The books you buy today will bloom in Spring.
Click through for your copies:

Titiro / Look by Gavin Bishop $25

A completely delightful ‘first words’ board book, with details of the appealing bold pictures labelled both in te reo Māori and English.

• Look inside!

• Other wonderful books by Gavin Bishop.

Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist by Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor, and Greg Donson $70

A century on, her remarkable body of work remains fresh and contemporary. Featuring over 150 artworks, this book examines the continuing impact of Whanganui-born and British-trained Edith Collier and her artistic legacy. Collier was a dynamic Modernist, and the story of her years in Europe and then her return to New Zealand and the near abandonment of her practice are compelling as both art history and an affecting human story.

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Leslie Adkin: farmer photographer by Athol McCredie $70

Leslie Adkin (1888-1964) was a Levin farmer, photographer, geologist, ethnologist and explorer, a gifted amateur and renaissance man, of sorts, who used photography to document his scholarly interests, farming activities and family life. His much loved and exceptionally beautiful photographs taken between 1900 and the 1930s are one of the highlights of Te Papa's historical photography collection. This book of over 150 images, selected by Athol McCredie, Curator Photography at Te Papa, establishes his reputation more clearly within the development of photography in New Zealand and showcases a remarkable body of work. McCredie's substantial text gives rich insights into the varied elements of Adkin's very busy life, including his love for his wife Maud, captured over the years in a range of intimate and engaging images which feel as fresh as when they were first taken.

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Resetting the Co-ordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Chris Braddock, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Layne Waerea, and Victoria Wynne-Jones $70

The first anthology/reader of performance art of Aotearoa New Zealand, Resetting the Coordinates offers a lively, 50-year critical survey of Aotearoa New Zealand's globally unique performance art scene. From the post-object and performance art of the late 1960s to the rich vein of Maori and Pacific performance art from the early 1990s, its 18 chapters by researchers and practitioners is a major reference for art and performance communities of New Zealand, Australia and further afield. It discusses the influential work of Jim Allen, Phil Dadson, Peter Roche and Linda Buis, performance art initiatives in post-earthquake Christchurch and queer performance art, among many other topics.

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After a Dance: Selected stories by Bridget O’Connor $38

Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday. In After a Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here — at its best and at its delightful worst.
”These are some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I've read in a long time.” —Roddy Doyle
”Every O'Connor story is a performance, a live fight with time and decay, disgust and the human body. She wrote intensely from her time and place; to read her now is to be catapulted back to 1990s London. Yet the voice, the themes are more relevant than ever. No wonder she was so preoccupied with temporality: she was before her time.” —Martina Evans, The Irish Times

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang $25

Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang's unique imagination invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
“United by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion.” —China Miéville
”A science fiction genius. Ted Chiang is a superstar.” —The Guardian

We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida (translated from Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda) $36

On the top floor of an old building at the end of a cobbled alley in Kyoto lies the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. Only a select few — those who feel genuine emotional pain — can find it. The mysterious centre offers a unique treatment for its troubled patients: it prescribes cats as medication. Get ready to fall in love:-—Bee, an eight-year-old female, mixed breed helps a disheartened businessman as he finds unexpected joy in physical labour; —Margot, muscly like a lightweight boxer, helps a middle-aged callcentre worker stay relevant; —Koyuki, an exquisite white cat brings closure to a mother troubled by the memory of the rescue kitten she was forced to abandon; —Tank and Tangerine bring peace to a hardened fashion designer, as she learns to be kinder to herself; —Mimita, the Scottish Fold kitten helps a broken-hearted Geisha to stop blaming herself for the cat she once lost. As the clinic's patients seek inner peace, their feline friends lead them towards healing, self-discovery and newfound hope. [Hardback]

Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon $38

Haddon weaves ancient myths and fables into fresh and unexpected forms, and forges new legends to sit alongside them. The myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth is turned into a wrenching parable of maternal love — and of the monstrosities of patriarchy. The lover of a goddess, Tithonus, is gifted eternal life but without eternal youth. Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals. From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks. Whether describing Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit, or St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert, his powers of observation are at their height when illuminating the thin line between human and animal.
”A marvel of a collection — suffused with curiosity, humanity and mystery, bold in its scope and virtuoso in its telling. Mark Haddon makes stories matter.” —Kaliane Bradley
”In sentences as precisely cut as paper sculptures, Mark Haddon fits ancient myth to the cruelties and wonders of the present.” —Francis Spufford

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff $26

A servant girl escapes from a settlement. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief of everything that her own civilisation has taught her. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how — and if — we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves. [New paperback edition]
”I could not stop reading. A haunting, thrilling, gripping and rich. An unputdownable adventure, a mystery and a strange beautiful redemption.” —Naomi Alderman
”Groff is a mastermind, a masterpiece creator, an intoxicating magician. I wait with impatience for every book and I am always surprised and delighted. The Vaster Wilds feels like her bravest yet, hallucinatory, divine, beyond belief but also entirely human.” —Daisy Johnson

• Read Stella’s review.

The Year of Sitting Dangerously by Simon Barnes $29

In the autumn of 2020, Simon Barnes should have been leading a safari in Zambia, but Covid restrictions meant his plans had to be put on hold. Instead, he embarked on the only voyage of discovery that was still open to him. He walked to a folding chair at the bottom of his garden, and sat down. His itinerary: to sit in that very same spot every day for a year and to see — and hear — what happened all around him. It would be a stationary garden safari; his year of sitting dangerously had begun. For the next twelve months, he would watch as the world around him changed day by day. Gradually, he began to see his surroundings in a new way; by restricting himself, he opened up new horizons, growing even closer to a world he thought he already knew so well. The Year of Sitting Dangerously inspires the reader to pay closer attention to the marvels that surround us all, and is packed with handy tips to help bring nature even closer to us. [Now in paperback]

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout $38

It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known — "unrecorded lives," Olive calls them — reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
”The shrewd-eyed observer of love, loss and the ties that bind - life, basically - is back. Strout weaves a gossamer light web of a community's hopes and setbacks.” —Observer

Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to A.I. by Noah Yuval Harari $45

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI - a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity.

• Never summon a power you can’t control.

The Name She Gave Me by Betty Culley $25

A thoughtful and moving YA novel in verse. Rynn was born with a hole in her heart — literally. Although it was fixed long ago, she still feels an emptiness there when she wonders about her birth family. As her relationship with her adoptive mother fractures, Rynn finally decides she needs to know more about the rest of her family. Her search starts with a name, the only thing she has from her birth mother, and she quickly learns that she has a younger sister living in foster care in a nearby town. But if Rynn reconnects with her biological sister, it may drive her adoptive family apart for good.

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers $25

An experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage their dreams, desires, connections and communities. [New paperback edition.]
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, 2023.
”A polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of these isles as it's rarely taught.” —Observer
”It's been a while since I've reacted as emotionally to a novel. An epic the north has long deserved: ambitious, dreamy, earthy, dark, welcoming and not. There are readers like me who will not just enjoy this book but feel deeply grateful for its existence.” —Financial Times

New books for a new month and a new season.
Click through for your copies:

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner $38

Sharp, brainy, and hugely enjoyable — Rachel Kusner’s new novel exceeds even our anticipatory dreams. A thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of a mysterious elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation tout court. Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno's idealism laughable — he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Beneath this parodic spy novel about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
”Creation Lake reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture. Only Rachel Kushner could weave environmental activism, paranoia, and nihilism into a gripping philosophical thriller. Enthralling and sleekly devious, this book is also a lyrical reflection on both the origin and the fate of our species. A novel this brilliant and profound shouldn't be this much fun.” —Hernan Diaz
”I honestly don't know how Rachel Kushner is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerising way.” —George Saunders

• A philosophical spy novel for an age of environmental anxiety.

• A secret being deposited.

• Read an extract.

• Getting older.

• To help her cause.

• Kindred.

• Other books on the 2024 Booker long list.

COMFORT by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh

Ottolenghi's first brand-new major cookbook since the era-defining SIMPLE and FLAVOUR. With over 100 irresistible recipes alongside stories of childhood and home, this is comfort food, Ottolenghi-style. Ottolenghi brings his inspiring, flavour-forward approach to comfort cooking, delivering new classics that taste of home. A bowl of pasta becomes Caramelised Onion Orecchiette with Hazelnuts & Crispy Sage, a warming soup is Cheesy Bread Soup with Savoy Cabbage & Cavolo Nero, and a plate of mash is transformed into Garlicky Aligot Potato with Leeks & Thyme. Weaving memories of childhood and travel with over 100 recipes, COMFORT is a celebration of food and home — of the connections we make as we cook, and pass on from generation to generation.

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Mina’s Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa (translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder) $38

After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life. The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin Mina draws her into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. As the two girls share confidences their eyes are opened to the complications of the adult world. Tomoko's understanding of her uncle's mysterious absences, her grandmother's wartime experiences and her aunt's unhappiness will all come into clearer focus as she and Mina build an enduring bond.
”Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina's Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.” —Ruth Ozeki

• Quite surprised.

• This book has chosen me.

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (translated from Italian by Leah Janeczko) $28

Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero's need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations: she tries (and fails) to run away to Paris at the age of fifteen; she moves into an unwitting older boyfriend's house after they have been together for less than a week; and she sets up a fraudulent (and wildly successful) street clothing stall to raise funds to go to Mexico. Most of all, she falls in love — repeatedly, dramatically, and often with the most unlikely and inappropriate of candidates. As she continues to plot escapades and her mother's relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn, it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer — and a liar — inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity. Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, Lost on Me seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity (beginning with Vero's first artistic achievement: a painting she steals from a school classmate and successfully claims as her own). New paperback edition.
”I fell head over heels in love with Lost on Me. What a thrillingly original voice! Raimo writes with a tender brutality that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking.” —Monica Ali
”A uproariously funny portrait of an unconventional family from a writer who knows the sliver of ice in the heart as well as she knows love. This deliciously enjoyable novel is a true original and one to savour.” —Katherine Heiny

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize

The Empty Grandstand by Lloyd Jones $30

Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered — a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world. The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice. Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood — riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped. As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference — places, people, politics and importantly, language. The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned — it's a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery, dream spaces where language is forever in play.

Dinner: 120 vegan and vegetarian dishes for the most important meal of the day by Meera Sodha

“The ability to put a good dinner on the table has become my superpower and I want it to be yours too.,” says Meera Sodha, who has previously brought us the loved cookbooks East and Fresh India. Dinner is a fresh and joyful celebration of the power of a good meal all created to answer the question: What's for dinner? in an exciting and delicious way. Discover 120 vibrant, easy-to-make vegetarian and vegan main dishes bursting with flavour, including baked butter paneer, kimchi and tomato spaghetti, and aubergines roasted in satay sauce. There are also mouthwatering desserts, such as coconut and cardamom dream cake and bubble tea ice cream, and exciting side dishes, such as salt and vinegar potato salad and asparagus and cashew thoran. From quick-cook recipes to one-pan wonders and delectable dishes you can just bung in the oven and leave to look after themselves, Dinner is an essential companion for the most important meal of the day.

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Translation State by Ann Leckie $28

Qven was created to be a Presger Translator. The pride of their clade, they always had a clear path before them: Learn human ways and, eventually, make a match and serve as an intermediary between the dangerous alien Presger and the human worlds. But Qven rebels against that future, a choice that brings them into the orbit of two others: Enae, a reluctant diplomat attempting to hunt down a fugitive who has been missing for over two hundred years; and Reet, an adopted mechanic who is increasingly desperate to learn about his biological past — or anything that might explain why he operates so differently from those around him. As the conclave of the various species approaches and the long-standing treaty between the humans and the Presger is on the line, the decision of all three will have ripple effects across the stars. 
"A rich exploration of self-identification and personhood serve as a fantastic introduction to Leckie's world." —Polygon
"In this book that's part space opera, part coming-of-age tale, part body horror delight, Ann Leckie explores themes of power, gender identity, family, destiny and AI through charming characters, dramatic diplomacy and nail-biting action." —NPR Books
"Leckie's humane probe into power, identity, and communication is muscular and thought-provoking. This is an author at the height of her powers." —Publishers Weekly
"Puts the question of an individual's right to self-identification — both in terms of gender and species — at the heart of the narrative. Daring, thoughtful novels like Translation State perform vital cultural work to open up new spaces so that we can all remove our disguises and shine like the princexes we were always meant to be." —Los Angeles Review of Books

One Man in His Time by N.M. Borodin $55

From humble origins, the eminent Russian scientist Nicholas Borodin forged a career in microbiology in the era of Stalin. Pragmatic and dedicated to his work, he accepted the Soviet regime, even working on several occasions with the Secret Police. But in 1948, while on a state-sponsored trip to the UK to report on the bulk manufacture of antibiotics, he could no longer ignore his rising consciousness of the suppression of independent thought in his country. It was then that he committed high treason by writing to the Soviet ambassador to renounce his citizenship. One Man in his Time is the story of a man trying to live an ordinary life in extraordinary times. Rich in incident and astonishing details, it charts Borodin's childhood during the revolution and famine through to his scientific career amidst the suspicion and violence of the purges. Unsparing and frank in its depiction of the author's collaboration with Soviet authorities, it offers unparalleled insight into the daily reality of life under totalitarian rule. First published in 1955, and recently ‘rediscovered’. [Hardback]
”An astonishing testimony that has never seemed more timely or more pertinent.” —Nicholas Shakespeare

• Unspeakable times.

THAT GREEN OLIVE by Olivia Moore

Everyone has a food story — the recipes and ingredients they've grown up with and grown used to. In That Green Olive, recipe creator and Aotearoa foodie Olivia Moore shares her story, and shares how to find joy in the kitchen by mixing things up a little. Drawing inspiration from kiwi classics, restaurants and Olivia's lakeside hometown — with recipes for venison sausages and candied trout — That Green Olive gives you the choice to be a little bit fancy, whether it's beer and gruyere scones or a tasty nduja moussaka.
These are cosy snacks, dinners and desserts designed to inspire and devour, whether you are cooking for yourself, your family or friends.

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Emperor of Rome: Ruling in the Ancient world by Mary Beard $30

What was it really like to rule and be ruled in the Ancient Roman world? In her international best-seller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome. Now, she shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, one after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Beard asks bigger questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman (and our own) fantasies about what it was to be Roman, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before. Now in paperback.
”Britain's most famous classicist at the peak of her powers. Even more interesting than the insight into the imperial elite is the light the book sheds on the modern world.” —Sathnam Sanghera
”A beautifully written product of a lifetime of deep scholarly learning.” —Martin Wolf
”Lavishly illustrated, erudite and entertaining. Beard is so appealing and approachable that even the recalcitrant reader who previously gave not a single thought to the Roman Empire will warm to her subject.” —Jennifer Szalai

All That We Own Know by Shilo Kino $38

Meet Māreikura Pohe: she's in love with her best friend Eru, who is leaving to go on a church mission, and she's an accidental activist — becoming an online sensation after her speech goes viral. But does she really want the spotlight? Navigating self-diagnosed ADHD, a new romantic relationship, forging friendships and reclaiming her language all at once is no easy feat. And as her platform grows, Māreikura is unwittingly placed on a pedestal as a voice for change against the historical wrongs of colonisation. The question remains: at what personal cost? Set against the vibrant backdrop of Tāmaki Makaurau, All That We Know is a modern take on family and friendship and how, even in a divided and often polarising world, the resilience of friendship, love, and connection can defy the most challenges of our times.
”Magnificent. A well-observed mirror of our current time.” —Pip Adam
”Shilo Kino is an extraordinary writer — a growing, potent voice in Aotearoa/NZ literature. All That We Own Know is a clever, knowing insight into language trauma and reclamation and how we each navigate our experiences of colonisation and healing through te ao Maori me te ao Pakeha.” —Miriama Kamo

The Echoes by Evie Wylde $38

Max didn't believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max's death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max. Both a celebration and autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations and set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, stories and who has the right to tell them.

• Resound and rebound.

Wilding: How to bring Nature back, An illustrated guide by Isabella Tree, illustrated by Angela Harding $50

The latest iteration of Isabella Tree’s remarkable record of how she rewilded an English estate is a beautiful large-format book featuring stunning lino-cuts by Angela Harding. It is intended of children, but will be loved by anyone. Knepp is now home to some of the rarest and most beautiful creatures in the UK, including nightingales, kingfishers, turtle doves and peregrine falcons, hazel dormice and harvest mice, scarce chaser dragonflies and purple emperor butterflies. The sheer abundance of life is staggering too. When you walk out into the scrubland on an early spring morning the sound of birdsong is so loud it feels like it's vibrating in your lungs. This is the story of Knepp, and a guide telling you how to bring wildlife back where you live. Includes timelines, an in-depth look at rewilding, spotlight features about native animals including species that have returned and thrive — butterflies, bats, owls and beetles. There are accessible in-garden activities to 're-wild' your own spaces and the book encourages you to slow down and observe the natural world around you, understand the connections between species and habitats, and the huge potential for life right on your doorstep.

• Look inside!

The books you buy today will bloom in Spring.
Click through for your copies:

Nine Girls by Stacy Gregg $22

They dug a hole and they put the box filled with gold inside it. To keep it safe until they could return, one of them placed a tapu on it. A tapu so that anyone who tried to touch the gold would die. Titch is determined to find the gold buried somewhere on her family's land. It might be cursed but that won't put her off. Then an unexpected encounter with a creature from the river reveals secrets lying beneath its surface. As Titch uncovers the truth about the hidden treasure, she learns about her own heritage — and what it's like to feel like an outsider in your own world. A story about growing up in a time of social unrest in early 1980s New Zealand, Nine Girls is a page-turning adventure.
Winner of the  2024 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award, and winner of the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Junior Fiction Award — NZ Book Awards for Children & Young Adults 2024.
”In Nine Girls Stacy Gregg masterfully weaves comedy, fantasy and history together in a profound exploration of the complexity of identity in Aotearoa New Zealand through the experiences of a young Māori girl finding her place in the world. Historical events are woven into the fabric of the story, grounding her personal journey in a broader socio-political context. Vivid characters animate a fast-paced, eventful narrative with plot twists and emotional highs and lows. This book celebrates Māori identity, pays tribute to Aotearoa’s rich history, and testifies to the power of storytelling. Nine Girls is a taonga for readers of all ages, resonating long after the final page is turned.” — NZBACYA judges’ citation 

• The author on the book.

The Invasion of Waikato — Te Riri ki Tainui by Vincent O’Malley $40

The 1863 crossing of the Mangatāwhiri River by colonial forces was a pivotal moment, igniting a war between the Crown and the Waikato tribes that profoundly influenced New Zealand’s future. In The Invasion of Waikato: Te Riri ki Tainui, Vincent O’Malley introduces this critical period, presenting a conflict driven by opposing visions: European dominance versus Māori autonomy (as promised by the Treaty of Waitangi). The ensuing war was devastating, resulting in the loss of many lives, the displacement of communities and extensive land confiscations. Building on the detailed examination found in The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000 (2016), this concise new volume broadens the reach of the Waikato War narrative. Enriched with new research, maps and images, O’Malley’s latest work invites readers to contemplate the profound effects of this era on the nation’s identity and its enduring legacy.

• Look inside.

• 160 years on from the fighting.

Modern Women: Flight of Time edited by Julia Waite $65

Profiling 44 innovative artists, this book places women in the front and centre of New Zealand Modernism and explores their varied responses to the transformational changes occurring across five decades of the 20th Century. While presenting key works by such iconic figures as Rita Angus, Frances Hodgkins, and A Lois White, the book also aims to celebrate the significant contributions of lesser-known artists, including June Black, Flora Scales and Pauline Yearbury, one of the first Māori graduates of the Elam School of Fine Arts. Through their works, the book uncovers how these women navigated and transformed the cultural and political landscape of their time, offering new insights into themes of storytelling, identity and belonging. The artists featured in the book are: Rita Angus, Mina Arndt, Tanya Ashken, June Black, Jenny Campbell, Alison Duff, Elizabeth Ellis, Jacqueline Fahey, Ivy Fife, Anne Hamblett, Rhona Haszard, Barbara Hepworth, Avis Higgs, Frances Hodgkins, Julia Holderness (Florence Weir), Laura Knight, Mere Harrison Lodge, Doris Lusk, Molly Macalister, Ngaio Marsh, Kāterina Mataira, Eileen Mayo, Juliet Peter, Margot Philips, Ilse von Randow, Anne Estelle Rice, Kittie Roberts, Flora Scales, Maud Sherwood, May Smith, Olivia Spencer Bower, Helen Stewart, Teuane Tibbo, A Lois White, Pauline Yearbury, Adele Younghusband, and Beth Zanders.Nicely presented, with over 120 illustrations. [Hardback]

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Our Island Stories: Country walks through colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler $65

As well as affecting the lands appropriated and people subsumed into Empire around the world, the British colonial enterprise had an indelible effect even on the countryside and rural life within Britain’s own shores. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. Empire transformed rural lives, whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines — it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to link the lives of their descendants around the world now. [Hardback]
”This is real, difficult, essential history delivered in the most eloquent and accessible way. Her case, that rural Britain has been shaped by imperialism, is unanswerable, and she makes her arguments beautifully. An important book.” —Sathnam Sanghera
”A detailed and thoughtful exploration of historical connections that for too long have been obscured. A powerful book that brings the history of the Empire home — literally.” —David Olusoga
”This is an essential and fascinating book because it brings to light, through conversations and nature walks, some of the buried connections between Britain's landscape and historic buildings and its complicated hidden histories.” —Bernardine Evaristo

• A lightning rod.

