NEW RELEASES (27.6.24)
The following books would like a home on your shelf. Take your pick:
Chaos in the Heavens: The forgotten history of climate change by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher $49
Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War. Climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism. From these intellectual and political battles emerged key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of an undeniable climate emergency, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.
”A truly fabulous book — surprising, thought-provoking and rich in historical irony. It is a necessary corrective to the narrative which makes the emergence of climate change as a matter of concern relatively recent and incremental. But it is more enlightening, more provocative and more entertaining than any mere necessity would have required.” —Oliver Morton
”The upshot of is this brilliant book is that historians have been asking the wrong question. For years we've been trying to date the emergence of a consciousness about the impacts of human activities on Earth's climate. But this awareness long predates modern science, as we learn from the authors' pathbreaking research. The real question, the one at the heart of their book, is why this awareness was always ambivalent and why it evaporated at the turn of the twentieth century. If you want to understand the long path to the climate crisis, read this book.” —Deborah Coen, Professor of History & History of Science & Medicine, Yale University
Hopurangi—Songcatcher: Poems from the maramataka by Robert Sullivan $30
Ngā mihi whakawhetai nui ki a rātou e whai ana i te ara mātauranga o ō mātou mātua tūpuna!
A new collection from acclaimed poet Robert Sullivan, inspired by the Māori lunar calendar.
Three birds flew from me:
a sparrow from my chest
a tūī out my throat
a pīwaiwaka from my thigh
they flew to see my father
to let him know I am well
— from ‘Tamatea Kai-ariki: ‘Three birds flew from me’
After rejoining social media, Robert Sullivan wrote and posted a poem a day over two and a half months – the poems collected in Hopurangi—Songcatcher. Inspired by the cyclical energies of the Maramataka, these poems see the poet re-finding himself and his world – in the mātauranga of his kuia from the Ngāti Hau and Ngāti Kaharau hapū of Ngāpuhi; in his mother’s stories from his Ngāti Manu hapū at Kāretu; in the singing and storytelling at Puketeraki Marae, home of his father’s people of Kāti Huirapa, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha and Kāi Tahu Whānui in Te Tai o Āraiteuru; and in the fellowship of friends on Facebook. Tīhei mauri ora!
”Rich, accessible and fun, intense and moving, Hopurangi—Songcatcher presents poems charting the increasing harmonisation of a Māori literary intellect with his world in cultural, spiritual and physical terms. This harmonisation is focused through his intensifying connection with the Maramataka, the whenua he inhabits, his Māori community (online and in real life), and his own body. The poems are extraordinarily appealing – technically tight, warm and emotionally moving.” — Tina Makereti
The Details by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $28
A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? The Details is a novel built around four such portraits, unveiling the fragments of memory and experience that make up a life. In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human. Short-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.
”Brief and penetrating. Genberg's marvellous prose is also a kind of fever, mesmerising and hot to the touch.” —Catherine Lacey, New York Times
”The nonlinear narrative renders the protagonist both vivid and obscure — the perfect conduit for this compelling, uncannily precise meditation on transience.” —Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova $35
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses — though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care — threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life. A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.
"At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture. Monstrilio packs in a lot, and the author pulls it off brilliantly. It is at once dark and tender, at times bleak, but balanced with humor that borders on slapstick. An outstanding debut; for all the ground being broken in genre-bending horror, his is a distinctive, exciting new voice in fiction." —Gabino Iglesias, Los Angeles Times
"In his masterful and surreal debut novel, Mexican author Gerardo Samano Cordova revels in the mire of grief, then lifts the veil and gets playful with it, like the Brothers Grimm ghostwriting Stephen King. Monstrilio is full of surprises and delightfully messed up — at once precise and inscrutable and horrifying." —Patrick Rapa, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry $38
Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits - torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love. Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva, said to haunt a nearby manor, and whose startling astronomical discoveries may never have been acknowledged. Inspired by Maria, and the dawning realisation James may not reciprocate his feelings, Thomas finds solace studying the night skies. Could astronomy offer as much wonder as divine or earthly love? Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas. In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world, and the sheer miracle of being alive.
”Gauzy and unhurried, a genteel novel of inner space. It's luxuriously — defiantly — old-fashioned. Perry has always produced gorgeous prose, and she has found a new, ethereal register in this book.” —Guardian
”A genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet.” —Telegraph
”Extraordinary and ambitious. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry's luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.” —Observer
Max by Avi Duckor-Jones $38
I want to let her know that choosing something is the entire problem. How do you choose something without feeling the undeniable loss of everything you rejected?
Max is about to finish high school. On the surface it appears he has everything, but underneath he is floundering. Grappling with questions about his birth parents and his sexuality, he feels that there is a seed of badness deep within him that will inevitably be exposed. After an incident at the end-of-year party sets Max's world to crumbling, he must finally figure out who he is and where he came from — and who he is allowed to love. Max is a vivid and insightful coming-of-age novel about the ways we weave the threads of our adolescent identities into a cohesive adult self.
Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh $28
Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes. The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked. For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped-for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year - a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life — from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world — and it is about all that does not change. All that which simply keeps on — living and breathing, nesting and dying — in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.
”Raw, visionary, lucid and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life.” —Katherine May
”I am a little in awe of Kerri ni Dochartaigh's work — the clarity and disinhibition of her storytelling; the wild freedom of her prose. Here is a brave and bold book, and one that deserves to be read, then read again.” —Helen Jukes
”Kerri ni Dochartaigh is one of those rare writers — like Dickinson, like Blake — whose way of seeing and being burns fierce and bright. Out from a year of intense isolation comes this hope-giving story about a soul taking flight and new life taking root.” —Tanya Shadrick
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud $38
June1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar — honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica — bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole. A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France — their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.
