobiography, someone’s story, by necessity, at best. Subjectivity is a product of time, he thought, or produces time, whatever that is, the progression of our attention through a certain set of details, the constraining force that suppresses all but the supporting details, the readable details or at least the ones that we read, in either literature or life, the subjectivity that burdens us with personhood and other what we could call spectres of the temporal. He couldn’t get all the infraordinary down, he wrote, referring to Perec, Perec made an attempt at exhausting a place in Paris but his attempt was doomed to fail, just as it was revealing possibilities which made it a success it failed, due to time, due to the particular set of limitations that passes in this instance for Perec, he couldn’t get more of the infraordinary down without stopping time, without removing himself or at least seeming to, without taking a place, a small place, perhaps of necessity a fictional place but I’m not sure of this, without taking a place and truly exhausting it, stopping time, recording every infraordinary detail and watching them vibrate with the potential for unrealised story, without in other words sitting down and writing, soon after writing this book, his masterwork of detail, Life, A User’s Manual, he wrote.
Feeling the chill? Stuck inside?
Get baking and warm your kitchen. A new baking cookbook can open doors to new flavours and expert techniques. Be inspired and keep your tins full with biscuits ready for a quiet cup of tea or aromatic coffee, cake to cheer up a dull day, a lush dessert to complement a winter meal, or a pastry to wow.
And there are bonuses! Endear yourself to your housemates, keep your kids occupied with a fun activity inside, learn a new technique, or add something new to your baking repertoire! Here are a few baking books from our shelves to warm your winter heart and home.
Brush up your technical skills with The Elements of Baking. Learn how to alter recipes for gluten-free, eggless, and dairy free options. And there are recipes too!
"The Elements of Baking practically and beautifully shares a wonderful message — baking is truly for everyone." — Erin Jeanne McDowell, author of The Book on Pie and host of Happy Baking
Love a biscuit any time of the day? Early morning or late-night snack, there’s something for everyone —you’ll never run out of choices with Crumbs. Here you will find recipes from all over the world, and variety galore.
Bring the sunshine in with Taboon. Celebrating the delights of the Lebanese bakery, Hisham Assaad shares authentic recipes, both savory and sweet, and the “oven as the beating heart of every community”.
With Paris on our minds in Volume Focus this week, how could we ignore the French pâtisserie. In Sweet France, Francois Blanc, journalist at Fou de Patisserie magazine, seeks out the one hundred best contemporary French sweets. The recipes are designed for the home baker. Expert advice along with detailed instructions will take your baking to the next level. So make yourself a pastry, settle down with a Parisian-focused book and your favourite sweet drink. Bon appétit!
“This unsettling, tightly-plotted debut novel explores repressed desire and historical amnesia against the backdrop of the Netherlands post-WWII. The Safekeep is at once a highly-charged, claustrophobic drama played out between two deeply flawed characters, and a bold, insightful exploration of the emotional aftermath of trauma and complicity.” —Judges’ citation on awarding The Safekeep the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
”Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.” —Booker judges’ citation on short-listing the book for the 2024 Booker Prize.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
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Terrier, Worrier: A poem in five parts by Anna Jackson $25
"If sometimes I think of thoughts as being behind the eyes, sometimes I think of them more as floating, in a kind of cloud around the outside of my head." Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as thought. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Terrier, Worrier is a remarkable and playful book on language, anxiety, poetry and the strangeness of being a person. I loved its short length especially, as well as its fragmentary form falling somewhere between a diary and a collection of poetic essays. I wish more of my favourite poets wrote these kinds of books.” —Nina Mingya Powles
”Terrier, Worrier is extraordinary, in both concept and form. It joins the conversations of great writers and thinkers, past and present, who analyse how we function aesthetically in our little lives.” —Anne Kennedy
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane $65
Is a River Alive? is a joyous exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Powered by Macfarlane's dazzling prose and lit throughout by other voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has. [Hardback]
”Macfarlane is a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler." —Holly Morris, New York Times
”A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.” —Elif Shafak
”This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea: that rivers are living participants in a living world. Robert Macfarlane's astonishing telling of the lives of three rivers reveals how these vital flow forms have the power not only to shape and reshape the planet, but also our thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. Is a River Alive? is a breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation.” —Merlin Sheldrake