• Capital and Empire.

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker $38

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle. Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks - among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine — war-wife — to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by visions of his death — and her own — while Ritsa is forced to bear witness to both Cassandra's frenzies and the horrors to come. Meanwhile, awaiting the fleet's return is Queen Clytemnestra, vengeful wife of Agamemnon. Heart-shattered by her husband's choice to sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind to Troy, she has spent this long decade plotting retribution, in a palace haunted by child-ghosts. As one wife journeys toward the other, united by the vision of Agamemnon's death, one thing is certain — this long-awaited homecoming will change everyone's fates forever.
”Brilliant, masterful, strikingly accomplished. Few come close to matching the sharp perspicacity and profound humanity of Pat Barker. This bloody tale has reverberated down the ages. With her characteristic blend of brusque wisdom and piercing compassion, Barker remakes it for our times.” —Guardian
”The Voyage Home brings forgotten female characters into sharp psychological focus. It is astonishingly fresh and modern, bristling with anger, and breezily quick to read. Pat Barker is one of the finest novelists working today.” —Alice Winn

• A fierce and chilling end.

• The Women of Troy.

• The Silence of the Girls.

• Intolerable when not writing.

The History of Ideas: Equality, justice, and freedom by David Runciman $40

What can Samuel Butler's ideas teach us about the oddity of how we choose to organise our societies? How did Frederick Douglass not only expose the horrors of slavery, but champion a new approach to abolishing it? Why should we tolerate snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy, as Judith Shklar suggested? And what does Friedrich Nietzsche predict for our future? From Rousseau to Rawls, fascism to feminism and pleasure to anarchy, this is a mind-bending tour through the history of ideas which will forever change your view of politics today.

• Talking politics.

• How the world might be remade.

• After Confronting Leviathan.

Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian literature by Dougal McNeill $45

McNeill explores how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world. In engaging prose and with impressive intellectual range, McNeill applies insights from Marxist critical theory to the works of selected Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian writers. From Harry Holland, Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore responding to the legacy of Robert Burns in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first-century novelists applying their literary imaginations to intersectional spaces and Indigenous, settler, gendered and international freedom traditions, McNeill reveals literature’s capacity to find potent forms with which to articulate concepts of, and beliefs about, freedom. McNeill’s argument for literature as an essential ‘form of freedom’ is a resonant call for our times. Authors whose work is discussed in Forms of Freedom include: Pip Adam; Emily Perkins; Alice Tawhai; Hone Tuwhare; Patricia Grace; Elsie Locke; Albert Wendt; Mary Gilmore; Dorothy Hewett; Harry Holland; Eve Langley; Ellen van Neerven; Henry Lawson; Amanda Lohrey.

• Emily Perkins as a prophet of globalised cultural and economic flows.

Granta 167: Extraction edited by Thomas Meaney $33

From mining to Bitcoin, energy politics to psychoanalysis, the spring edition examines a practice as old as human history: Extraction. In this issue James Pogue is detained in the Central African Republic, where mines and mercenaries are at the centre of governmental conflict, Nuar Alsadir analyses boredom, Bathsheba Demuth travels the Yukon River and Laleh Khalili unravels the history of energy in Israel. Elsewhere, Anjan Sundaram reports from Mexico, Thea Riofrancos discusses the green transition and William Atkins visits the Forest of Dean, with photography by Tereza Červeňová. And in fiction, we have new work by Carlos Fonseca (tr. Jessica Sequeira), Camilla Grudova, Benjamin Kunkel, Eka Kurniawan (tr. Annie Tucker) Rachel Kushner and Christian Lorentzen. Plus, photography by Danny Franzreb (introduced by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian) and Salvatore Vitale.

• Look inside.

• Culture bound up with extraction.

Tairāwhiti: Pine, profit, and the cyclone by Aaron Smale $18

An examination of the region's struggle with colonial legacies and environmental mismanagement. Through personal stories, interviews and critical analysis, Smale uncovers the multifaceted impacts of pine plantations, land confiscation and climate events of increasing severity on a landscape and its people. This book provides a nuanced understanding of the socioeconomic and ecological challenges facing the Tairāwhiti community and points toward a path that will honour and sustain the future.

• Other BWB Texts.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson $38

The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognise — a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick — except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the 'sidekick' is DC Reggie Chase. The crumbling house — Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton — suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it. Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another painting: ‘The Woman with a Weasel’, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow's carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does ‘The Woman with a Weasel’ hold? The puzzle is Jackson's to solve. And let's not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace. All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house. A brilliantly plotted, supremely entertaining, and utterly compulsive tour de force from a great writer at the height of her powers. [I’m sure that’s not a rook but perhaps a booby on the cover. {T}]

The House on Via Gemito by Dominico Starnone (translated from Italian by Oonagh Stransky)

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit.The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night.
Federi, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn't have a family to feed, he'd be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment.His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble. Narrated against the background of a Naples still marked by WWII and steeped in the city's language and imagery.

• Long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Determined: The science of life without free will by Robert Sapolski $30

Determined offers a synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works — the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's ‘fault’; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognising that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. New paperback edition.
”Robert Sapolsky explains why the latest developments in neuroscience and psychology explode our conventional idea of Free Will. The book's chock-full of complex and often counter-intuitive ideas. It's also a joy to read. That's because Sapolsky is not only one of the world's most brilliant scientists, but also an immensely gifted writer who tells this important story with wit and compassion. It's impossible to recommend this book too highly. Reading it could change your life.” —Laurence Rees

Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers $37

Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town's Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics. Dinah has an especial hero- Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can't believe her luck. Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high. But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he's never met, to come to somewhere he's never heard of. With nothing to lose and in need of the cash Bucky boards a plane. And so Bucky finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who is preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century. Over the course of the week, he finds himself striking up new and unexpected friendships; and facing his past, and its losses, for the very first time.
”Myers is the laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection. How beautiful to read something so affirming and full of light, and to have music, ephemeral as it might be, presented as precious and transformational.” —Wendy Erskine

• The beauty of the three-minute pop song.

Living With Our Dead: On loss and consolation by Delphine Horvilleur $30

Eleven stories of loss, mourning, and consolation, collected during years spent caring for the dying and their loved ones. From Charlie Hebdo columnist Elsa Cayat, to Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan, the ‘girls of Birkenau’; from Yitzhak Rabin, to Myriam, a New Yorker obsessed with planning her own funeral, to the author’s friend Ariane and her struggle with terminal illness, Horvilleur writes about death with intelligence, humour, and compassion. Rejecting the contemporary tendency to banish death from our thoughts, she encourages us to embrace its presence as a fundamental part of life. Drawing from the Jewish tradition, Living with Our Dead is a humanist, universal, and hopeful book that celebrates life, love, memory and the power of storytelling to inspire and sustain us.

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor $30

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island's shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what's to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island's harsh, salt-stung landscape. When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But, as she guides them across the island's cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.
”Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character's specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude. To different eyes, the same island might look like a prison or a romantic enclave, but to actually apprehend the truth of a place or person requires patience, nuanced attention and the painstaking accrual of details. Understanding is hard work, O'Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book's end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve.” —Maggie Shipstead, New York Times
”An astonishingly assured debut that straddles many polarities: love and loss, the familiar and the strange, trust and betrayal, land and sea, life and death. O'Connor has created a beguiling and beguiled narrator in Manod: I loved seeing the world through her eyes, and I didn't want it to end.” —Maggie O'Farrell

Ten Nosey Weka by Kate Preece and Isobel Joy Te Aho-White $22

A trilingual picture book in ta rē Moriori, te reo Māori, and English. Learn basic words and numbers in the Moriori, Māori, and English languages in this book about ten nosy weka, who peck at ngarara (ngarara / insects), squeeze under a farm gate, and tease a tchuna (tuna / eel). Let's hope these curious weka can find their way back to their flock in the end.

• Speaking ta rē Moriori.

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Diaries by Franz Kafka (translated by Ross Benjamin) $50

Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka's handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications — notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive — and often surprisingly unpolished — writing as it appeared in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.
”One of the finest translating achievements in recent history.” —Literary Review
”A new translation of the writer's diaries from his twenties restores them to how he wrote them: chaotic, sometimes incoherent and full of black comedy. The diaries will open your eyes.” —John Self, The Times
”An unprecedented, almost 600-page peephole into the mind of a writer whose published prose is otherwise classically abstract and inscrutable. It's some secret to be let into.” —Tanjil Rashid, Financial Times
”This new edition restores the variegated richness of the diaries. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us.” —Guardian
”This edition of the Diaries seems a model of both scrupulousness and generosity. Here we find the unpolished inner life of one of the most significant writers that ever lived; and the entries, which come from the mind of an ordinary human being and not from some otherworldly realm of inner consciousness, do not in any way detract from Kafka's work.” —Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator

• What we learn.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange $38

A tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope. Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America’s war on its own people. Readers of Orange’s classic debut There There will know some of these characters and will be eager to learn what happened to Orvil Red Feather after the Oakland Powwow. New readers will discover a wondrous novel of poetry, music, rage and love, from one of the most astonishing voices of his generation.
”This powerful epic entwines the stories of a diverse cast of characters, each grappling with the weight of history, identity and trauma. Through well-crafted prose and deftly drawn perspectives, Tommy Orange paints a vivid portrait of the Native American experience – both the pain of displacement and the resilience of those who continue ancestral traditions. Spanning centuries, the novel explores universal themes of family, addiction and the search for belonging in a society that often fails to recognise the value of its Indigenous people. Wandering Stars is a stunning achievement, a literary tour de force that demands attention.” —Booker judges’ citation
”It’d be a mistake to think that the power of Wandering Stars lies solely in its astute observations, cultural commentary or historical reclamations, though these aspects of the novel would make reading it very much worthwhile. But make no mistake, this book has action! Suspense! The characters are fully formed and they get going right out of the gate […] Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves, who contend with holding private and public identities, makes Wandering Stars a towering achievement.” —Jonathan Escoffery, New York Times Book Review

• Read an extract.

• I didn’t know you coulod do this.

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood $37

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place she grew up, finding solace in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town. She finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past. With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?
”Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.” —Booker Judges’ citation
”I have rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel. Wood is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here — the way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look, the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and inconsiderate to those around them — it all rings true. It's the story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance is global. This is a powerful, generous book.” —Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Guardian

• Nothing trivial, nothing insincere.

• Read an extract.

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.

What Is Mine by José Henrique Bortoluci (translated from Portuguese by Rahul Bery) $28

In What Is Mine, sociologist José Henrique Bortoluci uses interviews with his father, Didi, to retrace the recent history of Brazil and of his family. From the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s, Didi’s work as a truck driver took him away from home for long stretches at a time as he crisscrossed the country and participated in huge infrastructure projects including the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a scheme spearheaded by the military dictatorship of the time, undertaken through brutal deforestation. An observer of history, Didi also recounts the toll his work has taken on his health, from a heart attack in middle age to the cancer that defines his retirement. Bortoluci weaves the history of a nation with that of a man, uncovering parallels between cancer and capitalism — both sustained by expansion, both embodiments of ‘the gospel of growth at any cost’ — and traces the distance that class has placed between him and his father. Influenced by authors such as Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich, What Is Mine is a moving, thought-provoking and brilliantly constructed examination of the scars we carry, as people and as countries.
”A son’s journey, around father and country, subtle and complex, tender and brutal; an intimate work of rare beauty and power.” —Philippe Sands
”What Is Mine is an unforgettable oral history of truck driving along the potholed roads carving up the Amazon rainforest: bandits, sleep deprivation, beef barbecued on the engine. It is also an incisive political critique of ecocidal ideas of ‘progress’, a powerful reflection on the ways labour shapes a human body, and a loving exploration of a relationship between a father and son. It already has the feel of a classic.” —Caleb Klaces
”A political document told as memoir, this is a book of incredible beauty and insight, one which demonstrates one of the greatest truths: that our lives, and the lives of our families, are inextricably bound to the structures of class, economics, and history they were born into.” —Madeleine Watts

Philosophy of the Home: Domestic space and happiness by Emanuele Coccia (translated by Richard Dixon) $30

A bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom — are these three rooms all that make a home? Not at all, argues Emanuele Coccia. The buildings we inhabit are of immense psychological and cultural significance. They play a decisive role in human flourishing and, for hundreds of years, their walls and walkways, windows and doorways have guided our relationships with others and with ourselves. They reflect and reinforce social inequalities; they allow us to celebrate and cherish those we love. They are the places of return that allow us to venture out into the world. In this intimate, elegantly argued account, Coccia shows how the architecture of home has shaped, and continues to shape, our psyches and our societies, before then masterfully leading us towards a more creative, ecological way of dwelling in the world.
”I have been waiting for Philosophy of the Home. Coccia's reflections take you through the complexity of the notion of home — not merely as a place, but as a space of philosophy, history, politics, and art.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist
”A precious guide. There is so much more at stake than the material quality of a place for living — for us human beings, the house represents the universe.” —Chris Dercon

• The last obstacle.

• It’s all about love.

Pity by Andrew McMillan $37

The debut novel from award-winning poet Andrew McMillan, exploring community, masculinity and post-industrialisation in Northern England. The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important, it had purpose. But what is it now? Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex, is now in his middle age, and must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to mask. Simon is the only child of Alex and had practically no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs. Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's short and magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of a life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change. [Hardback]
”Tender and true. It explores with brilliance and deep empathy how our lives — and our secrets — are always intertwined with those who went before us.” —Douglas Stuart
”Pity digs deep into the heart and history of South Yorkshire and brings out the black gold of love, longing and loss. A triumph.” —Jon McGregor
”Pity pays a great poet's tough but tender attention to the unspoken layers and historic fissures which lie beneath the wounded town of the self. This beautiful book about the marks that are left on people and places in turn leaves a deep empathic mark on the reader.” —Max Porter
”Pity is as tough, glittering and multilayered as the coal upon which it rests. With lyrical prose and deep tenderness, Andrew McMillan beautifully explores the complex hauntings of love and grief across generations.” —Liz Berry
”Truly stunning. A novel that deals with the ways history intervenes in our lives and how we can use our lives to intervene in history. South Yorkshire is a crucible.” —Helen Mort

Quit Everything: Interpreting depression by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi $40

Depression is rife amongst young people the world over. But what if this isn't depression as we know it, but instead a reaction to the chaos and collapse of a seemingly unchangeable and unliveable future? In Quit Everything, Franco Berardi argues that this "depression" is actually conscious or unconscious withdrawal of psychological energy and a dis-investment of desire that he defines instead as "desertion". A desertion from political participation, from the daily grind of capitalism, from the brutal reality of climate collapse and from a society which offers nothing but chaos and pain. Berardi analyses why this desertion is on the rise and why more people are quitting everything in our age of political impotence and the rise of the far-right, asking if we can find some political hope in desertion amongst the ruins of a world on the brink of collapse.
”Berardi, your words are disgusting.” —Giorgia Meloni

• The power of quitting.

• Breaking the relation.

No Judgement: On being critical by Lauren Oyler $40

It is the age of internet gossip; of social networks, repackaged ideas and rating everything out of five stars. Mega-famous celebrities respond with fury to critics who publish less-than-rapturous reviews of their work (and then delete their tweets); CEOs talk about reclaiming 'the power of vulnerability'; and in the world of fiction, writers eschew actually making things up in favour of 'always just talking about themselves'. In this blistering, irreverent and funny first book of non-fiction, Lauren Oyler — one of the most trenchant, influential, and revelatory critics of her generation — takes on the bizarre particularities of our present moment in a series of interconnected essays about literature, the attention economy, gossip, the role of criticism and her own relentless, teeth-grinding anxiety. No Judgement excavates the layers of psychology and meaning in how we communicate, tell stories and make critical judgements.
”Brisk, honest and soaring with elan. Oyler persuasively advocates clear thinking through doing it herself with such poise. Her critical approach isn't currently common sense, but it should be, and soon enough maybe it will.” —Naoise Dolan

• You are what you write.

• Why criticism can never be written by A.I.

• How to criticise.

• Cultural critics are people too.

• The critic in the internet age.

Tipo 00: The pasta cookbook by Andreas Papadakis $55

This attractive and informative book is packed with everything you want to know to be able to make superb pasta — from scratch to sauce — any time of the day. With over 80 recipes and illustrations that will soon make you an expert in the kitchen and very popular with anyone who eats in your house, this is a good book to have. You’ll soon be eating pasta for every meal of the day. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Living on Earth: Life, consciousness, and the making of the natural world by Peter Godfrey-Smith $40

How has life shaped and been shaped by our planet? He visits the largest living stromatolite fields, examples of how cyanobacteria began belching oxygen into the atmosphere as they converted carbon dioxide and water into living matter using the sun's light. The extraordinary increase in oxygen in the atmosphere resulted in an explosion in the diversity of life. And so began a riotous tangle of coevolution between plants and animals, as each changed the environment around them allowing others to utilise these new ecosystems and thus new species to evolve. From cyanobacteria, through algae on to ferns or trees or grasses, and from protists , through invertebrates and fish through the dinosaurs and on to birds and mammals - our planet has seen an explosion of life forms, all reacting to their environment and all creating new environments that allow other life to evolve. In our own evolutionary line, an initially unremarkable mammal changed in new ways, evolving to come out of the trees to inhabit new savannas and then onto inhabit the whole planet. One of the most adaptable species ever found on Earth, and arguably the species causing the most change, humans are still part of this 3.8 billion year history of life forms changing the world around them. In Living on Earth, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Living on Earth shows that Humans belong to the infinitely complex system that is the Earth, and our minds are products of that system, but we are also an acting force within it. We are creatures of Earth, but we hold Earth's future in our hands.
”An exquisite account of intelligence across species. Living on Earth is consistently rewarding, packed with insights and invitations to reflect, and blessed with exquisite writing'.” —Guardian
”Clever, compassionate and often deeply moving. An excellent finale to an ambitious trilogy exploring the evolution of intelligence.” —New Scientist

• Would the planet be better off without us?

• Other Minds.

• Metazoa.

Mrs S. by K. Patrick $35

In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’. Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S’s world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both women know that a choice must be made. K. Patrick’s portrait of the butch experience is revelatory; exploring the contested terrain of our bodies, our desires and the constraints society places around both.
”The intense physicality of the novel's emotions and its stylish, stripped-back prose make for an arresting pairing.” —Observer
”Entirely captivating. Patrick's staccato sentences become a secondary language for butchness, powerful and confident” —New York Times

• Spooky sexy.

• The itch of skin.

The Samurai of the Red Carnation by Denis Thériault (translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie) $45

Matsuo is born to be a samurai, but as he is being trained in the art of war he realises he was meant for a different art altogether. Turning his back on his future as a warrior of the sword, he decides instead to do battle with words, as a poet. Thus begins a story of romance and adventure, love and betrayal, that takes Matsuo across medieval Japan, through bloody battlefields and burning cities, culminating in his ultimate test at the uta awase — where Japan's greatest poets engage in fierce verbal combat for the honour of victory. [Hardback]
”A charming, magical, picaresque journey through medieval Japan, filled with mystery, meaning and wonderful imagery. Denis Theriault's brilliant evocation of the noble art of the waka (classical Japanese poetry) is an absorbing, pacy and immensely enjoyable read.” —Sean Lusk

The Tree Collectors: Tales of arboreal obsession by Amy Stewart $55

When Amy Stewart discovered a community of tree collectors, she expected to meet horticultural fanatics driven to plant every species of oak or maple. But she also discovered that the urge to collect trees springs from deeper, more profound motives, such as a longing for community, a vision for the future, or a path to healing and reconciliation. In this slyly humorous, informative, often poignant volume, Stewart brings us fifty captivating stories of people who spend their lives in pursuit of rare and wonderful trees and are transformed in the process. Vivian Keh has forged a connection to her Korean elders through her persimmon orchard. The former poet laureate W. S. Merwin planted a tree almost every day for more than three decades, until he had turned a barren estate into a palm sanctuary. And Joe Hamilton cultivates pines on land passed down to him by his once-enslaved great-grandfather, building a legacy for the future. Stewart populates this lively compendium with her own watercolour portraits of these extraordinary people and their trees, side trips to investigate famous tree collections, arboreal glossaries, and even tips for 'unauthorised' forestry. [Hardback]

• Look inside!