”Wonderfully enjoyable, intelligent, perceptive, moving. Written with such affection and understanding, such an awareness of the passing of time and of the unavoidably bruising nature of experience which is nevertheless redeemed by love, loyalty, and kindness. It is indeed rare to come upon a novel which offers such a cornucopia of pleasure, such a sense of the physical world and the reality of experience.” —Scotsman
”This epic family saga, which stretches from Algeria in 1927 to Connecticut in 2010 is a wise and insightful novel about identity and family, and how love can stifle as well as comfort.” —The Times
”One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller.” —Yiyun Li
Uncivilised: Ten lies that made the West by Subhadra Das $40
Taking cues from Greek philosophy and honed in the Enlightenment, certain notions about humanity and human society grew into the tenets we live by, and we haven't questioned them a great deal since. But isn't it time we asked who really benefits from the values at the core of our society? How much truth lies in a science that conjured up 'race'? Who do laws and nations really protect? Why does it feel like time is money? What even is 'art'? And the real question - is the West really as 'civilised' as it thinks it is? This book will put everything back on the table and ask readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about civilisation. Taking ten core values of Western Civilisation in turn, it will examine the root of the idea, how it developed, and how it's impacted the way we live. Most importantly it will reveal how each of these ideas was either created in opposition to another group of people, or based on ideas they had first (and better).
”A witty and accessible survey of the shortcomings of western civilisation as many people imagine it.” —Angela Saini
”With cutting wit and incisive insight, Uncivilised makes minced meat out of the leviathan known as 'Western civilization'. Imagine a brilliant curator-comedian guiding you on an irreverent tour through a grand museum — exposing its attics, sewers, and closets full of real and metaphoric skeletons. Subhadra guides us out of hallowed, hypocritical halls of the 'Ten Lies That Made the West', and shares with us the histories, knowledges, and ingenuity of those peoples and cultures dismissed as 'uncivilised'.” —Xine Yao
The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig (translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches) $28
Spring, 1974. After twelve years abroad, Natàlia Miralpeix returns to Barcelona and her family. Change is in the air: revolution sexual, political and artistic is simmering. Franco may still be in power, but his death is only two years away. The younger generation write poetry, listen to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and talk of a freer future. The older generation, though, carry the hidden wounds of the Civil War, their divided loyalties, and their own thwarted dreams, rebellions and desires. Translated here for the first time into English, Montserrat Roig’s The Time of Cherries is a beloved classic of Catalan literature, bold and startlingly fresh. As it dips in and out of timelines, stories and voices, it evokes a heady, captivating Barcelona that is as smoky, gritty and troubled as it is romantic and sun-kissed; a city and a people striving to leave the ghosts of the past behind, find a place in this invigorating new world and bring in the time of cherries, the springtime of joy.
”An exquisite portrait of old Catalonia meeting its newer version.” —Times Literary Supplement
Non-Places: An introduction to supermodernity by Marc Augé (translated from French by John Howe) $25
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of "supermodernity" to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary scientists and a Siberian tale of jump-started evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut $42
Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs--they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken — imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades.
In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary, untold story of this remarkable undertaking. Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15,000 years, but within a decade, Belyaev and Trut's fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes, as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. Trut has been there the whole time, and has been the lead scientist on this work since Belyaev's death in 1985, and with Lee Dugatkin, biologist and science writer, she tells the story of the adventure, science, politics, and love behind it all. In How to Tame a Fox, Dugatkin and Trut take us inside this path-breaking experiment in the midst of the brutal winters of Siberia to reveal how scientific history is made and continues to be made today.
The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar $25
In her cramped New York apartment, a mother wilts beneath the intense August heat, struggling to adapt to her role as the silent interpreter of her newborn baby's needs. She is not the first woman to give birth, to hold and carry and soothe and cradle. But the walls of her home seem to press ever closer as she balances on the fragile tightrope between maternal instinct and the longing for all she has left behind. A lifeline emerges in the unexpected form of Peter, her ailing upstairs neighbour, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. They are both confined to this oppressive apartment building, and they are both running out of time. Something is soon to crack. In this mesmerizing portrait of the first days of motherhood, Szilvia Molnar lays bare the strength it takes to redefine who you are, rediscovering the simple pleasures of life along the way.
”Brilliant. Molnar's sentences give up riches and terrors. An essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood.” —New York Times
”Molnar has written a daring and much-needed novel that has some of the hothouse, unflinching quality of Sylvia Plath's late poetry.” —The Atlantic
On Extinction: Beginning again at the end by Ben Ware $37
On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face 'the end of all things', Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. Combining lessons from Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Lacan, as well as drawing on popular culture and ecology, Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.
”A sweeping tour of our crisis present. Ben Ware offers a series of incisive and unforgiving readings that guide and impel us through the wreckage of contemporary capitalism.” —Benjamin Noys
The Three Little Tardigrades: A slightly scientific fairy tale by Sandra Fay $38
Gavin, Colin, and Doug live on a cozy little drop of H2O until one day, their mother tells them it's time for them to grow up and leave home. In search of the perfect place to settle down, the three little tardigrades (also known as "moss piglets") journey to an underwater ice cave, an erupting volcano, and even the moon! They can survive under extreme conditions, but can they avoid the Big Hairy Wolf Spider. . .? Humor and scientific facts about these resilient microscopic creatures come together to remix a beloved story-with an unexpected twist (and tons of laughs)! Includes material at the end of the book with detailed information about tardigrades, a glossary of terms from the book, and more science for eager young readers.
Look inside!