”This book is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get onboard and float through the rapids of encounters with places and people, the eddies of ideas, to navigate the resurgence of Indigenous worldviews through three extraordinary journeys recounted with a vividness that lifts readers out of themselves and into these waterscapes. Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways.” —Rebecca Solnit
Ripeness by Sarah Moss $38
It is the 60s and, just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth, and then make a phone call which will seal this baby's fate, and his mother's. Decades later, happily divorced and newly energised, Edith is living a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Maebh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Maebh must decide if she will meet him, and she asks Edith for help. Ripeness is a novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong. [Paperback]
”Sex and childbirth, emigrant and exile, the present and the past: Sarah Moss's ambidextrous talent is evident on every page of this elegant novel. It is intelligent, but never disembodied; evocative, but never sentimental; honest, but never cruel. Ripeness is a book of tart and lasting pleasures.” —Eleanor Catton
”This book felt to me like I was reading the achievement of a lifetime, written by one of the best writers alive. Moving, unexpected, masterful, it is a story of stories, of belonging, of exits and entrances, and everything in between. Moss's understanding of who her characters are is also her understanding of all of us. A beautiful, powerful read that echoed for me long after.” —Jessie Burton
Short | Poto: The big book of small stories | Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero edited by Michelle Elvey and Kiri Piahana-Wong $37
Short short stories, sometimes known as flash fiction or microfictions, are one of the trickiest forms to write. Create a resonant world in fewer than 300 words? Not so easy! In this collection of 100 stories, a range of New Zealand writers, both well known and emerging, deliver emotionally charged stories that punch well above their weight and length. And there's more! Each of the stories has either been translated into te reo Māori from English or translated into English from te reo Māori by some of this country's most experienced translators, making this book a valuable contributor to our literary landscape that rewards repeated readings. [Paperback]
1985: A novel by Dominic Hoey $38
It's 1985 and Obi is on the cusp of teenagehood, after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime and street violence. His father is delusional, his mother is dying, the Rainbow Warrior is bombed, and it's time for Obi to grow up and get out of the arcade. When he and his best mate Al discover a map leading to unknown riches, Obi wonders if this windfall could be the thing that turns his family's fortunes around. Instead, he's thrown into a quest very different from the games he loves. A novel about life in a multi-cultural, counter-cultural part of Auckland pre-gentrification. 1985 is an adventure story with a local flavour, a coming-of-age story for the underdogs, the disenfranchised, and the dreamers. [Paperback]
A Different Kind of Power: A memoir by Jacinda Ardern $60
What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be. When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate yet powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift and sweeping gun control laws, that demonstrated her remarkable leadership. She guided her country through unprecedented challenges—a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity incursion, and a global pandemic—while advancing visionary new polices to address climate change, reduce child poverty, and secure historic international trade deals. She did all this while juggling first-time motherhood in the public eye. Ardern exemplifies a new kind of leadership—proving that leaders can be caring, empathetic, and effective. She has become a global icon, and now she is ready to share her story, from the struggles to the surprises, including for the first time the full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as Prime Minister. [Hardback]
Killing Time by Alan Bennett $25
”We have a choir and on special occasions a glass of dry sherry. It's less of a home and more of a club and very much a community.” Presided over by the lofty Mrs McBryde, Hill Topp House is a superior council home for the elderly. Among the unforgettable cast of staff and residents there's Mr Peckover the deluded archaeologist, Phyllis the knitter, Mr Cresswell the ex-cruise ship hairdresser, the enterprising Mrs Foss and Mr Jimson the chiropodist. Covid is the cause of fatalities and the source of darkly comic confusion, but it's also the key to liberation. As staff are hospitalised, protocol breaks down. Miss Rathbone reveals a lifelong secret, and the surviving residents seize their moment, arthritis allowing, to scamper freely in the warmth of the summer sun. “'Violet? She'll be having a little lie-down,' said Mrs McBryde. 'She likes to give her pacemaker a rest. I'll rout her out.'“ [Hardback]
”A mini-masterpiece.” —The Times
”Full of wit and style.” —Observer
”A geriatric Lord of the Flies.” —Spectator
How to Kill a Witch: A guide for the patriarchy (The witches of Scotland) by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi $40