• How do you collect a tree?

Sick Of It: The global fight for women’s health by Sophie Harman $40

We know the causes of death and disease among women all over the world. We have the funding and commitment from governments and philanthropists to tackle it. So why are women still dying when they don't have to? Harman argues that women's health is being caught in the crossfires of global politics — and gives us a roadmap for how we might stop it. There are multiple case studies on how women's health is being used and abused by politics and politicians across the globe: the repeal of abortion rights, Serena Williams's near-death experience, the bombing of Ukrainian maternity hospitals, and lesser-known issues like healthwashing by countries like Rwanda and the exploitation of women by the very health organisations that are supposed to help them. Through these stories, Sick of It explores urgent, topical questions around populist politics, big data and how women's work is valued, and offers smart solutions on how to fix this crisis through activism and political work.
”A powerful and inspiring must-read.” —Elinor Cleghorn
”Radical and thought-provoking, this book should drive us all to action — and the author tells us how.” —Gina Rippon

Cake for Everyone by Thé Tjong-Khing $30

Just when it is time for cake, an eagle swipes up the picnic blanket and flies away. The animals chase after to find all their stolen picnic things. Thé Tjong-Khing's visual storytelling slows us down and invites us to look more closely. Can you remember everything on the blanket? Hat, ball, doll, feather, cake? Who is hiding in the bush? What has the dog seen on the cliff? How will pig get back her sun umbrella? Why is the rabbit crying? And how can there be cake for everyone when the very hungry rat family has eaten it already? Collect all the missing objects, find out who they belong to, and come back home for more cake in this cheerful, wordless look-and-find story. (There is cake at the end.) [Hardback]

• Look inside!

Out of the carton and (nearly) into your hands.
Click through for your copies:

The Mermaid Chronicles: A midlife mer-moir by Megan Dunn $35

The true tale of how one woman's lifelong obsession became a midlife mermaid odyssey. Forty, freckled and facing infertility, writer and disgruntled project manager Megan Dunn hears the siren call that reawakens her lifelong obsession and sets off in pursuit of mermaids. Real mermaids. From Coney Island and Copenhagen to Courtenay Place, Wellington, New Zealand; from Waterhouse's classic painting ‘A Mermaid’ to the 1984 romantic comedy Splash to Skyping the first freelance mermaids of the new millennium, her odyssey takes her fathoms deep to strange and unlikely places, probing the collective unconscious and asking the question that has plagued humans for millennia — What is it about mermaids? Diving into the caves of her own life, Megan loses the plot but finds her voice and hears the mermaids singing. Shimmeringly intellectual and devastatingly deadpan, tragicomic and true, The Mermaid Chronicles is an off-the-hook tale about sex and marriage, mothers and daughters, middle age, women's work, obsession, the stories we tell ourselves and the myths that define us all. (And Daryl Hannah, too.)

• All day avoiding it.

• The Mermaid Chronicles: the exhibition.

• Immersed.

• More interviews than you could wish for (only just (there are a lot)).

• Footless footage.

• Professional mermaid.

• Don’t you forget about me.

• Things I Learned at Art School.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak $37

“A storm is approaching Nineveh, the sky swollen with impending rain. One of the clouds approaching the world's largest and wealthiest city, built on the banks of the river Tigris, is bigger and darker than the others-and more impatient. It floats suspended above a majestic building adorned with marble columns, pillared porticos and monumental statues. This is the North Palace, where the king resides in all his might and glory. The cloud casts a shadow over the imperial residence. For unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles. Dangling from the edge of the cloud is a single drop of rain - no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously - small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth open down below like a lonely lotus flower. Remember that raindrop, inconsequential though it may be compared to the magnitude of the universe. Inside, it holds a miniature world, a story of its own...” Shafik’s astounding, expansive new novel, set between the 19th century and modern times, is about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris — their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh.
”Gloriously expansive and intellectually rich — a magnificent achievement.” —The Spectator
”An absorbing novel. Shafak is a novelist whose interest in mapping the intricately related world and its history goes beyond literary device.” —Guardian
”Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf. Make place for her in your heart too. You won't regret it.” —Arundhati Roy
”It will surprise no one that this is a brutal, elegant and incredible book. Amazing what Elif Shafak has done here — again! Magic.” —Evie Wyld
”An odyssey, an epic, a lament, and a tale of redemption, There are Rivers in the Sky is a clarion call to honor the elemental forces that shape our memories, our histories, and our world. In short, a masterpiece.” —Ruth Ozeki

• A warning from history.

• Connected by water.

• Put on trial for fiction.

Like Love: Essays and conversations by Maggie Nelson $50

A raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's incisive work.  These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide — from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker — but certain themes recur- intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; the roles of the critic and language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the sustenance offered by art and artists. [Hardback]
”One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation.” —Olivia Laing.
”Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have.” —Guardian
”To read Like Love is to watch [Nelson] circling issues of gender and sexuality, but refracted through a variety of different prisms, so that the end result is a constellation of ideas that seem to be expanding outwards.” —Telegraph

• Does language make art happy?

• The conversations she wants to be having.

• Criticism is an expression of love.

• The magic of paying attention.

• Bluets.

The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen) $37

Having married her childhood sweetheart, Riko now finds herself trapped in a relationship that has been soured by infidelity. One day, by chance, she runs into her old friend Mr Takaoka, who offers friendship, love, and an unusual escape: he teaches her the trick of living inside her dreams. And so, each night, she sinks into another life: first as a high-ranking courtesan in the 17th century, and then as a serving lady to a princess in the late Middle Ages. As she experiences desire and heartbreak in the past, so Riko comes to reconsider her life as a 21st century woman, as a wife, as a mother, and as a lover, and to ask herself whether, after loving her husband and loving Mr Takaoka, she is now ready for her third great love.

• I won’t let you go.

• Other books by Hiromi Kawakami.

Metamorphoses: In search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba $45

It might seem obvious, where our obsession with Kafka's life stems from. We want to know what made Kafka Kafka. But there is also another part to this story, a part that does not get told nearly as often. To understand how Kafka became Kafka, we cannot stop in 1924, the year of his death, where most biographies end. To gain the status he gained, Kafka needed readers. Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself. Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.
”A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.” —Marina Warner

• His life after his death.

• More than just a prophet of malaise.

• Is That Kafka?

Around the World with Friends by Philip Waechter $30

Raccoon finishes his book and is ready for his own adventure — he wants thrills, excitement and to conquer the sea! He borrows everything he needs from his friends: a boat from Badger, who insists on coming along because you should never go on an expedition alone. Fox packs them eggs for the omelette — then must join to be the cook. Bear insists on coming to scare away the jellyfish, and Crow says he should be lookout. The friends sail through rapids, collect sweet blackberries, chase away bees, and play soccer, until a little rain and thoughts of home bring their excursion to an end. That, thinks Raccoon, was the most thrilling magnificent adventure with friends I've ever had. Let's go again soon — and next time we'll bring the chickens.

• Look inside!

• Also available: A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends.

The Architecture of Modern Empire: Conversations with David Barsamian by Arundhati Roy $30

A piercing exploration of modern empire, nationalism and rising fascism that gives us the tools to resist and fight back. Over a lifetime spent at the frontline of solidarity and resistance, Arundhati Roy's words have lit a clear way through the darkness that surrounds us. Combining the skills of the architect she trained to be and the writer she became, she illuminates the hidden structures of modern empire like no one else, revealing their workings so that we can resist. Her subjects — war, nationalism, fundamentalism and rising fascism, turbocharged by neoliberalism and now technology. But also — truth, justice, freedom, resistance, solidarity and above all imagination — in particular the imagination to see what is in front of us, to envision another way, and to fight for it. Arundhati Roy's voice — as distinct and compelling in conversation as in her writing — explores these themes and more in this essential collection of interviews with David Barsamian, conducted over two decades, from 2001 to the present.

Future of Denial: The ideologies of climate change by Tad DeLay $47

Capitalism is an ecocidal engine constantly regenerating climate change denial. Emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green-washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth's paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left? The symptoms suggest society's inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. And all the while, hypocritical governments and corporations pretend that increasing fossil fuel consumption is a way to ‘transition’ to cleaner energy. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War. Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?
”It is through denial that the climate crisis deepens, but we have hardly begun to get our heads around how it works. In this sweeping survey, Tad DeLay turns and twists the concept and uses it to shine light on a range of aspects of the crisis. It is a leap forward in the study of denial." —Andreas Malm
”The contradictions of daily life in the global North in the face of accelerating climate change have become normalized. Sure there are those who refuse to ‘believe’ in climate change, but even people who recognize the magnitude of the problem have to manage the chasm between how contemporary capitalism works and the radical otherwise that is required. This requires a vast arsenal of denial that we rarely if ever talk about, and Tad DeLay is its generous but unflinching diagnostician. This book uncovers not only the scams, lies and misinformation that sustain the degradation of people and planet, but just as importantly the repressions and suppressions that have for many become essential to making it through the day. It is also an excellent guide to how we might move forward without them, but without giving in to doom-saying.” —Geoff Mann
”An impressive, beautifully written and unsparing book. DeLay's precise, controlled fury lends itself to mournful ironies and asperous satire as he brutally exposes the sources of denial and weighs the options for a future beyond denial. Not a word is wasted in this vital intervention.” —Richard Seymour
”Tad DeLay is one of the most important and disquieting theorists of consciousness and politics writing today. His work is indispensable.” China Mieville

• What if there just is no solution?

Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu) $39

2080, the world is divided, dominated by two antagonistic factions, the Pacific League and the Atlantic Alliance. Tensions are high and the smallest disturbance in the status quo could set the world on fire. And a signal flickering through deep space could be just that spark. As three young scientists form an alliance to decode the signal, they realise that the answers don't only lie in deep space, they also lie deep in humanity's past. What they discover will change everything — our past, present and future. If we have one.
”A fresh approach — emphasising Chinese history, and including scenes of martial artistry along with philosophical debates — adds extra zest to the popular idea of wise and helpful aliens in this entertaining adventure.” —The Guardian
”Relentlessly charming. It is precisely its madcap range that makes it such a treat, its total lack of interest in distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow entertainment or between philosophy and mere fancy.” —Washington Post

How to Make a Bomb by Rupert Thomson $37

Philip Notman, an acclaimed historian, attends a conference in Bergen, Norway. On his return to London, and to his wife and son, something unexpected and inexplicable happens to him, and he is unable to settle back into his normal life. Seeking answers, he flies to Cadiz to see Inés, a Spanish academic with whom he shared a connection at the conference, but his journey doesn't end there. A chance encounter with a wealthy, elderly couple sends him to a house on the south coast of Crete. Is he thinking of leaving his wife, whom he claims he still loves, or is he trying to change a reality that has become impossible to bear? Is he on a quest for a simpler and more authentic existence, or is he utterly self-deluded? As he tries to make sense of both his personal circumstances and the world surrounding him, he finds himself embarking on a course of action that will push him to the very brink of disaster.
”An exceptional, frightening and curiously persuasive novel. I hope it brings Thomson the attention and reward that one our finest and most imaginative novelists clearly deserves.” —Miranda Seymour, Financial Times
”A magnetic portrait of one man's radicalisation. The text sparkles with clarity and precision, and frequently beauty too. A book that strikes to the core of our age of uncertainty.” —Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

• The violent effects of grief.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See $29

According to Confucius, ‘an educated woman is a worthless woman’, but Tan Yunxian — born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness — is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations — looking, listening, touching, and asking — something a man can never do with a female patient. From a young age, Yunxian learns about women's illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose — despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it — and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other's joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife — embroider bound-foot slippers, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights. How might a woman like Yunxian break free of these traditions and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? A re-imagining of the life of one person who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

The House at the End of the Sea by Victoria M. Adams $20

Saffi doesn't want her new life, living with her dad, little brother and old-fashioned grandparents in their B&B by the sea. She is grieving for her mum and longs for things to go back to normal. But this new home is anything but normal: the walls change colour, a face appears in the mirror, and the pantry is suddenly filled with fancy food. When a party of extraordinary visitors arrive at midnight, Saffi begins to realise that her family has a dark, magical secret. It will take all her bravery to discover the truth and find a way into another world.
”A delightfully eerie mystery that explores complicated family histories. A twisty tale of fairy folklore and what it means to stand betwixt and between." —Skye McKenna
"Majestic, in the tradition of Garner and Cooper. A debut with real magic in its pages." —Sinead O'Hart

Click through to our website for your copies.

Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall $40

Polly and Wiki and all the other kuia ride on the roof of Kerry’s Toyota Corona with its navy blistered bonnet. They do this for all the moko; they are everywhere and roam inside us as they keep weaving the net and it’s no small thing that only a few slip through. Time and whakapapa slowly unravel as Talia Marshall weaves her way across Aotearoa in a roster of decaying European cars. Along the way she will meet her father, pick up a ghost, transform into a wharenui, and make cocktail hour with Ans Westra. Men will come — Roman, Ben, Isaac — and some go. Others linger. And it is these men — her father, Paul, and grandfathers Mugwi Macdonald and Jim; her tīpuna Nicola Sciascia, tohunga Kipa Hemi Whiro, Kupe himself — who she observes as she moves backwards into the future. With her ancestor Tūtepourangi she relives Te Rauparaha’s bloody legacy, and attempts and fails to write her great historical novel. But it is her wāhine, past and present, who carry her, even as the ground behind her smoulders. Tempestuous and haunting, Whaea Blue is a tribute to collective memory, the elasticity of self, and the women we travel through. It is a karanga to and from the abyss. It is a journey to peace.  
”This is a wild road trip, frightening and funny. You can taste all the food, see all the ghosts, hear the ancestors. It’s a masterclass in honesty. It’s one for the wāhine. Through Marshall’s extraordinary storytelling I saw and laughed with the people she loves, and cried for those she wished had stayed.” —Becky Manawatu 
”Whaea Blue is a fiercely original memoir with a fresh Māori perspective, scanning the record of inter-iwi hatreds, curses, war, and colonial aftershocks. In the process, she crafts a complex personal relationship to Māori identity. No one is spared in this droll, lyrical memoir, least of all the author herself. Marshall dives fearlessly into the darkest topics – pain, loss, abandonment, violence, death, madness, war — and comes up with a testament you won’t forget.” —John Dolan
”Marshall’s whirlwind prose effortlessly slams the reader with neck-snapping speed from laughter to sorrow to recognition to disbelief and then back again. An uncommonly good debut by an author who is as original as she is undeniable.” —Victor Rodger

• “I always think I know better than Pākehā men in corduroy pants.”

• A walk backwards.

• A tour inside the mind.

• Continue the tour.

• Look inside.

• Everyone is wrong about Ans Westra except Talia Marshall.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith $40

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know. She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows — almost — about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape. Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
“Eloquently oblique and profoundly empathetic, dredging up meanings from under the river that runs over undesired histories. Han Smith slides round the side of the unsayable by turning language over to its silver side.” —Selby Wynn Schwartz
”Kaleidoscopic and beguiling. A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics.” —Andrew McMillan
”Strange, intriguing, exhilarating.” —Camilla Grudova
”Intimate, intricate, and ultimately irresistible. Smith's unforgettable style builds a political-personal narrative that resounds to the drumbeat of resistance and rebellion.” —Ruby Cowling
”Like being in a hall of mirrors where you think you've caught Smith's eye but it's just a reflection. When something slips into view between the glass, you get that uncanny feeling you're staring back at yourself. A mysterious quest of excavation.” —Jen Calleja

• A secret history.

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto (translated from Japanese by Beth Cary) $30

Tokyo, 1960. As the first rays of morning light hit the rails at Kamata Station, a man's body is found on the tracks: blood-stained, disfigured and unrecognisable. With only two leads — a distinctive accent and a single word, "kameda" — senior inspector Imanishi Eitaro is called in to solve the puzzle. Accompanied by junior detective Yoshimura, he crosses Japan in search of answers, determined to uncover the secrets of this gruesome crime. With no suspect, no evidence and no witnesses, the two quickly reach a dead end. But, before long, a series of strange coincidences reopen the unsolved case: a young woman scatters pieces of white paper out the window of a train; an actor, on the verge of revealing an important secret, drops dead of a heart attack; and Inspector Imanishi investigates... A fascinating glimpse into 1960s Japanese society. This is one of Seicho Matsumoto's best-loved of his many novels. A nice edition.
”This reminds me of John le Carre's writing. It's a moment of transition in Japan; new ideas are spreading, new contexts are forming. There's traditional beauty still, but modernity is yammering to be let in. Highly recommended.” —Nick Harkaway

Rēwena and Rabbit Stew: The rural kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800—1940 by Katie Cooper $50

The rhythms and routines of country life are at the heart of this compelling account of the rural kitchen in Aotearoa. Historian Katie Cooper explores how cooking and food practices shaped the daily lives, homes and communities of rural Pakeha and Maori throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Delving into cooking technologies, provisions, gender roles and hospitality, the story of the rural kitchen highlights more than just the practicalities of putting food on the table.
”This book is a fantastic addition to rural history, with a compelling perspective and a fresh set of concerns about place, dwelling, and movement in and around rural spaces. The book brings both an intimacy and a vulnerability to rural life plus a strong sense of rural robustness. Visually, this is an extraordinary collection. The images themselves tell a compelling story.” —Jane McCabe

• Look inside!

• A voice from the rural kitchen.

A Man Holds a Fish by Glenn Busch $75

A retrospective survey of 79 extraordinary images, chosen by the photographer himself, and beautifully presented in a large-format book. Almost other-worldy, and striking in their humanity and emotional affect, the images in this resonant book bear returning to again and again. Busch left school at 14 and spent his early years working as a manual labourer in many different places around Australia and New Zealand. His passion for photography began with the viewing of the work of Hungarian photographer Brassai and his understanding of the medium was helped through a chance meeting with John B Turner. Throughout his career, Busch has focused on capturing the essence of daily life, often exploring themes of community, work and identity. His influential projects include Working Men, You Are My Darling Zita, The Man With No Arms and Other Stories, My Place and the ongoing Place In Time documentary project.
”In the early 1970s, the social documentary tradition was the reigning, respectable approach, and Busch's work remains foundational, even after half a century retaining a vividness and force in its resistance to any tendency to idealise in his portraiture, as this book so clearly attests.” —Peter Ireland

• Look inside!

The World of James Joyce (and Other Irish Writers): A 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle by Michael Kirkham, with text by Joseph Brooker $45

Step into Dublin on 16 June 1904 with Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and a host of other characters. Spot Joyce himself along with fellow Irish writers as you explore the world of Ulysses.
"Challenging, but easier to finish than Ulysses." —VOLUME customer

• What it’s like!

• Ulysses.

• A reader’s companion.