As a woman, if you lived in Scotland in the 1500s, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch. Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women's fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning. Inspired to correct this historic injustice, campaigners and writers Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree. In order to understand why it happened, they have broken down the entire horrifying process, step-by-step, from identification of individuals, to their accusation, 'pricking', torture, confessions, execution and beyond. With characteristically sharp wit and a sense of outrage, they attempt to inhabit the minds of the persecutors, often men, revealing the inner workings of exactly why the Patriarchy went to such extraordinary lengths to silence women, and how this legally sanctioned victimisation proliferated in Scotland and around the world. With testimony from a small army of experts, pen portraits of the women accused, trial transcripts, witness accounts and the documents that set the legal grounds for the hunts, How to Kill A Witch builds to form a rich patchwork of tragic stories, helping us comprehend the underlying reasons for this terrible injustice, and raises the serious question — could it ever happen again? [Paperback]
Pathemata, Or, The story of my mouth by Maggie Nelson $35
As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator's tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss — the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life. With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving time in our shared history. An experiment in interiority by the author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as a meditation on love, affliction and resilience. [Hardback]
”Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation” —Olivia Laing
”One of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Always brilliant.” —Geoff Dyer
”Her words come as though from a great distance and strike incredibly close.” —Anne Enright
”Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating.” —Eula Biss
The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir (translated from French by Lauren Elkin) $38
Laurence lives what appears to be an ideal existence. Her life features all the trappings of 1960s Parisian bourgeoisie- money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy whilst she's at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. But Laurence is a woman whose happiness was relegated long ago by the expectation of perfection. Relentlessly torn by the competing needs of her family, it is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence resists. [Hardback]
The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa (translated from Japanese by Hiro Arikawa (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) $38
Famously scenic, the Hankyu commuter train trundles daily through changing landscape unaware of the heartaches of the passengers it carries. On the outward journey we are introduced to the emotional dilemmas of five characters as we puzzle out how they will unravel; on the return journey six months later, we watch them resolve: a man meets the woman who always happens to borrow a library book just before he can take it out himself — a woman in a white bridal dress boards looking inexplicably sad — a university student leaves his hometown for the first time — a girl prepares to leave her abusive boyfriend — a widow discusses adopting the Dachshund she has always wanted with her granddaughter. As the season and the landscapes change, passengers jostle and connect, holding and releasing their dreams and desires, as this famous little train carries them ever forward towards the person each intends to become. From the author of The Travelling Cat Chronicles. [Hardback]
Lawn (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Giovanni Aloi $23
A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilisers, weed-killers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement. Lawn untangles the colonial-capitalist threads that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we'd be better off without it. The lawn is aesthetically and ideologically versatile. From museums and hospitals to corporate headquarters and university campuses, it has become the verdant lingua franca of institutions of all kinds. Its formal homogeneity and neatness imply reliability, constancy, and solicit our trust. But beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological issues that over time have come to define our conception of nature. [Paperback with French flaps]
Against the Odds: New Zealand’s first women doctors by Cynthia Farquhar and Michaela Selway $55
In 2025, the year in which the Otago medical school celebrates 150 years, 50% of graduates are women. Back in 1891 when Emily Seideberg, who would go on to become the school's first woman graduate, applied for entrance it was not at all clear that it would be granted. There was active hostility in many quarters to the very idea that women could be doctors. This book traces the paths of the women who, between the 1880s and 1967 (when the Auckland medical school opened), battled indifference and chauvinism and, later, many of the other challenges that faced women in the professions, to become New Zealand's first women doctors. Their stories are often remarkable and the contribution to research, medical breakthroughs and improved patient care is to be honoured. [Paperback]
Peter Cleverley: Between Transience and Eternity by Alistair Fox $60
This heavily illustrated book traces Peter Cleverley's formation and evolution as an artist, identifying the influences that aroused in him a sense of the transience of human life and the paradoxical complexity of the human condition. The portrait that results shows how Cleverley's sense of the human condition has driven him to convey it symbolically in a way that simultaneously captures not only the fragility of human life, but also its joys. His art communicates an appreciation of the beauty of this world and the gift of being alive, together with the value of art as a means of transcending mutability. [Hardback]
NHOJ: A memoir that started backwards by John Lazenby $50
With an eye for peculiar detail and meticulous research, John Lazenby takes us on an evocative visit to the Britain of the 1960s, when, aged nine, he saw the Beatles play live in London before he could even hope to read, or write down, the lyrics from their iconic songbook. Along the way, we meet the warm and eccentric family who never gave up on him — and the array of severe teachers and tutors who did. We are reminded that it takes only one person to change a life for the better and, having been sent away to boarding school at the age of seven, John's young life pivoted on the miracle discovery of that person, a teacher who finally understood the boy that no one else could teach. NHOJ: A Memoir That Started Backwards is the story of his progress from seven-year-old who could write only one word — his own name, spelt backwards — to journalist and author who built a career around the very words that had initially been so elusive. [Hardback]
The Three Robbers by Tomi Ungerer $35
An old favourite (first published in 1962), ready for a new generation. The book tells the story of three fierce black-clad robbers who terrorise the countryside, scaring everyone they meet. One robber stops carriage horses with his pepper spray, the second destroys the wheels of the carriage with his axe, and the third robs the passengers by holding them up with his blunderbuss. One day the robbers stop a carriage only to find a small orphan girl called Tiffany inside. On her way to live with a strange aunt, Tiffany is delighted to meet the robbers, who take her back to their cave instead of their usual haul of money, gold and jewels. The next day, Tiffany sees the treasures the robbers have amassed and asks what they plan to do with their riches.The men are baffled, as they had never thought about spending their money. So they decide to buy a castle and welcome all the lost, unhappy and abandoned children they can find. The robbers dress them in tall hats and long capes, just like the ones they wear themselves, only in red instead of black. Years later, when they are grown up, the children build a village near the castle, full of people wearing red hats and red capes. They also build three tall towers, in honour of the three robbers. [Hardback]
Mānawatia a Matariki $5
This beautifully designed booklet contains karakia for each of the nine stars of Matariki to celebrate and educate readers about the traditions and cultural importance of Matariki.
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6 June 2025
“Absence is inconceivable, as long as there is presence. For the bereaved, the world is defined by absence,” she wrote. She went to Olevano, some distance from Rome, in the hills, in the winter, two months after her partner died, the bereavement was taking hold, she no longer fitted into her life. It was winter, as I said, she stayed alone in Olevano, she looked out of the window, she went for walks, she took photographs, she wrote. The whole place, and the text she wrote, was cold, damp, dim, filled with mist, vagueness, echoes, mishearings. Well, of course. This is not to say that her observations were not precise, preternaturally precise, and the sentences she wrote to describe them, they too were preternaturally precise, whatever that means. “In the unfamiliar landscape I learned to read the spatial shifts that come along with changes to the incidence of light.” She is unable to think of the one who is lost, rather, the one she has lost, she is unable to face an absence that at this time is an overwhelming absence, instead she observes in minute detail, with great subtlety, as if subtlety could be anything but great, the particulars of the day and the season, the fall of light, those things that only she could notice, or only a bereaved person could notice, the weight of noticing shifted by her bereavement, death pulling at everything and changing its shape, changing the fall of light, even, or making her aware of changes in the fall of light, and in the shape of everything, so to call it, that are inaccessible to the non-bereaved. There are other worlds, but they are all in this one, wrote Paul Éluard, apropos of something, if it was him who wrote it, and if that was what he wrote, if these are different things, but as we can cope with the world only by suppressing almost everything that comes at us, even at best, we notice only as our circumstances allow, our mental circumstances, our emotional circumstances perhaps most significantly, and we are somehow sharing space but seeing everything differently from others and some more differently than others. We live in different worlds in the same world. She was bereaved, she saw what she saw, observed what she observed, with great precision and intensity as I have said, out of the mist, among the fallen leaves. There is a cemetery in every town, or vice-versa, she visits them all, acquaints herself with the faces of the dead, but not her dead, not the one of whom she is bereaved. She writes of herself in a continuous past, “I would.” she writes, “Each morning I went,” she writes, as if also all that is observed also continues in this continuous and unbordered way, which might be so. Death, first of all, is an aberration of time, bereavement acts on time like a point of infinite gravity that cannot be observed but which bends all else. Memories are the property of death, there can be no memories if she