The Girls in the Red House Are Singing by Tracey Slaughter $30

our task is to sing in this killer place — but how does the body go on singing, in pain, in isolation, in dead-end love? Tracey Slaughter’s new collection of poems begins with the sequence that won the £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize in 2023, ‘opioid sonatas’, which travels the jagged aftermath of a high-speed crash, charting the fallout of grief and the body’s long-term struggles with dosage and damage. The sequence ‘psychopathology of the small hotel’ haunts the rooms of stale, no-exit adultery, watching the trade-offs the body makes to dull its pain. ‘the girls in the red house are singing’ tunnels back into childhood and teenage years, to face the echoes of violence left unvoiced — and confront the legacy of rape culture. ‘nudes, animals & ruins’ circles the emptied streets during lockdown, listening for the sounds the body makes when it must survive alone.
”Haunting and harrowing, yet executed with such forceful luminous brilliance. We kept reading the poems aloud, revelling in the breath-taking momentum, beautiful language, and galloping rhythmic quality. Outstanding.” —Malika Booker, Manchester Poetry Prize judge, 2023

Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Māori, Honoring the Treaty by Avril Bell $30

Becoming Tangata Tiriti brings together twelve non-Māori voices — dedicated professionals, activists and everyday individuals — who have engaged with te ao Māori and have attempted to bring te Tiriti to life in their work. In stories of missteps, hard-earned victories and journeys through the complexities of cross-cultural relationships, Becoming Tangata Tiriti is a book of lessons learned. Sociologist Avril Bell analyses the complicated journey of today's partners of te Tiriti o Waitangi, and asks: Who are we as tangata tiriti? How do we identify in relation to Māori? What are our responsibilities to te Tiriti? What do we do when we inevitably stumble along the way? This concise paperback acts as a guide for those just beginning their journey towards a Tiriti-based society — and is a sound refresher for others well along the path.
”Based on interviews with twelve non-Maori New Zealanders, Bell expertly weaves their narratives with existing writing, exploring what it means to be a good ally to Māori in contemporary times. To call it a 'how-to manual' would be too reductive but it does offer a pragmatic set of tools for those willing to do the work. Through teasing out the ways in which non-Māori have engaged with te ao Māori, and the often layered and nuanced complexities these engagements create, the book offers an invitation to Pākeha and, in fact, all non-Māori to be part of the conversation around what makes us New Zealanders — and how we might move forward in ways that are just and that enhance the mana of Māori and non-Māori alike. An easy-to-read book that should be compulsory reading for anyone concerned about our country's future.” —Rebecca Kiddle

Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid $38

A reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare's most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her. The Lady knows the stories: that her eyes induce madness in men. The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed. The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of survival, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armour. She does not know that her magic is greater, and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. She does not know this yet. But she will.
”Reid takes one of Shakespeare's most interesting antiheroes and endows her with vulnerability, power and depth: a protagonist who's neither flower nor serpent, but something both more magical and more human. This is a darkly gorgeous feast of a book, rich with irony and invention. I was spellbound from the very first page.” —Freya Marske
“Lady Macbeth is a dark, elegant, heart-stirring novel, beautifully written, rich with the history of language and of medieval Scotland. This tale of a tortured, appealing, resourceful woman carves its own life from the Scottish play in a unique and powerful way. I loved every page.” —Louisa Morgan

The Museum of Failures by Thrity Unrimgar $37

Remy Wadia left India for the United States long ago, carrying his resentment of his mother with him. He has now returned to Bombay to adopt a baby from a young pregnant girl — and to see his elderly mother for the first time in several years. Discovering that his mother is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life, he is struck with guilt for not realizing just how sick she has become. His unexpected appearance and assiduous attention revives her and enables her to return to her home. But when Remy stumbles on an old photograph, shocking long-held family secrets surface. As the secrets unravel and Remy's mother begins communicating again, he finds himself re-evaluating his entire childhood, his relationship to his parents, and his harsh judgment of the decisions and events long hidden from him, just as he is on the cusp of becoming a parent himself. But most of all, he must learn to forgive others for their failures and human frailties.
”There's no powder keg like a family secret. And when it explodes, nothing in the past is ever as it was, and nothing in the future is ever the same. The Museum of Failures is a symphony of secrets and lies, love and hate, regret and forgiveness.” —Marlon James

The West: A new history of an old idea by Naoíse Mac Sweeney $30

We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread stretching from classical antiquity to the countries of the modern Western world. But what if this is wrong? Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures — including a formidable Roman matriarch, an unconventional Islamic scholar, an enslaved African American poetess and a British prime minister with Homeric aspirations — archaeologist and historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney charts how the idea of The West was invented, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and why it is no longer ideologically fit for purpose today. New paperback edition.
”One by one she takes on hoary old myths, explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past.” —Guardian

A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle $38

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to? Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions. A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief.
”A life-affirming, deeply felt novel of the decisions we make and the lives that unspool from them. To read A Language of Limbs is to be reminded of the power of queer joy and community. I loved it.” —Hannah Kent
”Poetic, fresh and mesmerising, Hardcastle's work is like nothing I have ever read. A Language of Limbs is full of feeling; a love story about the family we make ourselves. Upon finishing this book I was overwhelmed by a sense of, more. I am desperate for more stories like this.” —Jessie Stephens
”Dylin Hardcastle's novel carried me away like a tidal current. Expansive across time, yet intimate in its focus, A Language of Limbs is that rare book that's equally poetic and propulsive — with twin protagonists who are impossible to shake. Nothing short of an instant queer classic.” —Benjamin Law

• Finding their own voice.

Into the Sideways World by Ross Welford $19

When twelve-year-olds Willa and Manny hear of a mysterious animal prowling their town, they are determined to prove it is real. Following the creature into a cave one full moon, they are swept into an alternate, ideal, world – one where pollution and conflict have been conquered decades ago and even their own families seem happier. But when they return, no one believes them. So, with a global war looming in their own world, their quest for proof of the Sideways World becomes ever-more urgent, in a nail-biting race against time. And Willa and Manny will have to make an impossible decision: because once you find a perfect world, can you ever leave it behind?

New books for a new month. Choose and read something new:

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) $36

Also available as Spontaneous Acts $35

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik… Yoko Tawada's novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music, of seeing and being seen weave a life together across decades, languages, and cultures, and reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.
”A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition." —Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review
"The varied characters in Tawada's work — from different countries, of different sexes and species — are united by the quality that Walter Benjamin describes as 'crepuscular': none has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines." —Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Magazine
"Yoko Tawada conjures a world between languages. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds." —Julian Lucas, The New Yorker
”Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel reads almost like a cautionary tale: this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry. Celan’s poems are Patrik’s only confidants. His girlfriend is long gone. A mysterious stranger, the trans-Tibetan angel of the title, lifts his spirits by seeking him out at a café with a gift: a German medical text that Celan once annotated on his quest for new language. This is Tawada's pandemic novel, which is never addressed directly—but it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why Patrik’s desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency.” —Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
"Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible." —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

• The present is a constant deferment.

• Removing language from the paper it’s written on.

• A poem intends another, needs this other.

Célina by Catherine Axelrad (translated from French by Philip Terry) $38

By the age of fifteen, Célina has lost her father to the sea, a brother to suicide, a sister to tuberculosis, her virginity to a wolfish man at the inn where she was waitressing, and the job at the inn when another servant informed on her. In the Channel Islands of the 1850s, Alderney is not yet the tourist paradise filled with luxury cars it is today. When the chance arises to leave and work in Hauteville House for the Victor Hugo household during their exile in Guernsey, it is Célina's first glimpse of a different kind of life. Axelrad sheds a new light on the complexity of Hugo’s persona, and on the sexual and class dynamics at play in the proprietary, yet strangely tender relationship between the maid and le grand homme. A fictional recreation based on Hugo’s Guernsey Diaries and on letters from his wife, Célina is a miniature literary monument to a forgotten life cut short.
”Pitch-perfect, and so light yet so profound. All of Axelrad's books have at their centre a silent, vulnerable young woman, but also one who is tough and resilient, totally unsentimental but deeply responsive and intelligent. How such a person emerges out of such apparent silence is the wonder of her work. Célina is as quiet and devastating a novel as I have read in a long time. Unforgettable.” —Gabriel Josipovici
”Seen through Célina’s eyes, told with her curiosity, her wonder, her sharp observations, what we witness unfolding here is not so much Victor Hugo’s life as that of the young narrator. We see the intelligence she brings to bear, playing her few cards just so in a time which may be the most patriarchal in our history: the nineteenth century. Catherine Axelrad describes a quiet young woman who nevertheless hears everything, sees everything, silently appraises her lovers, picks and chooses, and escapes submission in her own way. It’s a joyful read.” —Colombe Schneck
”Living in exile in the Channel Islands, the irrepressibly philandering author of Les Misérables went through what is called his ‘Chambermaid Period’. In this moving short novel, Catherine Axelrad gives us the great man and his retinue, his house and his mania for Gothic décor, the island and the threatening sea, all through the eyes of a chambermaid—not a fantasy maid, but the real girl from Alderney whose death in 1861 saddened the whole Hugolian establishment. The poverty, ill-health and exploitation of working folk and especially of the young girls who are brought to life here deepen the understanding of what Hugo’s great novel was really about. In this lively translation by Philip Terry, Axelrad’s portrait of a normal yet unique Victorian household seen from ‘downstairs’ is a true gem.” —David Bellos
”In this remarkable book Catherine Axelrad gives speech to a young woman born in poverty and almost lost to history. Célina is restored to life, emerging as lively, courageous, complex, witty, pragmatic, and joyful. There are moments of great tenderness and longing; despite her exploitation (for relations are often complicated, as Axelrad so subtly weaves), there is a real and delicate relation between her and her master, with whom she discovers the possibility of poetic language. Célina and Célina, woman and book, haunt me.” —Sharon Kivland

• Meeting Monsieur.

• Moot points.

• Other books published by Les Fugitives.

Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich $38

Eva meets Jamie by chance. She is sixteen, living in middle-class Brooklyn; he is the same age, but from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She's observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he's bold, mysterious, eccentric. Eva's family is warm and welcoming, but Jamie avoids going home to his. Despite having little in common, they instantly forge a deep friendship. As Eva goes off to college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and is drawn toward radical experiments in politics and religion. Their separate spheres seem to be spiralling away from each other, but it soon becomes clear that they are both circling the same question: how do you define yourself and your beliefs in a divided and unjust world?
”Ask Me Again is a beautifully observed and deeply philosophical novel, which surprises and delights at every turn.” —Jenny Offill
”Rigorous, intensely observed, and brimming with the sort of elusive revelations that form the heartbeat of a life, Sestanovich's novel debut demonstrates a tremendous gift at rendering the texture of love, faith, and heartbreak with both subtlety and force. In her masterful hands, relationships condense, turn acute, and unfurl with symphonic grace across the individual arcs of characters that you can't help but carry with you long afterward.” —Alexandra Kleeman

• Different people.

A Radically Different World: Preparing for climate change by Jonathan Boston $18

Boston provides an urgent exploration of our future in the face of climate change. Focusing on the challenges of adaptation, Boston’s insightful analysis assesses the scale of impact on communities, the need for robust policy for relocation and the design of fair compensation schemes. He charts the changing landscape of residential property insurance and offers a vision for navigating our uncertain future with hope.

A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw $38

Maxine has been losing things lately. Her car in the shopping centre carpark. Important work files — and her job as a result. Her marbles? 'Mild cognitive impairment', according to the doctor. Time for a nursing home, according to her daughter, Rose. Rose has her own troubles with memory: a recurring vision of a locked cupboard, claustrophobic panic. Something in the shadows. Something to do with the old family house in Kutarere. Back in that house by the beach, Maxine and Rose try to find their bearings. But they can't move forward without dealing with the past — and the past has a few more surprises in store.
”A beautiful story, this tangled yarn of dementia and love—harrowing, haunting and tender.’ —Michelle Elvy

Pirate Enlightenment, Or, The Real Libertalia by David Graeber $30

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolising risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies — vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire. In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, written while he and David Wengrow were working on what would become their major bestseller, The Dawn of Everything. In direct conversation with that work, Graeber explores how the proto-democratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. The result is a short but sweeping exploration of the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and an endeavor to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future. [Now in paperback!]
”The chief pleasure of Graeber's writing is not that one always agrees with his arguments about the past. It is rather that, through a series of provocative thought experiments, he repeatedly forces us to reconsider our own ways of living in the present. Whatever happened in 18th-century Madagascar, Pirate Enlightenment implies, we could surely all do with a bit more free-thinking and egalitarianism in our own social, sexual and political arrangements.” —Fara Dabhoiwala, The Guardian

This Other Eden by Paul Harding $26

Inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways — in flight from society and its judgment — have landed and built a home.  In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey arrives on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, to make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, alongside an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours.  Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island. A missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions — or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark. [Now in paperback.]
Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
”Based on a relatively unknown true story, Paul Harding’s heartbreakingly beautiful novel transports us to a unique island community scrabbling a living. The panel were moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders.” —Booker judges’ citation

The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy Each $25

New editions of two favourite books from this beloved feminist poet.

The World’s Wife: Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.

Feminine Gospels: Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions — and revisions — of female identity. Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect - as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door.

“Part of Duffy's talent — besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety — is her ventriloquism: from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets — that is, she makes it look easy.” —Charlotte Mendelson, Observer

WHAT by John Cooper Clarke $40

Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen — and that's just the first poem. Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke's could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection.

• Maintaining his front.

• I Wanna Be Yours.

Leonardo Forever by Richard Yaxley $20

In the summer of 1465, fourteen-year-old Annalisa de Torriano reluctantly travels with her family to her father’s new estate near the village of Vinci. Although she misses her privileged life, and the wealthy Matteo, in magnificent Florence, Annalisa is soon entranced by the freedom the countryside offers—and by the brilliant and charming young King of the Forest, Leonardo da Vinci, who, alongside his beloved companion Dante, quickly befriends her. Mesmerised by Leo’s intelligence and beauty, an infatuated Annalisa starts to dream of a different life. But her dreams are an illusion, and as her relationship with Leo unfolds, it is Dante who will change all their lives forever.

Jumping out of the carton and into your hands. Click through to our website to secure your copies:

Woman, Life, Freedom by Marjane Satrapi et al $65

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, returns to graphic art with this collaboration of over 20 activists, artists, journalists, and academics working together to depict the historic uprising, in solidarity with the Iranian people and in defense of feminism. On September 13th 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. A wave of protests soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" — words that have been chanted around the world during solidarity rallies. In order to tell the story of this major revolution happening in her homeland, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together an array of journalists, activists, academics, artists, and writers from around the world to create this powerful collection of full-color, graphic-novel-style essays and perspectives that bear witness. Contributing artists: Joann Sfar, Coco, Mana Neyastani, Catel, Pascal Rabate, Patricia Bolanos, Paco Roca, Bahareh Akrami, Hippolyte, Shabnam Adiban, Lewis Trondheim, Winshluss, Touka Neyastani, Bee, Deloupy, Nicolas Wild, and Marjane Satrapi. 3 expert perspectives on Iran: long-time journalist for Libération and political scientist Jean-Pierre Perrin; researcher and Iran specialist Farid Vahid; and UC Berkeley historian Abbas Milani, Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrates that this is not an unexpected movement, but a major uprising in a long history of women who have wanted to affirm their rights.
 "A small miracle of lively, serious and joyful intelligence." —Elle (France)
"Each comic in this anthology might also function as a small lantern, an opportunity to illuminate yet another aspect of daily Iranian life and resistance under the current regime." —The Markaz Review

• Look inside!

• Finger cramps.

• What can art achieve in a revolution?

The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an easier life in the kitchen by Bee Wilson $70

This excellent book, compiled from a lifetime’s experience of preparing, eating, thinking and writing about food, realigns even a sophisticated cook’s basic approaches and ingredients, and makes life in the kitchen simpler, more enjoyable, and always satisfyingly productive. The Secret of Cooking is packed with solutions for how to make life in the kitchen work better for you, whether you are cooking for yourself or for a crowd. Wilson shows you how to get a meal on the table when you're tired and stretched for time, how to season properly, cook onions (or not) and what equipment really helps. The 140 recipes are doable and delicious, filled with ideas for cooking ahead or cooking alone, and the kind of unfussy food that makes everyday life taste better.
”A lifetime of kitchen wisdom here.” —Nigel Slater
”A truly remarkable cookbook that will change lives.” —Rachel Roddy
”It's not often that a genuinely game-changing cook book comes out, but this accomplished, approachable and helpful book — its writing as nourishing as the recipes — is most definitely it. Quite frankly, there's not a kitchen that should be without a copy of The Secret of Cooking.” —Nigella Lawson
”There is wisdom, and notes from a lifetime of reading, thinking, cooking and eating here. And it's not just about food but about how we live, and how we look after ourselves and each other>” —Diana Henry
”The very acest book — so utterly lovely and so utterly necessary.” —Jeremy Lee
”Bee Wilson seems to help me in my moments of crisis — both when I'm struggling to find the right words and when I've got creative fatigue. The Secret of Cooking reminds us to cut ourselves some slack. Bee focuses on probability rather than possibility. The book is brimming with clever tips, handy shortcuts and substitutions, with 15 pages devoted to the versatile and underrated box grater (NB it really isn't just for cheese).” —Yotam Ottelenghi
”It is my Book of the Year, across any genre — packed to the absolute gills with invaluable advice, hints and tips, so reassuring and warm in tone that you feel actual love for the author, and, of course, also full of fantastic, achievable, home-kitchen friendly recipes that I guarantee will immediately become part of your repertoire.” —India Knight
”I don't need a lot of convincing to pick up a pan, but Wilson's tips are so clever, her recipes so tempting, and her vignettes of family life so candid, that this is a book I can read for pleasure alone.” —Niki Segnit
”This book is the perfect cooking companion and Bee Wilson is the ultimate kitchen friend: smart, funny, conscientious and patient, this is a book you'll want to spend time with, in and out of the kitchen.” —Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer

• Look inside!

The Raven’s Eye Runaways by Claire Mabey $25

A gripping fantasy quest set in a parallel medieval world. Three friends and a one-eyed raven find themselves up against the rulers who restrict the gifts of writing and reading to an elite few. They must go on a wild and unpredictable rescue mission. Who and what will they meet along their way? And what is the terrible truth behind everything they think they know about their world?  
”As delicate as it is potent, The Raven's Eye Runaways is a hot, pungent pot of tea. With every gulp, you'll be transported to a heady, haunting world where words are a currency reserved for the few, and paid with the price of spilled blood. A feverish love letter to the written word, I dare you to read it — you will be bewitched!” —Graci Kim 
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox
”I adored it.” —Rachel King
”A beautiful, warm and assured debut.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
”Claire Mabey writes like a dream.” —Anna Smaill

• Witch trials and post-it notes.

• Now think.

Marrow, And other stories by Sloane Hong $35

A collection of short comics by Sloane Hong, brought into print for the first time. Although varied in content, each story explores how we relate to each other and the world around us — through grief, love and our innate curiosity of the unknown. Plagued with intrigue and often unsettling, these gloriously stylish panels peel back layers of the human psyche, exposing them, throbbing and pulsating, for all to see.

• Look inside.

• Pip Adam recommends this (and a couple of other good books).

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won) $26

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression. Now in paperback.
”By turns love letter to and critique of language itself, Greek Lessons is a brief yet, in its concision and finesse, lapidary work. One of Han's most intimate works.” —Financial Times
”In Greek Lessons Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable. Han Kang turns the well-worn idea of the mind-body disconnect into something fresh and substantial.” —Los Angeles Times
”This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language. Han is an astute chronicler of unusual, insubordinate women.” —The New York Times
”Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience.” —Katie Kitamura
”Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up even the most jaded of literary palates.” —Independent

• How language misses its mark.

Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk $50

Following The Great War for Civilisation, this posthumous volumes is a chronicle of Fisk's trademark rigorous journalism, historical analysis and eyewitness reporting. Fully immersed in the Middle East and skeptical of the West's ongoing interference, Fisk was committed to uncovering complex and uncomfortable truths that rarely featured on the traditional news agenda.
”Every sentence of Robert Fisk radiates his loathing of wars and the inevitable dehumanisation they produce, which makes his (sadly) last book an everlasting warning, beyond its value as a meticulous historical recount and analysis of today's events.” —Amira Hass, journalist, Haaretz
”In his attentive, careful, detailed, historically grounded reporting — and in this remarkable posthumous book, which deserves to be widely read — the voices of people demanding freedom are given space, recognition, and dignity. This is an exemplary and deeply human work of both journalism and history.” —Anthony Arnove
”Even after 20 years, we still don't know the full depths of the strategic bankruptcy and moral depravity of America's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Legendary journalist Robert Fisk's Night of Power is essential reading to understand the full extent of the crime that was the Iraq war.” —Trita Parsi

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy $28

Claire Kilroy takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity. Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn't know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember. Tender and harrowing, Kilroy's book portrays parenthood in all its agony and ardent joy.
"Oh this novel! Powerful beyond description. I read it in a day, holding my breath, heart bursting. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever felt swallowed alive by caring for a child, and essential reading for everyone who hasn't." —Barbara Kingsolver
"The most vivid account I've ever read of how difficult it is to cope with the demands of an infant. Through a prism of love and despair, Kilroy's narrator illuminates how a baby can tear away at a woman's sense of self, as her needs disintegrate in the face of her child's interminable demands.., if a woman chooses to devote herself to ensuring her child's wellbeing, then someone needs to take care of her too." —John Boyne

• Parenting under the patriarchy.