is to face each day, though the memories pluck at her in her dreams. She observes, she wanders, she acts on nothing, she changes nothing, the season moves slowly through darkness and chill. She travels to the nearby towns and into the hills, the mists. She recognises herself more in those displaced like her to Italy, the migrants and the refugees, those for whom no easy place welcomes them, those who have lost something, recently, that the others around there have perhaps not recently lost. “We sized each other up as actors on a stage of foreignness,” she writes, “Each concerned with his own fragmented role, whose significance for the entire play, directed from an unknown place, might never come to light.” She is aware, everywhere, of the loss that outlines and gives shape to that which goes on, and the mechanisms of loss that are built into the function of a whole town, or a whole human life. She sees the junkyard by the bus station, “an intermediate space for the partially discarded, whose time for final absence has nevertheless not yet arrived.” She visits the Etruscan tombs and sees the reliefs there as a membrane separating the living from the dead, their loss is one of space as well as of time, what is shared between her and them is two dimensional only, “as if the dead would know how to reach through the cool thickness of the masonry to touch the object’s or animal’s other side, invisible to us, and hold it in their life-averted hands.” The membrane is infinitely thin. It is only two dimensions. It is everywhere. She asks, “Will it wither away, the hand I pull back from the morti?” Time passes. Something unobserved is changing beneath the changes she observes, “the Spring air a different shade of blue-gray.” She leaves Olevano and leaves the first section of the book. Because she, we, you, I perceive only a fraction of what we could call the external, the fraction to which we are at a moment attuned, it is easy to fall out of tune with others. For her, whom bereavement has differently attuned, or untuned, her reattunement must be achieved by words, she who lives by words must recalibrate her world through words, descriptions, care, precision, nuance, it is wrong to think of nuance as somehow imprecise, it, all this, is an exercise in slowness, and we who read must also change our speed to the speed of her noticing if we are to experience the text, if we are to experience, through the wonder of her text, somehow, her experience, or something thereof. The external reveals itself only to those moving at the precise right speed of perception, so she shows us, and so too her text reveals itself only to those moving at the precise right speed, those who read the text at the speed the text requires. In the second section she remembers, memory being the province of death, or vice-versa, her father, of whom she has also been bereaved, a little longer ago, and the holidays in Italy of her childhood, with him, and, presumably, with her mother, though this section deals specifically with memories of her father, perhaps because her mother is still alive, if she is still alive. This section is the section of the father, of the memories of the father more particularly, the only way her father now exists, he has finished contributing to memories that might be had of him and fairly soon these memories become the memories of memories, the parts magnified becoming still more magnified, the other parts abraded, becoming lost. Each memory contains a necropolis, it seems. With nothing, she begins the third and final section. She rents a cottage, so to call it, in the delta of the Po. Marshes, salt pans, mists again, fogs, rains. Birds. It is winter. “Everything had been repeatedly disturbed, was forever suspended between traces and effacement.” All that is human, and all of nature is abraded. “It was even hot when I arrived, the air similarly gray and viscous, and the landscape lay motionless, disintegrating under its weight; on hillcrests and in the occasionally visible strips of riverbank clung fragments of memory that had been torn away from a larger picture and settled there.” Time moves differently, again, here, she lets it, broken things stand about, the past is forgotten but is everywhere, is in the dust and mud, more often mud, the rain, the fog. “It was a place that could only be found in its absence, by recalling what was lost, therein lay its reality.” But here in this slow nowhere something almost unperceived begins to change, the emptiness provides a space, the past gets somehow out of her, death begins not to completely overwhelm her, memory relinquishes something of its choke. She even gets a ride to town with the owner of the cottage, in his car. Perhaps she comes to think that history is the proper province of the past. “Among the places of the living are the places of the dead,” she says, and not vice-versa nor one inside the other. She visits Ravenna and in Ravenna the two mosaics spoken of to her by her father not long before his death, actually the last time she saw him before his death. The mosaics are now outside her, sensed, and no longer trapped inside, her father’s experience of the two blue mosaics likewise no longer trapped, the experience of her father, something of a connoisseur of blue, no longer confined inside the one who is bereaved, the bearer of his memory, but somehow shared with her. These two mosaics, I wonder, for her, also a connoisseur of blue, are, perhaps, the mosaic of life and the mosaic of death. “These two mosaics — the dark-blue, bordered harbour with its still unsteady boats; and the light-blue expanse with no obstruction, nothing nameable, not even a horizon.”
Han Kang's semi-autobiographical The White Book is a contemplation of life and death. It’s her meditative study of her sibling’s death at a few hours old, and how this event shapes her own history. Taking the colour white as a central component to explore this memory, she makes a list of objects that trigger responses. These include swaddling bands, salt, snow, moon, blank paper and shroud. “With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like a white ointment applied to a swelling, like a gauze laid over a wound.” Han Kang was in Warsaw - a place which is foreign to her when she undertook this project - and in being in a new place, she recalls with startling clarity the voices and happenings of her home and past. The book is a collection of quiet yet unsettling reflections on exquisitely observed moments. These capsules of text build upon each other, creating a powerful sense of pain, loss and beauty. Each moment so tranquil yet uneasy. Han Kang’s writing is sparse, delicate and nuanced. Describing her process of writing she states, “Each sentence is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air.” You can sense the narrator’s exploration and stepping out into the unknown in her descriptions of snow, in her observations as she walks streets hitherto unknown, and in her attempts to realise the view of her mother, a young woman dealing with a premature birth, and the child herself, briefly looking out at the world. Small objects become talismans of memory, a white pebble carries much more meaning than its actuality. Salt and sugar cubes each hold their own value in their crystal structure. “Those crystals had a cool beauty, their white touched with grey.” “Those squares wrapped in white paper possessed an almost unerring perfection.” In 'Salt', she cleverly reveres the substance while at the same time cursing the pain it can cause a fresh wound. The White Book is a book you handle with some reverence - its white cover makes you want to pick it up delicately. The text is interspersed with a handful of moody black and white photographs. This is a book you will read, pick up again to re-read passages, as each deserves concentration for both the writing and ideas.
“Hope is a shovel and will give you blisters.” Overwhelmed and often unmoved by the scientific and political jargon of climate change, Nadine Hura sets out to find a language to connect more deeply to the environmental crisis. But what begins as a journalistic quest takes an abrupt and introspective turn following the death of her brother. In the midst of grief, Hura works through science, pūrākau, poetry and back again. Seeking to understand climate change in relation to whenua and people, she asks: how should we respond to what has been lost? Her many-sided essays explore environmental degradation, social disconnection and Indigenous reclamation, insisting that any meaningful response must be grounded in Te Tiriti and anti-colonialism. Slowing the Sun is a karanga to those who have passed on, as well as to the living, to hold on to ancestral knowledge for future generations.