Mask by Sharrona Pearl $23

From the theater mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks — as faces — are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponised and politicised, Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object. By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Sharrona Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value.
”Masking is, as Sharrona Pearl wisely observes, a complicated enterprise: masks can protect and buffer even as they diminish, eviscerate, and lie. With a historian's rigor and a human's candor, Pearl addresses all of this and more. From public health to performance and ritual, Mask interrogates the personal, public, and inevitably paradoxical ways we both conceal and reveal our increasingly imperiled selves.” —Jessica Helfand

• Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie $25

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband's abuse have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-three years. She has told no one of her own visions and knows that time is running out for her to do so. The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything. Vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women. New paperback edition.
”A tiny marvel, tenderly illuminating the inner lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.” —Guardian
”Electrifying — This slim novel is a pocket epic; you will read it in no time but be thinking about it for ages after. You feel in every sentence the weight of history pressing down on and confining these women.” — Frank Cotterell-Boyce, Guardian
”A beautiful book. I loved it. Margery and Julian are both so alive. The invisible balancing and weighing MacKenzie has done across the whole to bring them dialogue with each other and to bring the reader into emotional and spiritual connectedness with them is just so brilliant. And it's funny. It warmed my heart.” —Max Porter

• How much has been lost.

• Suprising.

To the City: Life and death along the ancient walls of Istanbul by Alexander Christie-Miller $40

Caught between two seas and two continents, with a contested past and an imperiled future, Istanbul represents the precipitous moment civilizations around the world are currently facing. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the fears and hopes of the present-day inhabitants, and the story of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II's siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform Turkey in an echo of its imperial past. Istanbul stands at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. Environmental decay, rapacious development and a refugee crisis are straining the city to breaking point, while its civil society gutters in the face of resurgent authoritarianism. Yet, the city has endured despite centuries of instability. Christie-Miller introduces us to people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds. Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country's history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future.
”The author is a sensitive and patient presence, piecing together these stories over many pages. Spending time at a teahouse, an animal shelter and a former Dervish hall that is now an academic institution, he brings to life the rich variety of these neighbourhoods. While Christie-Miller's focus remains on the streets surrounding the walls, his characters offer broader insights into Turkey's social and political make-up. He is also sensitive to the poetry of his surroundings, captured in moments of lyrical precision.” —Financial Times

Father and Son: A memoir about family, the past, and mortality by Jonathan Raban $40

On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his own mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the extraordinary story of his parents' marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.
”A beautiful, compelling memoir. Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement." —Ian McEwan

Inheritance: The evolutionary origins of the modern world by Harvey Whitehouse $40

Every human being is endowed with an inheritance. A set of ancient biases — forged by natural selection and fine-tuned by millennia of culture — that shape every facet of our behaviour. For countless generations, this inheritance has been taking us to ever greater heights — driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organised religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it is failing us. Suddenly, we find ourselves on a path to destruction.Here, a leading anthropologist offers a sweeping account of how our inheritance has shaped humanity's past and future. Unveiling a pioneering new way of viewing our collective history — one that weaves together psychological experiments, on-the-ground fieldwork, and big data — Harvey Whitehouse introduces three evolved biases that shape human behaviour everywhere — conformism, religiosity, and tribalism. He recounts how our tools for managing these biases have catalysed the greatest transformations in human history — the birth of agriculture and the invention of kingship, the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of the first crusading empires. And he takes readers deep into the modern-day tribes — from Indonesian terrorist cells to Libyan militias to American ad agencies — that show how our three biases are now spiralling out of control.Above all, he argues that only by understanding our ancient inheritance can we solve our thorniest modern problems, whether violent extremism, political polarisation or environmental catastrophe. The result is a powerful new perspective on the human journey; one that transforms our understanding of where we have been and where we are going.
”A bold and sweeping analysis that ranges widely through time, across geographies and through different kinds of human societies. A book of rare ambition and scope.” —Peter Frankopan
”A compelling, thoughtful, nuanced, and ultimately hopeful new perspective on our history, present crises, and future potential. This book is a masterpiece - important, thought-provoking, and great fun to read.” —Kate Fox

The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival $22

There's a bunch of kids in there and suddenly they're all looking at me like someone who can actually do something, not just some weirdo with the wrong shoes and a rubbish coat . Will has the wrong shoes – he's always known it but doesn't know how to change it. Navigating the difficulties of home and school when you feel you stick out is tough, but finding confidence with the help and empathy of friends can be all you need to see the way. A sensitive exploration of the experience of child poverty.
”Reading fiction is about walking in the shoes of people whose lives are very different to ours and allowing more readers to see themselves in stories. The Wrong Shoes is the perfect example of both — the right book at the right time.” —Tom Palmer

Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen $23

Eighteen-year-old Aihui Ying dreams of becoming a brilliant engineer just like her beloved father - but her life is torn apart when she arrives a moment too late to stop his murder, and worse, lets the killer slip out of reach. Left with only a journal containing his greatest engineering secrets and a jade pendant snatched from the assassin, Ying vows to take revenge into her own hands.Disguised as her brother, Ying heads to the capital city, and discovers that the answer to finding who killed her father lies behind the walls of the prestigious Engineers Guild - the home of a past her father never wanted to talk about. With the help of an unlikely ally - Aogiya Ye-yang, a taciturn (but very handsome) young prince - Ying must navigate a world fraught with rules, challenges and politics she can barely grasp, let alone understand.But to survive, she must fight to stay one step ahead of everyone. And when faced with the choice between doing what's right and what's necessary, Ying will have to decide if her revenge is truly worthwhile, if it means going against everything her father stood for…

Newspaper by Maggie Messitt $23

Newspaper is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account. This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home — the United States and South Africa. The ‘first draft of history’, newspapers figure prominently through each movement and period of unrest in both nations — from the first colonial papers published by slave traders and an advocate for press freedom to those published on id cards, wallpaper, and folio sheets during civil wars. Offices were set on fire. Presses were pushed into bodies of water. Editors were run out of town. And journalists were arrested. Newspaper reflects on a tool that has been used to push down and to rise up, and a journey alongside the hidden lives that have harnessed its power.

• Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Good Night, Belly Button by Lucie Brunellière $22

A delightful interactive board book! Baby is ready to sleep so it's time to say good night — all the way from toes to nose! With each new blanket-page longer than the previous one, the cosy check blanket gradually covers the baby's whole body. One by one, we say good night to little feet, little ankles, little knees... And what about you, little eyes — are you ready to close?

• See how it works!

Chose your new book from the newest of the new books:

All Fours by Miranda July $37

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY.  Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrilling.
 “A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers. Funny, honest, rich with the energy of the mind, All Fours will jump-start your relation to language and cause you to think anew about the nature of desire.” —George Saunders
”All Fours is profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind.” —Emma Cline

• Threads of identity.

• New forms for mid-life.

• It started with this story.

• Determined to cure the inhibitions of middle age.

• The miracle of middle age.

• Standing on the cliff of motherhood.

• Being Miranda July.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan $26

This tender and fierce novel set in the societal trauma of the Sri Lankan civil war has been awarded the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?
”V.V. Ganeshananthan's novel Brotherless Night reveals the moral nuances of violence, ever belied by black-and-white terminology.” —The New York Times
”A beautiful, brilliant book: tender and fierce as it is mournful. It is unafraid to look directly at the worst of the violence and erasure we have perpetrated or allowed to happen, but is insistent that we can still choose to be better.” —Danielle Evans
”With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief. "I want you to understand," the narrator of Brotherless Night insists, and by the end of this blazingly brilliant novel, we do: that in a world full of turmoil, human connections and shared stories can teach us how — and, as importantly, why — to survive.” —Celeste Ng

• Read an extract.

• Earning trust.

Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki $36

Mary Toft was just another eighteenth century woman living in poverty, misery and frequent pain. Mary Toft was the kind of person overlooked by those with power, forgotten by historians. Mary Toft was nothing. Until, that is, Mary Toft started giving birth to rabbits... In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, Noemi Kiss-Deaki reimagines Mary's strange and fascinating story — and how she found fame when a large swathe of England became convinced that she was the mother of rabbits. Mary and the Rabbit Dream is a story of bodily autonomy, of absurdity, of the horrors inflicted on women, of the cruel realities of poverty and the grotesque divides between rich and poor. It is a story told with exquisite wit, skill and a beautiful streak of subversive mischief.
“One of those novels that seemingly arrives from nowhere, fully-formed, as odd, disturbing and lingering as the most vivid of fever dreams. To create something so playfully provocative, subversive and gripping displays a rare literary talent. I’ve certainly never read anything like it.”   —Benjamin Myers
“In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, Noémi Kiss-Deáki transforms the tale of Mary Toft into a stinging, witty critique of the oppressions heaped upon the bodies of impoverished women. This is a brave debut, one told with courage and wit, one which dissects a ruthless system of class and gender – and lays bare the concentric circles of power that still govern our world.” —Selby Wynn Schwartz
“Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s style is astonishing – hypnotic, poetic, persistent, wild, blazing and marvellous. As the novel unfolds you simply can’t believe what is happening – it’s outrageous, it’s cruel, it’s unfathomable and yet – it’s the way of the world. Here is Mary Toft’s tale, retold in dazzling prose that is both exquisite and furious. Noémi Kiss-Deáki reimagines the possibilities for historical fiction and Mary and the Rabbit Dream is utterly original and utterly brilliant." —Victoria Mackenzie

• Mysterious labours.

• A curious case.

• A little more about the book.

• Medical science has come a long way.

The Picnic: An escape to freedom and the collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo $40

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable- they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain — and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border between Hungary and Austria and packed the nearby camping sites, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The highest state authorities were choosing to turn a blind eye — but that could change at any moment. The stage was set for the greatest border breach in Cold War history — that day hundreds would cross from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union — the so-called end of history — all would flow from those dramatic hours. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved — activists and border guards, escapees and secret police, as well as the last Communist prime minister of Hungary — Matthew Longo reconstructs not only this remarkable event but also its complex and bittersweet aftermath. Freedom had been won but parents had been abandoned and families divided. Love affairs faltered and new lives had to be built from scratch. The Picnic is the story of a moment when the tide of history turned. It shows how freedom can be both dream and disillusionment, and how all we take for granted can vanish in an instant.
Winner of the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing (non-Fiction)
”Longo covers the Picnic at ground level, evoking the dramatic events in vivid colour. Anecdotes and impressions are woven through the historical narrative, providing an insight into how deeply this history still matters today. The chain of events in 1989 and its historical context are outlined with clarity and verve. The narrative is spiked with Longo's commentary and anecdotes from his trips, making The Picnic a deeply personal account of a fascinating milestone of Cold War history.” —Katja Hoyer, Telegraph

Choice by Neel Mukherjee $37

A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift.
These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee's new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them.
”Choice is funny, horrible, ironic, damning, affecting and deadly serious.” —Financial Times
”In his dazzling new novel, Neel Mukherjee dissects how economics rules our lives and impoverishes our souls. Choice is by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking. It burns brightly with fierce intelligence, with wisdom and compassion, and achieves what so few novels even attempt: it makes the reader think deeply about how we've come to live this way, at what cost, and about those who pay the greatest price.” —Monica Ali
”In each panel of this masterful triptych exquisite prose gradually crescendos to jaw-dropping revelations. Possessed of great moral seriousness, Choice is also very funny in its satirical excoriation of the obsession with calculating life in purely economic terms in so many realms of contemporary life. It is, in short, a deeply human novel, and a humane one. We come to realize that a human life is not simply the result of rational choices but rather, as Mukherjee puts it, the lull between them — a rich and swaying lull, thick with love and responsibility.” —Namwali Serpell

• Hard choices, hidden costs.

A Body Made of Glass: A history of hypochondria by Caroline Crampton $40

"There is a twilight zone between illness and health, and that's where I dwell." An ache, a pain, a mysterious lump, a strange sensation in some part of your body, the feeling that something is not right. The fear that something is, in fact, very wrong. These could be symptoms of illness. But they could also be the symptoms of hypochondria — an enigmatic condition that might be physiological or psychological or both. Caroline Crampton tells the story of hypochondria, beginning in the age of Hippocrates and taking us right through to the wellness industry today. Along the way, we encounter successive generations of doctors positing new theories, as well as quacks selling spurious cure-alls to the desperate. And we meet those who have suffered with conditions both real and imagined, including Moliere, Darwin, Woolf, Freud, Larkin, and Proust (whose symptoms and sensitivities gradually narrowed his life to the space of his cork-lined bedroom). Crampton also examines the gendered nature of the medical response, the financial and social factors at play, and the ways in which modern technology simultaneously feeds our fears and holds out the promise of relief. Drawing on Crampton's own experience of surviving a life-threatening disease only to find herself beset by almost constant anxiety about her health, A Body Made of Glass explores part of the landscape of illness that most memoirs don't reach: the territory beyond survival or cure, where body and mind seem locked in a strange and exhausting kind of dance. The result is both a fascinating cultural history of hypochondria and a moving account of what it means to live with this invisible, elusive and increasingly wide-spread condition.
”Clarity and beauty combine with terror and dark comedy — essential reading for everyone who has a body.” —Lucy Worsley
”A thoughtful and touching examination of what it means to be well. Crampton's unflinching honesty and skill with words make for a tender and often heart-breaking history of medicine. Every medical professional should read this book.” —Subhadra Das

• The podcast interviews to accompany the book.

• Do hypochonriacs want to be cured or do they want someone to confirm that they’re sick?

Vertigo: The rise and fall of Weimar Germany, 1918—1933 by Harald Jähner $40

Germany, 1918 — a country in flux. The First World War is lost, traditional values are shaken to their core, revolution is afoot and the victory of democracy beckons. Everything must change with the times. The country is abuzz with talk of the 'new woman', the 'new man', 'new living' and 'new thinking'. What follows is the establishment of the Weimar Republic, an economic crisis and the transformation of Germany. A triumphant procession of liberated lifestyles emerges. Women conquer the racetracks and tennis courts, go out alone in the evenings, cut their hair short and cast the idea of marriage aside. Unisex style comes into fashion, androgynous and experimental. People revel in the discovery of leisure, filling up boxing halls, dance palaces and the hotspots of the New Age, embracing the department stores' promise of happiness and accepting the streets as a place of fierce battles. So much of this short burst of life between the wars seems amazingly modern today, including, amidst a frenzy of change, the backlash from those who did not see themselves reflected in this new culture. Little by little, deep divisions in society began to emerge. Divisions that would have devastating consequences, altering the course of the twentieth century and the lives of millions around the world.
”Vertigo is outstanding. Harald Jahner's gift for illuminating the big picture with telling detail gives the reader an uncanny sense of what it was actually like to be present in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This is history at its very best.” —Julia Boyd

Analogue: A field guide by Deyan Sudjic $70

Covering sound, vision, communication and information, Analogue: A Field Guide is an evocative trip through an era of innovative design, profiling 250 classic objects from radios to turntables, TVs to cameras, and typewriters to telephones. Along the way, it surveys all the iconic brands as well as the technological developments that have made these devices possible. There is a growing nostalgia for physical, real-world interaction with design and technology and a desire to reconnect with both things and people, something that has been eroded by the digital revolution. The wide-ranging approach of this book enables it to show the deeper cultural and social significance of the analogue era, with the authority to convince those who know a lot about each category and the breadth to attract the non-specialist. Ideal for those nostalgic for physical media, as well as those who collect, use and maintain these older technologies. Impressive.

• Look inside!

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada (translated from Japanese by David Boyd) $30

Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time. One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole — a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.
”A great book.” —Patti Smith
”Surreal and mesmerizing.” —New York Times

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad $26

After years away from her family's homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. On her arrival, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. When Sonia meets the charismatic Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing with a dedicated, if competitive, group of men — yet as opening night draws closer, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life she once knew starts to give way to the exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home. New papernack edition.
”Enter Ghost retells Hamlet for now, dropping its readers deep into the contemporary tensions of the West Bank, asking crucial and layered questions. Hammad is a calm and vital storyteller, a writer of real rhythmic grace.” —Ali Smith
”How can a production of Hamlet in the West Bank resonate with the residents’ existential issues? Enter Ghost is a beautiful, profound meditation on the role of art in our society and our lives.” —Monica Ali
”Beautifully written, poignant yet forceful, thoughtful and thought provoking, but above all challenging the reader to respond to the question facing the characters in the novel: how to live under occupation while preserving your dignity and humanity? Hammad answers this question through taking us into the hearts and minds of the characters in the novel and through that into the heart and mind of Palestine.” —Azar Nafisi

• Fiction unbuttons the constraints of history.

• It doesn’t look good.

• Always more than a place.

The King’s Witches by Kate Foster $38

Denmark, 1589. Princess Anne is betrothed to King James VI of Scotland — a geo-political royal marriage designed to forever unite the two countries. But first, she must pass the trial period: one year of marriage in which she must prove herself worthy of being Scotland's new Queen. If the King and the Scottish royal court find her wanting, she faces disgraced and permanent exile. Determined to fulfil her duties to King and country, Anne resolves to be the perfect royal bride. Until she meets Lord Henry. By her side is Kirsten, her loyal and pious lady's maid. But whilst tending to Anne's every need, she has her own motives for the royal marriage to be a success . . . On the other side of the border in North Berwick, a young housemaid by the name of Jura is dreaming of a new life. With an abusive master and a soured relationship with a young farmer's son, she secretly practises the charms taught to her by her mother. When the tension reaches breaking point, Jura makes a run for it: to Edinburgh. But it isn't long before she finds herself caught up in the witchcraft mania that has gripped the capital, and her freedom and her future are on the line. Will Anne, Kirsten and Jura be able to save each other, and in doing so save themselves?

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (translated from German by Jane Degras) $33

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to 'read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content', but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realise that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies... But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for life. New edition.

The Dream Factory by Steph Matuku, illustrated by Zak Ātea Komene $22

An amazing building rises on the edge of town — it's the dream factory. Every night, it sends out magical mist. Flying cars, flower cakes and talking tigers fill people's dreams. And the next day, the people make those dreams come true. But when a kereru flies into the dream factory, and a feather floats into a cog, everything goes terribly wrong.

• Look inside.

• Shortlisted for the Russell Clark Award for Illustration in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

The Further Adventures of Miss Petitfour by Anne Michaels, illustrated by Emma Block $23

Miss Petitfour enjoys having adventures that are 'just the right size' for a 'single, magical day’. With her sixteen cats and the aid of a tablecloth as a makeshift balloon, Miss Petitfour soars — which is to say, she rises high in the air and flies — over her charmingly eccentric village, encountering adventures along the way. One never knows where the wind will take her in this delightfully seasonal collection of magical outings: perhaps to the aid of dearly loved friends and neighbours, including a hapless handyman and an onion-loving baby, or to a coconut-confetti parade, or in search of keys, lucky charms or even simply the perfect tablecloth for her next flight. A witty, whimsical, beautifully illustrated collection of tales that celebrate language, storytelling and all the pleasures of life, large and small.

• Meet Miss Petitfour and her cats.

Birds Aren't Real: The true story of mass avian murder and the largest surveillance campaign in U.S. history by Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos $35

Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? You haven't, have you? No one has, not in many, many years. They used to be everywhere. That's because they come out of the factory as adults. In the 1970s, the United States government killed off the entire bird population and replaced them with robotic bird replicas that are used for mass surveillance. Bird drones that recharge on power lines and leave 'liquid tracking devices' on your car are omnipresent while the American people live in blissful ignorance. Until now. In Birds Aren't Real, whistleblowers Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos trace the roots of a political conspiracy so vast and well-hidden that it almost seems like an elaborate hoax. These hero Bird Truthers have risked life and limb to spread the word, to free America and prevent other countries' governments from enacting a similar scheme.

• The lunacy is getting more intense.

Straight from the carton and into your hands!

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin $40

The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
”Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly — a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin's nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.” —Guardian

• On remembering to touch base with yourself.

• Identity, language, and desire.

• Writing fiction for the first time.

• Other books by Lauren Elkin.

Sight Lines: Women and art in Aotearoa edited by Kirsty Baker $70

From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa. How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith and Megan Tamati-Quennell alongside the author, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists.

• Look inside!

• A hook but no fish.

The Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of Neoliberalism (and how it came to control your life) by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison $32

Neoliberalism — do you know what it is? We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives — our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; the planet we inhabit — the very air we breathe. So pervasive has it become that, for most people, it has no name. It seems unavoidable, like a natural law. But trace it back to its roots, and we discover that it is neither inevitable nor immutable. It was conceived, propagated, and then concealed by the powerful few. It is time to bring it into the light — and, in doing so, to find an alternative worth fighting for.
”This brave book borders on being a page turner — 'The Secret History of Neoliberalism' is really the ultimate crime novel, one in which we all play a part.” —Kevin Anderson
”Incisive, illuminating, eye-opening-an unsparing anatomy of the great ideological beast stalking our times.” —David Wallace-Wells
”The Invisible Doctrine is everything you need. Monbiot and Hutchinson have written the definitive short history of the neoliberal confidence trick.” —Yanis Varoufakis
”Read it, get angry, demand better!” —Gaia Vince

• Neoliberalism’s ascent.