A selection of books that take our hand. Click through to find out more:
Grief is the Thing with Feathers
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30 May 2025
He had always found the countryside horrible. This, he now realised, was not due to anything inherent in the landscape, so to call it, but due to the rurality that has been imposed everywhere upon the landscape, a rurality fundamentally at odds with the landscape, smothering it, a rurality in some places intolerably dense and in other places miserably attenuated yet everywhere resulting in what he experienced, driving through it, as a terrible claustrophobia. The road, and how he clung to it, provided the only chance of escape from the rurality pressing down upon him, and yet it was the road that brought them, with every bend, deeper and deeper into the countryside. As he drove, he thought of the book that he was reading, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton, there on the back seat, just in case, though circumstances were unlikely to allow any reading on this journey, or at least he hoped not, certainly not when he was driving, although he had been known to read a book when riding a bicycle, foolishly, where was he, the book, and how the feeling of unease inherent in the stories in the ‘Prairie’ section, especially what he now remembered as the feeling of unease when the narrator is driving through the prairie, though what even is a prairie, he wondered, is any of the landscape we have been driving through today anything like a prairie, the feeling of unease perhaps arises from the unresolved transitional state that the narrator finds herself in, in the prairie or driving through the prairie, whatever that is, either by herself or with other people, members of her family perhaps, or other people, somehow sharing a small capsule of hyperawareness moving through an indeterminate and possibly oppressive landscape, just as in all car journeys and in all stories, borne on detail by detail through what otherwise could have been a long view, though a long view is nothing but impressionistic at best, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with impressionistic. The road is what matters. In Dutton’s stories, he thought, all manner of often small but generally disquieting uncertainties and disruptions, if uncertainties and disruptions could be anything but disquieting, are introduced into the text or into the narrator’s mind, if there is any difference between the text and the narrator’s mind, and move their weight upon it in causing bends and dips that the narrator must steer herself around or through. In a classic story, as Chekhov iterated, any detail introduced must eventually be discharged, the gun seen early will be fired later, but this, he thought, is fundamentally a lie, life is not like that really, and neither are Dutton’s stories. The firing of Chekhov’s gun, he thought, provides relief from the expectation that the gun will at some point be fired, literature is fundamentally reassuring in this way though it has no reason and no right to be. Is that why we read? He had wondered. Dutton’s stories have no such reassurances of shape and no catharses. Details bulge into hyperawareness and the narrator must intensify her awareness of them and steer her anxiety around them and between them, and the cumulation of undischarged and perhaps undischargeable details in the stories result in angst, just like in real life, or so he has found and in fact, if he admitted it to himself, has recently increasingly found, or so it seemed to him, grasping the steering wheel and turning it this way and that as he drove them through this increasingly intolerable rurality. He was now overaware of every turn of the steering wheel, of every acceleration and deceleration, of the way that every slight move he made of his body was translated into or was dictated by the movement of the vehicle upon the infinite turns and inclines of the road, each turn and incline composed as it was of an infinitude of subturns and subinclines, each of which required a subresponse from him as he drove upon them, each of which demanded of him that he not make even the slightest error in his driving. Whereas once he used to feel himself or managed to somehow make himself one with the machine, an extension of the vehicle, moving as one being over the terrain, he was now finding himself uncomfortably separate from the vehicle, acting upon it and responding to it consciously, to every minute variation of the terrain consciously, to every bend and every incline, hyperaware, as if he was writing an infinitely detailed story or a set of instructions for achieving an impossibly complex task, the task of guiding them safely through the rurality of this possibly prairie-like non-prairie landscape, keeping the car not only on the road but comfortably so, a task certainly impossible in its totality but, he hoped, perhaps just achievable as a string of details, a string of details for which the accumulating angst was certainly preferable to discharge. Is the vehicle responding differently, very slightly differently to the terrain, to the bends and inclines that comprise the road they are travelling upon, is there something in the steering, he wondered, or in the wheels, or in the response of the engine to the accelerator, he couldn’t isolate anything, everything seemed fine and the wheels had been recently aligned so it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the car, so perhaps the disconnect he was experiencing was between his awareness-and-intention and his body, perhaps he was becoming or even needed to become hyperaware of his own body, perhaps he was inducing in himself by merely thinking about it one of those degenerative conditions in which, before it is too far progressed, every movement necessarily becomes a set of conscious micro-instructions to the body, micro-instructions that make the movement at first possible but ultimately impossible. He had once written a very detailed description of a person walking up some stairs, he had broken down this action into the smallest possible micro-actions, he himself had walked up some stairs and worked out how to describe these micro-actions in words and it had filled or wasted several pages, and after that he occasionally found himself repeating the exercise, and it had initially just been an exercise, involuntarily for other actions, which was at first intriguing but ultimately very unpleasant, even horrific, the mind is a fragile instrument to which everything becomes a threat. Everything. He drove on.