• On the mess we’re in.

Ædnan: An epic by Linnéa Axelsson (translated by Saskia Vogel) $55

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the ground, the earth. In this majestic verse novel, Linnea Axelsson chronicles the fates of two Indigenous Sámi families, telling of their struggle and persistence over a century of colonial displacement, loss and resistance. It begins with Ristin and Ber-Joná, who are trying to care for their troubled young sons while migrating their reindeer herd in northernmost Scandinavia during the 1910s. The coming of the Swedes brings new borders that lay waste to Sámi customs and migration paths – and mean devastating separation for this family. In the 1970s, Lise grapples with how she was forced to adapt to Swedish society, haunted by her time in a ‘nomad school’ where she was deprived of her ancestors’ language and history. Lise’s daughter, Sandra, seeks to reclaim that heritage, becoming an activist struggling for reparations from the Swedish state. As one generation succeeds another, their voices interweave and form a spellbinding hymn to lands and traditions lost and reclaimed. Written in sparse, glittering verse that flows like a current, Ædnan is a profound and moving epic of Sámi life.
”Crystalline — reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I've never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old.” —Tommy Orange
”Mesmerising. A beautiful, poetic weaving of language, character and place. Evocative and heart-breaking.” —Audrey Magee
”A soul-gripping and enthralling journey into what it feels like to be othered in your own land. Axelsson offers us a profound invitation into understanding what it means to be deeply intertwined with nature.” —Lola Akinmade Akerstrom
”A sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Expanses of white space.

• Many threads and voices.

• “I am not particular about what readers call it.”

A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Tanya Leslie) $25

On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux's mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother's condition, she had refused to fathom, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time in an effort to recover the different facets of a woman whose openness to the world and appetite for reading created the conditions for the author's own social ascent. Mirroring A Man's Place, in which she narrates her father's slow rise to material comfort, A Woman's Story explores the ambiguous and unshakeable bond between mother and daughter, its fluctuation over the course of their lives, the alienating worlds that separate them and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute to the last thread connecting her to the world out of which she was born, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was.
”Ernaux's genius, here as elsewhere, is in using her own experiences to bring into consciousness our painful unknown knowns, through a deeply relatable, hyper-personal objectivity.” —Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Irish Times
”What emerges is something that verges on the mystical: Ernaux writes as though she is not writing but unearthing something that already exists.” —Lucy Thynne, The London Magazine
”The writing itself in A Woman's Story is truly exquisite. Annie Ernaux is a master of the form: her crisp sentences and plain style manage to convey the story so clearly, leaving the reader in no doubt of its genuineness. At the same time, this purity of language transmutes the most difficult emotions with highly effective results.” —Gosia Buzzanca, Buzz
”The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething.” —Edouard Louis, author of Change
”Infinitely original. A Woman's Story is every woman's story. [Its] power rests not in the drama of its main event but in moments that might escape unnoticed, if not for a writer desperate to recapture every last image that her memory reluctantly yields of a lost loved one.” —New York Times

• Other books by Annie Ernaux (fill your gaps!).

• Other books published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Bad Archive by Flora Feltham $35

In these deftly woven essays Flora Feltham explores the corners where her memories are stashed: the archive vault, her mother’s house, a marriage counsellor’s office, the tip and New World. She takes us on a frenzied bender in Croatia, learns tapestry and meets romance novelists, all while wondering how families and relationships absorb the past, given everything we don’t say about grief, mental illness or even love. Most importantly, she asks, how do you write about a life honestly – when there are so many flaws in the way we record history and, more confrontingly, in the way we remember? Bad Archive is a lucid, continually surprising, funny and at times bracingly personal essay collection.
”Flora is just so smart and funny and these essays have so much heart. Her idiosyncratic, warm and wry voice moves seamlessly across time and space.” —Rose Lu

• Archiving and weaving.

• Julian of Norwich.

• Crystal systems.

Empireworld: How British imperialism has shaped the globe by Sathnam Sanghera $40

2.6 billion people are inhabitants of former British colonies. The empire's influence upon the quarter of the planet it occupied, and its gravitational influence upon the world outside it, has been profound — from the spread of Christianity by missionaries to nearly 1 in 3 driving on the left side of the road, and even shaping the origins of international law. Yet Britain's idea of its imperial history and the world's experience of it are two very different things. Travelling the globe to trace its international legacies — from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond — Sanghera demonstrates just how deeply British imperialism is baked into our world. From the author of the excellent Empireland (which examines how the legacies of imperialism are evident in modern Britain).
”If you thought Empireland was beautifully written, this follow up takes you even further on an extraordinary, entertaining and eye-opening journey around the globe.” —Sadiq Khan
”Essential and absorbing reading for those not afraid to encounter diligently researched, complex, and often contradictory truths about colonial rule and its legacies.” —Alan Lester
”This is a ground-breaking and eye-opening book, that everyone should read. Written with wit, nuance and academic rigour; it is a long overdue look at Empire and its effect on the world.” —Kavita Puri

• Knowing and not knowing.

What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh $23

A poignant, incisive meditation on Israel's longstanding rejection of peace, and what the war on Gaza means for Zionism. When apartheid in South Africa ended, dismantled by internal activism and global pressure, why did Israel continue to pursue its own apartheid policies against Palestinians? In keeping with a history of antagonism, the Jewish state established settlements in the Occupied Territories as extreme right-wing voices gained prominence in Israeli government, with comparatively little international backlash — in fact, these policies were boosted by the Oslo Accords. Condensing this complex history into a lucid essay, Raja Shehadeh examines the many lost opportunities to promote a lasting peace and equality between Israelis and Palestinians. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe, each side's perception of events has strongly diverged. What can this discrepancy tell us about Israel's undermining of a two-state solution? And will the current genocide in Gaza finally mark a shift in the world's response? With graceful, haunting prose, Shehadeh offers insights into a defining conflict that could yet be ameliorated.
”In his moral clarity and baring of the heart, his self-questioning and insistence on focusing on the experience of the individual within the storms of nationalist myth and hubris, Shehadeh recalls writers such as Ghassan Kanafani and Primo Levi.” —New York Times
”Shehadeh is a great inquiring spirit with a tone that is vivid, ironic, melancholy and wise.” —Colm Toibin
”A buoy in a sea of bleakness.” —Rachel Kushner

• All this solidarity and yet nothing has changed.

• Other books on Palestine and Israel.

• Other books by Raja Shehadeh.

Slim Volume by James Brown $25

A slim volume of verse, like a bicycle, offers us fresh and joyful and sometimes troubling ways of seeing the world. James Brown’s eighth collection of poems begins in childhood and moves through education, jobs and the essential unremarkable activities that occupy our lives – before arriving in a post-apocalyptic future, where the nights run late and down to the wire. The poems are ever-alert to the minutiae of power, the thrill of the unexpected, and the shiny potential of an ending. Always compelling, funny, heartening, Brown speaks volumes even when claiming to have little to say.
”James Brown makes the process of reading feel effortless, but always rewards active attention. Like Stevie Smith, he can sometimes seem to be waving and drowning at the same time.” —Bill Manhire
”How gifted Brown is at the craft of poetry, the game of word and sounds on the page that are tidy and tight and clever and cool. And also how he lifts aside that cleverness to show us the tender inner self, the moist soft core of James Brown and his world.” —Anna Livesey

Get the Picture: A mind-bending journey among the inspired artists and obsessive art fiends who taught me how to see by Biana Bosker $40

In Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker trained her insatiable curiosity, journalist's knack for infiltrating exclusive circles and eye for unforgettable characters on the wine world as she trained to become a sommelier. Now she brings her smart yet accessible sensibility along for a ride through another subculture of elite obsessives. In Get the Picture, Bosker plunges deep inside the world of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators and, of course, artists themselves — the kind who work multiple jobs and let their paintings sleep soundly in the studio while they wake up covered in cat pee on a friend's couch. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly naked performance artist and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for an hour straight while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonisation machine but also a more expansive way of living. The book encompasses everything from colour theory to evolutionary biology, and from ancient cave paintings to Instagram as it attempts to discern art's role in our culture, our economy and our hearts.
”In Get the Picture — curious but not nave, gossipy but generous, critical but admiring, hilarious but profound — Bosker probes the human thirst for art, examines the addictive high it gives and rescues the unfashionable idea of beauty, of the pleasure of creation, from the theorists and the marketeers. This book is sheer pleasure: the best book I've ever read about contemporary art.” —Benjamin Moser
”This book freaked me out. Bosker's accessible, conversational spelunking into the world of contemporary art so powerfully rehydrated the PTSD in me between the little kid artist I once was with the self-consciously constricted thinker I became in art school that at one point I simply had to put it down, shaken. If you've ever wondered 'what happened' to art — galleries, critics, collectors — and, of course, artists — then this book is a very companionable start. It's also very funny, to say nothing of very vivid. And, confoundingly, very, very difficult to put down.” —Chris Ware

The Lodgers by Holly Pester $40

“What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.” After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination. The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester's irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures.
”Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters.” —Kate Briggs
”There is no one better than Holly Pester at communicating the eerie, sometimes hilarious and often hallucinatory experience of modern precarity. This is a novel for the age and for generation rent: a captivating and unforgettable account of how economic circumstance can lead to a feeling of being only half alive.” —Nathalie Olah
”With tang and pith in every sentence, The Lodgers speaks to a generational epidemic of rootlessness and porous selfhood with vital wit and utter originality.” —AK Blakemore

• Pester reads from the novel.

• The sharp end of the housing crisis.

• The naughty thing that she did.

• Unlicensed housing.

The Hunger Between Us by Marina Scott $25

In a city ruled by hunger, the black market is Liza’s lifeline, where she sells or steals whatever she can get her hands on just for enough food to survive. Morality, after all, has become a fluid thing during the brutal year her city has been under siege. But when Liza's best friend proposes that they go to the secret police, rumored to give young women food in exchange for ‘entertainment’, Liza thinks there surely must be some other way. Then her friend disappears, and Liza devises a plan to find her, entangling herself with two dangerous young men—one a member of the secret police, the other forced to live underground—and discovering there are some lines that should never be crossed.
"A fast-paced and atmospheric historical thriller. In this rare portrayal of the fight for survival inside the necropolis that was Leningrad between 1941 and 1944, its protagonists and the formidable enemy they face--starvation--add up to a ravishing, unforgettable portrait of an era." —The Historical Novel Society

Our solutions to your reading resolutions are below.

The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden $37

When she was a child, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died and ten when she lost her mother. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, her personal devastation was mirrored by a city that was ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she begins to research the mysterious parallels between the histories of AIDS and the internet. She questions what it means to 'go viral' in an era of explosive biological and virtual contagion and simultaneously finds her own past seeping into her investigation. While connecting her disparate strands of research — images, fragments of scientific thought, musings on Raymond Chandler and late-night Netflix binges — she makes an unexpected discovery about what happened to her family and who her parents might have been. Entwining an intensely personal search with a history of viral culture and an ode to Los Angeles,  The Observable Universe is a prismatic account of loss calibrated precisely to our existence in a post-pandemic, post-internet life.
”McCalden's sequence of itemized yet interlocking chapters — many less than a page long — is so surprising that this debut book feels revelatory. She hires a private investigator to look into the life of her father, about whom she knows very little. This gives her story drive — rare in a collection of vignettes. But it becomes clear that for McCalden the facts of the past are not really important: what matters is grappling with how we live now, with contagion and loss in the digital age. —Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
”A gifted writer's brilliantly innovative approach to autobiographical non-fiction, syncing a narrative of profoundly personal emotion with the invention and evolution of today's cyberspace.” —William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
”Part meditation on loss, AIDS, and viral transmission, part howl of grief and fury, The Observable Universe spells out better than anything else I've read the transformative power of the internet. It felt like Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts meets Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, and is easily the equal of both.” —Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being
”It isn't pain itself that inspires great art; it's the frenzied avoidance of pain that pushes an artist to do something, anything, other than feel pain. This book is what arises from that practice: the artifact of one writer's solitary, complicated grief. With every carefully, thoughtfully written page, one feels the unwritten grief thudding behind it, beautiful and monstrous. And in the end there's no true story, no solution to the mystery, no final coherence. But there is this marvelous book.” —Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque stories by Ali Smith, Tommy Orange, Naomi Alderman, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Charlie Kaufman, Elif Batuman, Leone Ross, and Joshua Cohen $38

What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from Kafka’s work and use it to spark something new? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.
”This inspired anthology demonstrates the enduring influence of Franz Kafka's fatalistic worldview and mordant humour. These stories will do the trick for the Kafka-curious and diehard fans alike.” —Publishers Weekly

• “Kafka himself would have loved it.”

Urban Aotearoa: The future for our cities edited by David Batchelor and Bill McKay $18

A critical look at the evolution of New Zealand’s cities, at a crtitical time. Moving past the country’s rural image, the book addresses the realities of its urban majority, questioning suburban spread and exploring options for smarter living. A range of contributors provide insights that span housing trends, Māori urban development, Pacific design, climate action and more. This BWB Text is a straightforward look at how cities work and how they can change for every New Zealander interested in the future of our urban spaces. Contributors: Ben Schrader, Shamubeel Eaqub, Selena Eaqub, Anthony Hōete, Lama Tone, Jane Higgins, Paul Dalziel, John Tookey, Morten Gjerde.

The Ministry of Time by Keliane Bradley $38

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' — Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?
”Holy smokes, this novel is an absolute cut above! Exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic.” —Max Porter
”An outrageously brilliant debut. This is already the best new book I will have read next year>” —Eleanor Catton
”Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It's thought-provoking and horribly clever — but it also made me laugh out loud.” —Alice Winn
”Conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage.” —Mark Haddon
”Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm — no, hotter than that — in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time-bomb of a book> —Francis Spufford

• It started as a joke.

• She fell in love with him herself!

• Luck jumper.

Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes (translated from Italian by Jill Foulston) $37

Looking back over her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in 1930s Rome. A sensitive child, she was always alert to the loneliness and dissatisfaction of her mother and the other women in their crowded apartment block. Observing how their lives were weighed down by housework and the longing for romance, she became determined to seek another future for herself. This conviction will lead her to rebel against the expectations of her family, rail against the unjust treatment of women and seek to build a life with an anti-fascist professor. As her independence grows, so too does resistance against it - even from those closest to her. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the partisan struggle in the Second World War, Her Side of the Story is a devastating story of one woman's determination to carve her own path.
”Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere.” —Annie Ernaux
”De Cespedes's novel anticipates the candid confessionals of writers such as Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk. Formally precise, psychologically rich, and suffused in suspicion and suspense.” —Financial Times
”While I'm writing, I confine myself to occasionally reading books that keep me company not as entertainment but as solid companions. I call them books of encouragement, like those by Alba de Cespedes.” —Elena Ferrante
”Recently rediscovered, her work has lost none of its subversive force.” —New York Times

• Forbidden Notebook.

The Fight for Freshwater by Mike Joy $40

Mike Joy is recognised in New Zealand as a leading freshwater ecologist and a fervent advocate for the preservation of waterways. However, the journey that led him to these influential roles is as winding and unique as the rivers he strives to protect. His story is not just about academic success and public profile, but also personal discovery, challenge and resilience. Before setting foot in academia, Mike’s early life included a surprising range of occupations, including time on farms – the very industry that would later be a particular target of his academic activism. It wasn’t until his early thirties that he decided to pivot towards academia, enrolling at Massey University. This memoir provides a rare first-hand look at the pressures and challenges faced by those who dare to raise their voices, especially when debating issues as crucial as the health and future of New Zealand’s waterways. At a perilous time for our universities, it is also an inspirational account of staying true to academia’s function as ‘critic and conscience’ for our society. More urgent now than ever.

• Tinker, tailor, water warrior, spy.

• Under pressure.

• Polluted Inheritance.

• Mountains to Sea.

Everything That Moves Moves Through Another edited by Jennifer Cheuk $95

A landmark anthology that brings together the creative work of twenty-seven mixed-heritage creatives from across Aotearoa. Weaving together a range of artistic mediums and giving space to both emerging and experienced creatives, this anthology lays the groundwork for deeper and more empathetic conversations around the experience of mixed-heritage individuals. Through an open call for contributors in 2023, this publication was created in response to the lack of authentic representation for biracial, mixed-heritage and multi-ethnic individuals living in Aotearoa. Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another features photography, comics, essays, poetry and multimedia art from a range of creative practitioners (listed below). The publication also includes an original introduction written by mixed Malaysian-Chinese poet, Nina Mingya Powles. This project showcases the importance of independent publishing and collective creativity in platforming diverse stories and voices. Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another explores the book as an object wherein communities can converse with one another, and different artistic mediums can converge on the page. Contributions from: Nina Mingya Powles, Kim Anderson, Cadence Chung, Kàtia Miche, Damien Levi, Jefferson Chen, Ivy Lyden-Hancy, Jessica Miku 未久, Ruby Rae Lupe Ah, Ying Yue Pilbrow, Emma Ling Sidnam, Jimmy Varga, Jill and Lindsey de Roos, Daisy Remington, Chye-Ling Huang, Evelina Lolesi, Eamonn Tee, Emele Ugavule, Harry Matheson, kī anthony, Maraky Vowells, Dr Meri Haami and Dr Carole Fernandez, Kechil-kechil chili padi, Nkhaya Paulsen-More, Yani Widjaja, Chyna-Lily Tjauw Rawlinson, romesh dissanayake, Jake Tabata.

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) $28

Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organising image, the narrator of Gospodinov's novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Both moving — such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill — and very funny — see the section on the awfulness of the question "how are you?" — The Physics of Sorrow is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various ‘side passages’, getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathising with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.

• Nothing ever certain.

• The unstable form.

• Literature develops empathy.

• Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter was awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize.

Bethlehem: A celebration of Palestinian food by Fadi Kattan $65

Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan celebrates the hidden parts of Bethlehem, his home, conjuring the colours and smells of its market and spice shops and introducing readers to the local farmers and artisans with whom he works to find the perfect ingredients and shares his love of culinary experimentation. Fadi’s inspiration comes from these food artisans, who grow the grapes, mill the wheat, make the olive oil, and most importantly, pass down the generational food knowledge. His loving profiles of these people are accompanied by his own recipes, some passed down, some from his restaurants in Bethlehem and London. Learn to stuff grape leaves with Nabulsi cheese, slow roast lamb seasoned with fenugreek and cardamom, roll labaneh in nigella seeds, and make Mouhalabieh, a milky pudding scented with mastic and pistachios.

• Look inside!

Space Rover (‘Object Lssons’ series) by Stewart Lawrence Sincliar $22

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated with the space race. Fifty years later, that vision feels like a nostalgic fantasy, but the lunar rover's legacy paved the way for Mars rovers like Sojourner, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Other rovers have made accessible the world's deepest caves and most remote tundra, extending our exploratory range without risking lives. Still others have been utilized for search and rescue missions or in clean up operations after disasters such as Chernobyl. For all these achievements, rovers embody not just our potential, but our limits. Examining rovers as they wander our terrestrial and celestial boundaries, we might better comprehend our place, and fate, in this universe.

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

Sarn Helen: A journey through Wales, past, present, and future by Tom Bullough, with illustrations by Jackie Morris $28

Sarn Helen — Helen's Causeway — is the old Roman Road that runs from the south of Wales to the north. As Bullough walks the route, sometimes alone, sometimes in company, he describes the changing landscape around him and explores the political, cultural and mythical history of this country that has been so divided, by language and by geography. Running alongside this journey is the story of Bullough's engagement with the issue of the climate crisis and its likely impact on the Welsh coastline. Sarn Helen is at once a vivid and immersive portrait of a nation, and a resonant meditation upon the way in which we are shaped by place and in turn shape the places — potentially irrevocably.
”Vital, and urgent with concern. You cannot leave this book without its message thundering in your head. It is not enough to walk old routes. This was. Now what?” —Cynan Jones
”A profound and beautiful portrait of Wales. With great charm and learning, Tom Bullough walks us through the country's leafy backways, its deep pasts, the sparkling shards of its identity, its vanishing rural traditions and its fragile ecology.” —Philip Marsden

• The author writes about the book.

Heartsease by Kate Kruimink $38

“I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.” Charlotte ('Lot') and Ellen ('Nelly') are sisters who were once so close a Venn diagram of the two would have formed a circle. But a great deal has changed since their mother's death, years before. Clever, beautiful, gentle Lot has been unfailingly dutiful — basically a disaster of an older sister for much younger Nelly, still haunted by their mother in her early thirties. When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed. Heartsease is a sad, sly and darkly comic story about the weight of grief and the ways in which family cleave to us, for better and for worse.
”Sharp, gorgeous and unforgettable.” —Robbie Arnott

• On writing the book.

• You give yourself away.

• Losing her fingerprints.

Clive and His Babies by Jessica Spanyol $18

Meet Clive — and his imagination! Clive loves his dolls. He enjoys playing with them, and sharing them with his friends. A gentle, affectionate book, celebrating diversity and challenging gender stereotypes.

• Look inside!

Big Ideas from Literature: How books can change your life $50

This book is an exploration of the ideas found in books, that teach children through the stories they tell. Books can be powerful, helping us through tricky times, offering us wisdom we haven't learnt yet, showing us that there are people like us, or showing us the opposite, that other people live very different lives. Books can be a friend when you need one the most and you can use them to help and inspire others too. Big Ideas from Literature helps children discover key ideas that lots of different books are trying to teach through the stories they tell - and helps a growing child develop empathy and resilience. This book teaches children (and adults!) about the history of literature, from the first ever story that was written down to the invention of books just for children. The best children's books become our dearest friends and companions. Children discover characters from a diverse range of books — including Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams — and learn how these stories can help them better understand the world around them.

• Look inside!

• In the same series: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.

Goodbye Eastern Europe: An intimate history of a divided land by Jacob Mikanowski $25

An epic history of the 'other' Europe, a place of conflict and coexistence, of faith and folklore. Eastern Europe is more than the sum total of its annexations, invasions and independence declarations. From the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev, the area exuded a tragicomic character like no other. This is a paean for a disappearing world of movable borders, sacred groves and syncretism. And an invitation to not forget.
”Do not rush to bid farewell to eastern Europe until reading this book. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this very personal story of the place that one can't find on the map pays tribute to the origins of the experiences, cultures and ideas that continue to shape political and ideological battles of the modern world.” —Serhii Plokhy
”This wonderful book is a firework display: an unforgettable flash of forgotten past. Mikanowski shows that the vast regions between Germany and Russia are not just a zone of blood and tragedy, but of marvellous human vigour and resilience.” —Neal Ascherson

A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal $25

On the streets of White Roaring, Arthie Casimir is a criminal mastermind and collector of secrets. Her prestigious tearoom transforms into an illegal bloodhouse by dark, catering to the vampires feared by society. But when her establishment is threatened, Arthie is forced to strike an unlikely deal with an alluring adversary to save it-and she can't do the job alone. Calling on some of the city's most skilled outcasts, Arthie hatches a plan to infiltrate the dark and glittering vampire society known as the Athereum. But not everyone in her ragtag crew is on her side, and as the truth behind the heist unfolds, Arthie finds herself in the midst of a conspiracy that will threaten the world as she knows it.
”A Tempest of Tea is a masterpiece, filled with phenomenal prose, impeccable world building, and a mesmerizing found-family cast embarking on the heist of their lives! Hafsah Faizal has written the kind of book you can't stop thinking about. If you like vampires, romance, and kick-ass characters with magic weapons, unique talents, and dangerous secrets, look no further and you'll be delighted! —Ali Hazelwood

Wisdom from the Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben $30

A beautifully illustrated hardback collection of insights from The Hidden Life of Trees. Discover the operations of the forest ecosystem where themes of communication, resilience, beauty, age, family, society and survival tie into our human world. With rich yet easy-to-understand language and evocative artwork from all over the world, this book highlights the interconnectedness of our world — and celebrates trees!

• Look inside!

• The book that started it all.

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

• Read an extract.

• Q&A with the author and the translator.

• The first time the band felt complete.

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

• A taxonomy of love.

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.

• Reconsidering the Southern Man.

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

• Oddly boned.

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

• The past that lives within us.

• Drawing from the archives.

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

• Take no-one’s word for it.

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.

• Non-relational space.

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

• Pulling back on reality.

• A painful process.

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!

Out of the carton and into your hands. Click through for your copies:

Parade by Rachel Cusk $37

Cusk clarifies her style and complicates her content still further in the creation of a new ‘documentary’ voice that operates on the border between fiction and reality. It braids imagined characters with the actual, experience with the philosophical, to altering effect. Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands. The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It spins past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a ‘true’ story about art, family, morality, gender, the relationships between mothers and daughters, and about how we compose ourselves. A new and potentised distillation of Cusk’s enduring themes (and targets).
"Cusk continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes. Self-consciously original, inward and undeterred, she has become ever more persistently determined to write about life precisely as she finds it, and in Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat. ... No one else can do what she does in the way that she does it. Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent." —The Guardian
“Parade ultimately reveals itself to be the work of the same genius of the ‘Outline’ trilogy and Second Place, one of the most exacting, terrifying novelists working today. Parade is either a guide or a warning. How thrilling not to know which.” —Los Angeles Times

• Either a guide or a warning.

• Upside down and inside out.

• Welcome to enter?

• Read Thomas’s reviews of the ‘Outline’ trilogy.

• Read our reviews of Second Place.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti (translated from German by Peter Filkins) $38

In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that “by definition, he could never live to complete”, as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death — published in English for the first time — interposed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate who dies in 1994 is a reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicisation, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one's own death, while considering death as a force exerting itself upon culture and fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power.
”Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti's great strength. He is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words. His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.” —Susan Sontag

• Those who end life and those whose lives end.

• A metaphysical mistake.

My Cinema by Marguerite Duras (translated from French by Daniela Shreir) $45

Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression. Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history. A beautifully designed and produced volume, illustrated with film stills.
”To still be able to hear Marguerite Duras’s voice as she speaks and writes about her filmmaking practice is a gift.” —Bette Gordon, filmmaker
”Both ahead of her time and nostalgically mired in the past, in My Cinema, Duras deconstructs her own methods, going gleefully against the grain in order to ‘destroy’ conventional cinema. A beautifully translated collection of writing by an often maddening genius.” —Lizzie Borden, filmmaker

• Look inside!

• Some films by Marguerite Duras.

At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley $37

Following a disastrous family holiday, Libby and Curtis make a promise — if they ever visit the West Coast of the South Island again, it will be to stay at the majestic Grand Glacier Hotel. Twenty years later, Libby is recovering from cancer and the couple finally return to the resort. Except the glacier has retreated, nothing goes to plan, and after a storm separates her from Curtis, Libby finds herself alone in the isolated hotel. She tentatively begins to explore her surroundings. Could the inaccessible hotel and its lurious collection of staff and guests hold the key to Libby reconnecting with the person she once was?Drawing on a varied soundscape, this tangible, moving portrait of physical and emotional recovery offers a way forward, one hopeful step at a time.
”I am such a fan of Laurence's writing. I devoured her book in two sittings, breathlessly, compulsively, saying to myself, this is what fiction can do.” —Paula Green
”An experienced and accomplished writer with a command of language.” —Owen Marshall
”Fearnley pulls the reader into her story with a deft and inescapable grip that keeps you peering into the plot, arms out in front to keep your place in the narrative, to the last page.” —Sally Blundell

• A word that cradles the reader.

• I say glacier you say glacier.

A Silent Language by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searls) $25

Interesting enough to forget your coffee but short enough for your coffee still to be warm when you've read it. Jon Fosse's Nobel Prize in Literature lecture on how and why he writes, gives a picture of a mind with a unique relationship to language.

• Saying the unsayable and listening to silence.

• Books by Jon Fosse.

• Find out more.

Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard (translated from French by Daniel Levin Becker) $32

Éric Chevillard is one of France's leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday with some postmodern twists. This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel's cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip. Throughout, Chevillard's powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze — initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic — manages time and again to defamiliarise the familiar and make us think anew about what we thought we knew.
"In Museum Visits, Chevillard is at his best, spewing anxious observations of the everyday in shortform. While deliriously funny, Chevillard's short prose also palpitates from one anxious cogitation to another. In his fluid translation, Daniel Levin Becker matches the minute tonal shifts. The reader is elevated, planted in Chevillard's unordinary perspective and given access to an inside joke told by an author of extraordinary wit." —Bridget Peak, Asymptote
”Museum Visits is a book of sheer exuberance, a delicious ten-course meal whipped up out of Chevillard's fizzing, capacious, elegantly controlled delight in the world." —Lauren Groff
"These improbable, oblique, razor-sharp and often hilarious miniatures seem to be about nothing very much. Don't be taken in by appearances. Chevillard's gem-like pieces, superbly translated by Daniel Levin Becker, bring to life a whole world, and its gently squinting observer." —David Bellos

• Mental weather.

• Read a bit.

• On experimental writing.

Landfall 247 edited by Lynley Edmeades $30

Landfall 247: Autumn 2024 announces the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition, an annual competition that encourages young, up-and-coming writers to explore the world around them through words. Landfall 247 features the winning essay, alongside the judge’s report from Landfall editor, Lynley Edmeades. Landfall 247 also includes essays from the 2024 collaboration between Landfall and RMIT University’s nonfiction/Lab. These trans-Tasman essays, written in collaboration between New Zealand and Australian writers, focus on the theme of ‘making space,’ and what it means to use writing as a tool to create space for different voices, perspectives and ideas.
Contributors: NON-FICTION Maddie Ballard, Airini Beautrais, Lucinda Birch, Amy Brown, Joan Fleming, Mia-Francesca Jones, Emma Hughes, Lauren Vargo, Jessica Wilkinson; POETRY Nicola Andrews, Nick Ascroft, Rebecca Ball, Cindy Botha, Nathaniel Calhoun, Chris Cantillon, Medb Charleton, Brett Cross, Mark Edgecombe, David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy, Craig Foltz, Michael Hall, Chris Holdaway, Greg Judkins, Fiona Kidman, Wes Lee, Zoë Meager, Harvey Molloy, Federico Monsalve, Emma Neale, Mikaela Nyman, Claire Orchard, Vaughan Rapatahana, Harry Ricketts, Nicola Thorstensen, Ariana Tikao, Chris Tse, Rose Whitau, Kit Willett, Kirby Wright, Nicholas Wright, Zephyr Zhang; FICTION Connie Buchanan, Lorraine Carmody, Thom Conroy, Kristin Kelly, Michelle Duff, Scott Menzies, James O’Sullivan, James Pasley, Phoebe Wright; REVIEW David Herkt, Simone Oettli, Iain Sharp, Ian Wedde, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb, Helene Wong; ART Ayesha Green, Pat Kraus, Kate van der Drift.

• Look inside.

Echoes from Hawaiki: The origins and development of Māori and Moriori musical instruments by Jennifer Cattermole $50

Cattermole traces the origins and development of taonga pūoro, the stories they carry and how they connect present-day iwi with ancestral knowledge and traditions. She shows how traditional Māori and Moriori musical instruments have developed in response to available materials and evolving cultural needs, from their ancestral origins through the suppression of their use in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand, to their revival in the present day. An essential resource for all who are interested in taonga pūoro as treasured objects and as voices through time and place. Beautifully illustrated with examples of traditional instruments of all sorts.
”How did our forebears succeed in creating a bountiful array of musical instruments using stone tools and natural materials? This book answers that question in fine detail and also reveals how our present generation is reviving indigenous culture and language, thereby sustaining our brightly burning fires.” —Huata Holmes (Kāitahu, Kāti Mamoe, Waitaha, Hāwea a Rapuwai ano)

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The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry $37

Butte, Montana, October 1891, and a hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the bad-lands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast. A savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West, from the award-winning author of Night Boat to Tangier.
”Kevin Barry lights out for the territory and once again comes back with a shining nugget of gold. The Heart in Winter is a glorious and haunted yarn, with all the elements - the doomed lovers, the bounty hunters, the knife-fights and whisky-soaked songs - brought to mysterious life by the heft and polish of the Barry sentence. Marvellous.” —Jon McGregor

• A long while coming.

The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (translated from French by Frank Wynne) $40

In the soft morning light, a man, a woman, and a child drive to Les Roches, a dilapidated house, where the man grew up with his own ruthless father. After several years of absence, the man has reappeared in the life of his wife and their young son, intent on being a family again. While the mother watches the passing days with apprehension, the son discovers the enchantment of nature. As the father's hold over them intensifies, the return to their previous life and home seems increasingly impossible. Haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the father slips into a kind of madness that only the son will be able to challenge. A blistering examination of how families fold together and break apart under duress.
”The Son of Man demands a fearless kind of reading. It combines the impassive eye of a naturalist regarding their object of study, with the fierce revolt of that which is scrutinized, and resists being catalogued and known. Del Amo reaches into atavistic territories of impulse, desire, violence and repetition, and refuses to domesticate through conclusion. I was mesmerized by this formidable tale of a son and a mother who come up against both the law of the father and the lawlessness of nature.” —Daisy Lafarge
”An exquisite and mesmerizing novel, in which violence constantly threatens to break the surface. The precision and detail of the prose imprints on the mind like a photograph.” —Isabella Hammad

Granta 166: Generations edited by Thoimas Meaney $37

Baby-boomers, gen-X, millennials, zoomers: the dividing lines among generations in literary culture have become stark to the point of parody. Granta 166 tests the limits of each generation's given definition in popular culture against the reality of its most sharply observed fiction. Stories by Andrew O'Hagan, Brandon Taylor, Nico Walker and Lillian Fishman fill an issue that captures the change in values, aesthetic emphasis and technological experience among different age cohorts, all the while questioning the legitimacy of the generational conceit. Non-fiction includes meditations on the short history of the idea of 'a generation', as well as on the relative absence of youth revolts in our time, and the shadowy rule of the old — gerontocracy — in societies across the globe.

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Language City: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues by Ross Perlin $33

A portrait of contemporary New York City, the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet, told through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages. Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and — because many have never been recorded — when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Both social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is an exploration of a city and the world that made it.

• A language map of New York.

• The endangered languages of New York.

• One person’s efforts.

• Celebrating Babel.

• Deep linguistic diversity.

Liar’s Test by Ambelin Kwaymullina $30

Seven will come. Two will die. Two will sleep. Two will serve. One will rule. I didn't want to rule the Risen. Wreak a little havoc upon them, though? That was something else entirely. Bell Silverleaf is a liar. It's how she's survived. It's how all Treesingers have survived since they were invaded by the Risen and their fickle gods. But now Bell is in the Queen's Test — she's one of seven girls competing in deadly challenges to determine who will rule for the next twenty-five years. If Bell wins, she'll have the power to help her people and take revenge on the Risen. But first she has to make it through the challenges alive. She doesn't know how much she's been lied to, or where she fits in a bigger story, a mystery stretching back generations. And she's facing much bigger dangers than the Queen's Test. She's up against the gods themselves. Liar's Test is a fast-paced, intricately woven YA fantasy novel with an unforgettable heroine inspired by the strength and power of Aboriginal women.
”A genre-bending, non-stop adventure foregrounding First Nations lifeways, the power of resistance and the multi-generational harms wrought by colonialism and empire. Bell Silverleaf is the kick-arse First Nations heroine we have longed for.” —Rebecca Lim
”Tucked into a twisty, fast-paced narrative that explores legacies of colonialism are subtle messages about the ever-changing, symbiotic web of life. Intriguing and imaginative.” —Kirkus

Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler $37

An investigation into the medical origins of LSD, and how the Nazis and the CIA turned it into a weapon, by the author of Blitzed. First used as a drug capable of treating mental illnesses, then as a 'truth serum' by the CIA, Tripped reveals how the fortuitous discovery of LSD in April 1943 led to a mass exploitation of this ‘promising’ hallucinogen. Using archival material, Norman Ohler brings to light the often misguided interaction between scientific research, state authorities and hedonistic drug culture that shaped drug policy in the twentieth century. With a cast of characters ranging from Albert Hofmann to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics; Richard Nixon to Elvis Presley; to Aldous Huxley and John Lennon.
”Utterly fascinating and illuminating. In tracing the curious origins of LSD as a drug and as a cultural phenomenon — a compulsive maze-like trail that takes in obscure Swiss institutes, the rise of Nazi Germany, the philosophy of brainwashing, CIA conspiracies, the White House and Elvis Presley — Norman Ohler also cleverly throws fresh light on the Cold War that dominated the late twentieth century: a global struggle for psychological supremacy and psychic liberation. On top of all this, his storytelling is not only beguiling but — by the end — profoundly moving as well. It is possible that LSD will have a part to play in all our medical futures: this gripping and deeply felt book will tell you why.” —Sinclair McKay

Choose yourself a new book from these titles that have just arrived at VOLUME. Click through to our website to get your copies:

Performance by David Coventry $38

“David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed — and de-formed — by his experience suffering from ME, and is compelling, thoughtful, memorable, and disconcerting. A unique contribution to the literature of illness.” —Thomas
Performance is a self-portrait like no other. David Coventry takes us into his experience of ME, a debilitating systemic disease which took hold in March 2013 but has roots in his childhood. For Coventry, ME radically overturns the rules of time, thought and embodiment – an experience which has shaped the writing of this book. Through an illuminating blend of life transcription and deep imaginative projection, he shows how placing fiction into the stories of our damaged lives can remind us of who we are and who we might have been, even when so much of us has been taken away by illness. From a mountaineering disaster in Kaikōura to a literary encounter in Austria, a country mansion to a volcanic archipelago, this novel is a strikingly vivid, at times disorienting series of journeys, stopovers and emergencies that take in the world, one in which Coventry is often an outsider, even when at home in Wellington. With purposeful unreliability and flashes of humour amid pain and searching, Performance takes us into a space where ‘reading’ itself fails as a description of how we meet the text.
”Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.” —Martha Stoddard Holmes
”A masterpiece of narrative disintegration with a deep psychic grip on the reader – a book whose design not infrequently had me exhaling in both profound affect and aesthetic astonishment. A monumental achievement.” —Tracey Slaughter

• Other books by David Coventry.

Still Is by Vincent O’Sullivan $30

The thrushes are back. The blackbirds too are back, already worrying the thrushes, filching their choice worms. The gorse is running the hills along the Aramoana Road, spills the slopes yellow; the broom, so much more politely, you call it gold. Look again, the gorse walks prickling against the skyline. This is September.
Still Is gathers ninety new poems by Vincent O’Sullivan, who died recently. These are poems that call and respond, poems that elaborate and pare down, and poems in which an ending is a beginning.

• Vale.

• Moe mai rā.

Always Song in the Water: An ode to Moana Oceania by Gregory O’Brien $45

An expanded edition of O’Brien’s superb 2019 rumination on experiences of art, cuture, and environment, considering the ocean that reaches around Aotearoa and stretches to the Kermadecs and beyond as the medium that bears our thoughts in suspension and washes them on both familiar and unfamiliar shores. The entire book celebrates — in images, words and sound — our connectedness with the wider Pacific region, its peoples, flora, fauna and the expansive waters which both inspire and define us. The expanded edition returns to the themes, ongoing concerns and unresolved issues of the earlier project. In essence, the 2011 Kermadec voyage never ended. O'Brien considers that he and the other artists who voyaged to Rangitahua Raoul Island on HMNZS Otago in 2011 never really disembarked from the ship that took them north. He thinks of thems as still out there, on the ocean, absorbing its energy, listening to its oceanic songs and confronting the environmental issues which have only increased in urgency over the ensuing decade. The new edition includes a section of 40 extra pages of images and thoughtful text.

• Look inside.

• The earlier edition.

Old Black Cloud: A cultural history of mental depression in Aotearoa New Zealand by Jacqueline Leckie $50

Mental depression is a serious issue in contemporary New Zealand, and it has anincreasingly high profile. But during our history, depression has often been hidden under a long black cloud of denial that we have not always lived up to the Kiwiideal of being pragmatic and have not always coped. Using historic patient records as a starting place, and informed by her own experience of depression, academic Jacqueline Leckie's timely social historyof depression in Aotearoa analyses its medical, cultural and social contexts through an historical lens. From detailing its links to melancholia and explaining its expression within Indigenous and migrant communities, this engrossing book interrogates how depression was medicalised and has been treated, and how New Zealanders have lived with it.

• Read an extract.

• An interview with the author.

Without Model: Parva aesthetica by Theodor W. Adorno (translated by Wieland Hoban) $47

In Without Model, Theodor Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known.  Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production.  He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of 'Amorbach', but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry.  He criticises attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.  

• Wild resistance.

The Social Space of the Essay, 2003—2023 by Ian Wedde $50

“From the outset, the social space of the essay is involved with the text' s readers to the degree that conversation is implied - more or less intimate, even argumentative. The essay will often have originated in conversation, or the conversations of groups gathered around an event. Its long form may both contain and measure the extended time of face-to-face conversation or imply that extent; in this it will differ from social media, email and instant messages. These forms are often both dynamic and distanced, with the immediate energy of in-the-moment exchanges. The essays collected here, though, hope for the pleasure of extended conversation, both in their content and in the critical participation of their readers.” Wedde’s third collection of essays ranges widely through Aotearoa, the Pacific ocean, and the libraries and museums of the world. Artists considered in depth and often from multiple perspectives include Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Judy Millar, Peter Black, Anne Noble, Yuk King Tan, Elizabeth Thomson and Gordon Walters, while writers including Allen Curnow and Russell Haley are remembered.

Interesting Times: Some New Zealanders in Republican China by Chris Elder $40

The era of Republican China began with the fall of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty in 1912, and came to an end in 1949, when Mao Tse-tung declared the People's Republic of China. The 37 years in between were marked by power struggles between competing warlords, anti-foreign riots, floods and widespread famine, an eight-year conflict with Japan, and the depredations of an ongoing civil war. For the Chinese people, and for foreigners living in China, these were indeed interesting times. Some New Zealanders were drawn to China by missionary zeal or humanitarian concern, others by commercial opportunities, still others by political curiosity or simply by their appetite for risk. In this book, famous figures like Rewi Alley, James Bertram and Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde) rub shoulders with long-term China hands like the YWCA secretary Agnes Moncrieff and the missionary Alice Cook. Interesting.

Eat Pacific: The Paific Island food revolution cookbook by Robert Oliver $60

Eat Pacific includes 139 zesty recipes from Fiji, Sāmoa, the Kingdom of Tonga, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tahiti, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea, taken from the popular TV series Pacific Island Food Revolution, now in its third season. There’s more than healthy, tasty, affordable food, however. This book has a powerful health and food-sovereignty message: local food cultures hold the key to better diets, economic sustainability and combatting diseases such as diabetes and obesity.

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Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul $60

Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I'm alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, "Time is a strange substance" and who knows really, with our time-bound com- prehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.
Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876-1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists' work), and a writer/artist's daybook, describing Paul's first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband's diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory — the artist at present — and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.

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Human? The lie that’s been killing us since 1788 by Ziggy Ramo $39

So-called Australia is built upon a lie — that 97% of the population are human, and the others simply 'Indigenous', devoid of the same basic rights. Human? is the story of Ziggy Ramo's experience growing up under the weight of this lie. “We've had 235 years of continued destruction in the name of 'civilised progress', under an oppressive colonial system that punches down on almost everyone. We all deserve more. But to move forward we have to be honest about the past.” Written on the precipice of becoming a parent, Human? is Ziggy Ramo's offering for the future an attempt to bridge a nation-wide knowledge gap, and start a new conversation. Ramo asks — Would you still fight for human rights if it meant giving up your privilege?

• Sovereignty was never ceded.

Tarot by Jake Arthur $25

Jake Arthur's beguiling second poetry collection opens with a tarot reader coaxing us into a reading over a cup of tea. And in a rush of vivid scenes and impressions, we begin to imagine episodes from different lives — a woman tries to train a robin; parents anxiously attend a teacher-parent interview; a man is cast overboard and wonders if he will ever be found. Each card prompts a new character to mull over their uncertainties, hopes, obstacles and joys.Loosely inspired by the illustrations of the famous 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, with its riotous depictions of magicians, occultists, lovers, fools and angels, these poems have us grappling our way towards a clear path.
”An enchanted and enchanting clamour. Intimate, wise, utterly glorious. —Catherine Chidgey

The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright $26

Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent. New format.

The Pinchers and the Diamond Heist by Anders Sparring & Per Gustavsson $20

Theo is good at most things. He can almost count to a thousand, knows several French words and can operate the washing machine. But he can't lie or steal. “You must try harder,” says his mother sternly. The Pincher family love to steal things. It’s what they are born for! When his parents leave to visit the diamond exhibition, Theo's heart sinks. After breaking Grandma out of prison (his little sister needs someone to read her bedtime story), Theo sees no alternative but to stop his parents stealing the diamond. His shout of “Stop! Police!” brings them only delight—Theo's lie has shown he is a true Pincher. A mix of adventure, silliness and everyday family life.

• Look inside!

Keep warm with one (some) of these new books — just out of the carton:

The Garden Against Time: In search of a common paradise by Olivia Laing $50

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the costs of making paradise on earth. But amidst larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, she also finds rebel outposts and communal dreams, including Derek Jarman's improbable queer utopia and William Morris's fertile vision of a common Eden. The Garden Against Time is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens — not as places to hide from the world but as sites of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
”I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind.” —Observer
”What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.” —Nigel Slater
”A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.” —Neil Tennant
”Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.” —Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
”No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.” —Philip Hoare

• The radical potential of gardens.

• Hidden relationships with colonialsim.

Do Not Send Me Out among Strangers by Johua Segun-Lean $36

Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers is a wholly remarkable text considering shame, isolation, and the strange terrain where private and public grief meet. 31 illustrations: black-and-white and colour photos, iPhone dawings.
”Beautiful, strange, captivating.” —Olivia Laing
”Clear-eyed and brilliant and desperately sad.” —Sara Baume

• Look inside!

• The smell of bread forms a map of life.

Foraging New Zealand: Over 250 plants and fungi to forage in New Zealand by Peter Langlands $50

Aotearoa is full of incredible, edible wild foods — fruit, fungi and seaweed; berries, herbs and more — you only need to know where to look and how to use it safely. This remarkable, definitive book is the ultimate guide to unearthing more than 250 of our tastiest wild plants. Packed with stunning photography, up-to-date information and helpful tips, this book will have you venturing into the countryside or your own garden, viewing urban weeds with fresh eyes, and returning to the larder with zest. Peter Langlands has spent a lifetime compiling Aotearoa's largest database of wild foraged species, running workshops and sourcing wild produce for chefs as one of our only licensed professional foragers. He brings his years of expertise together in this essential compendium. This book will change the way you eat and the way you think of where you live.

The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon $38

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. In the Edo Period, a samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen. In upstate New York, a formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town and attempts to build a family. The Hive and the Honey is a bold and indelible collection that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in the far east of Russia?

• Violence is the only law in this war.

• Both real and not real.

Missing Persons, Or, My grandmother’s secrets by Clair Wills $50

A history of unmarried motherhood and concealed secrets through three generations of an Irish family. How far would you go for the missing? When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. How could a whole family — a whole country — abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence — stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.
I”n its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy — a brave and rigorously humane book.” —Sean Hewitt
”If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement.” —Doireann Ni Ghriofa
”Clair Wills retrieves from time's abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland.” —Paul Lynch

• Never going home.

Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann (translated from Russian by Imogen Taylor) $40

What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? As a child, Lena longs to pick hazelnuts in the woods with her grandmother. Instead, she is raised to be a good socialist: sent to Pioneer summer camps where she’s taught to worship Lenin and sing songs in praise of the glorious Soviet Union. But perestroika is coming. Lena’s corner of the USSR is now Ukraine, and corruption and patronage are the only ways to get by – to secure a place at university, an apartment, treatment for a sick baby. For Tatjana, the shock of the new means the first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops; it means terrible choices about how to love. Eventually both women must decide whether to stay or to emigrate, but the trauma they carry is handed down to their daughters, who struggle to make sense of their own identities. Glorious People is a vivid depiction of how the collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated through the lives of ordinary people.
 ''A story of several generations of women that poignantly demonstrates the imprint of history on people's lives, often with tragic consequences. Salzmann conveys the emotional turmoil and agonizing choices their characters make with exquisite nuance and sensitivity. Their distinctive voice, elegant prose and engaging narrative result in a marvelous work.” —Victoria Belim
”Glorious People is hypnotic, sweeping, and more relevant than ever. The mothers and daughters of Glorious People will stick with you long after you turn the last page of this mesmerizing, sharp, and devastating novel. They are searching for meaning and belonging as immigrants, mothers, wives, professionals, and citizens of a complex and ever-changing world. This novel offers a fresh take on the Soviet diaspora that offers both a meaningful critique and a semblance of much-needed hope for the future.' —Maria Kuznetsova

How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir by Safiya Sinclair $38

There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved. Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. Rastas were ostracised in Jamaica, and in this isolation Safiya's father's rule was absolute. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: no short skirts and no opinions, nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path. Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books, poetry and education. But as Safiya's imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it greater clashes with her ever more radical father. Safiya realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how? In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning.
'“Dazzling. Potent. Vital.” —Tara Westover
”To read it is to believe that words can save.” —Marlon James
”Unforgettable, mesmerising, heartbreaking and heartwarming. One of the best memoirs in world literature.” —Elif Shafak

• Short-listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

• Writing a ghost story.

• Scorching.

Sebze: Vegetarian recipes from my Turkish kitchen by Özlem Warren $65

Here you will find Kahvati (all day breakfast), Meze and Salata, Sokak Yemekleri (street food) as well as breads, mains, pickles, and sweets. Everything looks and sounds delicious. Winter garden favourites could be Pazih Lebeniye Corbasi (Yoghurt Soup with Chickpeas and Swiss Chard), Pazih, Cevizli Eriste (Eriste Noodles with Chard, Walnuts and Crumbly Cheese), or Firinda Sebzeli Karnabahar Mucveri (it’s a baked cauliflower dish!).

• Look inside!

• Cooking sunshine.

Wild Figs and Fennel: A year in an Italian kitchen by Letitia Clark $65

A beautifully presented delight. It’s a seasonal culinary journey through the sun-soaked landscapes of Italy sure to please. In the Winter section there’s the always popular Spaghetti Puttanesca, Lemon and Wild Fennel Polpette and the wonderfully named Ricotta Cloudballs. Packed with recipes for everyday and special occasions.

• Look inside!

• Cooking sunshine.

Empire, Incorporated: The corporations that built British colonialism by Philip J. Stern $74

Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan — a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

The Other Side: A journey into women, art, and the spirit world by Jennifer Higgie $30

In an illuminating blend of memoir and art history, The Other Side explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women artists. From the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen and the nineteenth-century spiritualist Georgiana Houghton to the pioneering Hilma af Klint, these women all — in their own unique ways — shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of their myriad lives, Jennifer Higgie considers the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. New paperback edition.
”In effervescent and atmospheric prose, Jennifer Higgie explores some of history's most innovative artists and their spiritual investigations into this realm and the next. I was entranced from start to finish, as she takes us on both a personal and artistic journey across time and across the globe. The Other Side is an exhilarating read.” —Katy Hessel
”The Other Side lit up my brain. A radical, fascinating exploration of art and the otherworldly, Higgie is an expert and erudite guide in this brilliant reclamation of female artists.” —Sinead Gleeson

Mediterranean (‘The Passenger’) $40

The word ‘Mediterranean’ evokes something larger than geography, and has historically marked a distinct cultural space, one where different people have met, traded, and clashed. Today the Mediterranean appears to be in crisis, neglected by the EU, and at the centre of one of the greatest migrations in history. While millions of tourists flock to its shores, hundreds of thousands of people face a dramatic journey in the opposite direction-to escape wars, persecutions, and poverty. The liquid road, as Homer called it, is increasingly militarized, trafficked, and polluted-as well as overheated and overfished. But the Mediterranean remains a source of wonder and fascination-a space not entirely colonized by modernity, where time flows differently, and where multiple cultures and languages are in very close contact and dialogue. Includes: ‘The Sea Between Lands’ by David Abulalfia; ‘The Liquid Road’ by Leila Slimani; ‘The Cold One, the Hot One, the Mad One, and the Angry One’ by Nick Hunt — plus: the sounds and smells of the Mediterranean; the invention of the Mediterranean diet; and more.

• Look inside!

• Other volumes in the excellent ‘The Passenger’ series.

Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll $20

Edinburgh is a city filled with magical creatures. No one can see them… until Ramya Knox. As she is pulled into her family’s world of secrets and spells, Ramya sets out to discover the truth behind the Hidden Folk with only three words of warning from her grandfather: Beware the Sirens. Plunged into an adventure that will change everything, Ramya is about to learn that there is more to her powers than she ever imagined.

The Great Wave: The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider by Michiko Kakutani $38

In the twenty-first century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger. As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and the grassroots are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider — the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, and others have provided inspirational leadership. But all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new. Writing with a critic’s incisive understanding of cultural trends, Michiko Kakutani outlines the consequences of these new asymmetries of power, and looks back to similar hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War, to find a way forward. For there is, Kakutani argues, always the promise of transformation in times of turmoil. We can surrender to the waters, give in to the gathering chaos, or we can use the wave’s momentum to propel us into a more stable and sustainable future.
”Michiko Kakutani offers a profoundly inspiring and prophetic perspective on the contemporary world. The Great Wave is an exceptionally rare book, marked by its deep, sincere, and precise comprehension of the formidable challenges that humanity faces in the third millennium. This may well be a pivotal turning point.” —Ai Weiwei

Start winter with a book still warm from the carton.
Click through to our website for your copies:

Long Island by Colm Tóibín $37

Eilis Lacey is Irish and married to Tony Fiorello. They live in a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, surrounded by Tony's large Italian family. Spring 1976. Eilis is now in her forties with two teenagers. An Irishman knocks on her door and tells her his wife is pregnant with Tony's child. Eilis has choices to make.
”Brilliantly written with a deft touch, it is only at the end that the breath you have been holding will be exhaled, but only briefly. —Stella
 "A masterful novel full of longing and regret." —Stuart Douglas
"Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue: this is Toibin at his best." —Robbie Millen, The Times
"Glittering with all of Toibin's intelligence and humane wit." —Colin Barrett

• Read Stella’s review.

• We will be discussing Long Island in our online book group on Tuesday 9 July. Please join us!

Our Strangers by Lydia Davis $45

Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers. This book has taken six months to come back into stock, so we will celebrate it as if it were a new release!
”This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust.” —Ali Smith
”Davis captures words as a hunter might and uses punctuation like a trap. Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail, a most original and daring mind.” —Colm Toibin

• A feat of omission.

• Writing and revision.

• Not worried about fame and glory.

Ela! Ela! To Turkey and Greece, A journey home through food by Ella Mittas $45

A collection of recipes and stories from cook and food writer Ella Mittas. Inspired by her time working in a village in the mountains of Crete and the hot, loud streets of Istanbul, as well as her Greek heritage, they represent a journey of food, culture and belonging. These simple, comforting recipes are a mix of things Ella saw, ate and was taught on her travels, though years of cooking them have made them something more her own. Above all, they represent community — the reason Mittas ever wanted to cook at all.

• Look inside!

• Mittas at home.

In Italy: Venice, Rome, and beyond by Cynthia Zarin $23

Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ – a traveller moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her we see anew the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice, Rome, Assisi and Santa Maria Maggiore vividly to life for the reader.
”These pieces induce a comparable sense of being pleasurably lost, of wanting to live imperfectly in the present tense.” —Observer

• Self-portrait in Venice.

A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabelle Hirsch $55

The way we remember the past today remains dishearteningly patriarchal: a place where women have always been oppressed by men, from ancient times to the present day. A History of Women in 101 Objects tells a new story of female history, revealing the evolution of the role women have played in society through the quiet power of their everyday items. Much of what we've read about history focuses on the men in power: women's stories are too often hidden or considered unremarkable. But in this collection, Annabelle Hirsch curates a compendium of women and their things, uncovering the thoughts and feelings at the heart of women's daily lives, to offer an intimate and lively alternative history. The objects date from prehistory to today and are assembled chronologically to show the evolution of how women were perceived by others, how they perceived themselves, how they fought for freedom. For example, what do handprints on early cave paintings tell us about the role of women in hunting? What does a mobile phone have to do with femicides? Or Kim Kardashian's diamond ring with Elena Ferrante?
”I love this book — a new feminist history of the world — stirring, provocative and carefully researched.” —Lauren Elkin

• Look inside!

• Her grandmother’s lipstick.

• Not exactly how it happened.

Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville $40

A novel of the life of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmother — a woman Kate feared as a child, and only came to understand in adulthood. Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society's long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
Short-listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
”The writing sparkles with Grenville's gift for transcendently clear imagery. This is a work of history, biography, story and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer and pathway to understanding.” —Guardian

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler $65

Butler confronts the attacks on gender that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed 'anti-gender ideology movements' dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous threat to families, local cultures, civilization — and even 'man' himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to abolish reproductive justice, undermine protections against violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights. But what, exactly, is so disturbing about gender? In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how 'gender' has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and transexclusionary feminists, and the concrete ways in which this phantasm works. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of critical race theory and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonises struggles for equality and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a call to make a broad coalition with all those who struggle for equality and fight injustice.
”Who's Afraid of Gender? calls for gender expression to be recognized as a basic human right, and for radical solidarity across our differences. With masterful analysis of where we've been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge.” —Esquire
”If we want to see the political temperature fall to something that might allow for progress, there are few thinkers better placed to guide us than Butler. Crucially, Butler sets out an ethical vision for how gender freedoms and rights might be better integrated within a collective broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food for everyone everywhere.” —Angela Saini

• Judith Butler thinks you’re over-reacting.

Papyrus: The invention of books in the Ancient world by Irene Vallejo $30

Long before books were mass produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this impressive tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are fascinating stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humourists, Sappho and the empowerment of women's voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world. New edition.
”In this generous, sprawling work Vallejo sets out to provide a panoramic survey of how books shaped not just the ancient world but ours too. While she pays due attention to the physicality of the book, Vallejo is equally interested in what goes on inside its covers. And also, more importantly, what goes on inside a reader when they take up a volume and embark on an imaginative and intellectual dance that might just change their life. As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading. “ —Guardian

• Why it is a mistake to undervalue books.

• Booksellers are saviours.

A Thread of Violence: A story of truth, invention, and murder by Mark O’Connell $33

In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland's Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland's history and the words used to describe the crimes (grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre, and almost unbelievable) have remained in the cultural lexicon as the acronym GUBU. Mark O'Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk.
”Like all great books, A Thread of Violence is the document of a great writer's obsession. Mark O'Connell draws the reader into a deeply engrossing story, and at the same time into a complex investigation of human brutality and of narrative writing itself. This is a superb and unforgettable book.” —Sally Rooney
”Phenomenal. It's very dark, necessarily, but I found it very rich. Macarthur seems as though he's being generous and open, but there's also this manipulative side of him. It's like a chess game between the two of them, which I found really compelling. No contemporary literary mind seems to me more subtle, perceptive or trustworthy. An eerie, philosophically probing book. A Thread of Violence instils the certitude not only that no one else could have written this book, but that no other need ever be written on the subject. It's a marvel of tact, attentiveness, and unclouded moral acuity.” —Guardian

The Curtain and the Wall: A modern journey along Europe’s Cold War border by Timothy Phillips $28

The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, north to south, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. But we cannot consign the tensions and restrictions of the past to history. At a time when Russia is once again making war and when divisions elsewhere in Europe are on the rise, these old fault lines have new resonance. What do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What have they left in their wake? In this book, Timothy Phillips travels the route of the Iron Curtain from deep inside the Arctic Circle to the meeting point of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. He explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense between 1945 and 1989, and where the world's most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. The people he meets bear vivid witness to times of change. There are those who look back on the Cold War with nostalgia and affection. Others despise it, unable to forgive the hard and sometimes lost decades that their families, friends and nations endured. In these historic landscapes lie buried many of the seeds of our world's current disputes - over borders, and about belonging and the meaning of progress.

12 Theses of Attention edited by D. Graham Burnett and Stevie Knauss $20

"True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable." So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, written by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics — one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend. It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously "frack" our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer. The book is illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.

• Look inside!

• Meet the Friends of Attention.

Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe (translated from Japanese by David Boyd) $25

Successful entrepreneur A.A. Abrams is pursuing the enigmatic writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who appears to have the ability to write expertly in the language of any place they go. Abrams sinks endless resources into finding the writer, but Tomoyuki Tomoyuki always manages to stay one step ahead, taking off moments before being pinned down. But how does the elusive author move from one place to the next, from one language to the next? Ingenious and dazzling, Harlequin Butterfly unfurls one puzzle after another, taking us on a mind-bending journey into the imagination.
”The novel is perhaps most provocative as a meditation on language. A satisfying and reflective read” —Asian Review of Books

• Harlequin’s butterfly.

Brave Kāhu and the Pōrangi Magpie by Shelley Burne-Field $20

Poto is the perfect fledgling – the apple of her father's eye and a natural at hunting and flying. Anything a kāhu is supposed to be good at, Poto can do best of all. She can't understand why her sister Whetū gets cross with her – it's not her fault she's good at everything! As for her baby brother Ari, he's so weird and annoying. After their mother is killed by a flock of magpies, Poto and Whetū have to get an injured Ari to safety before a deadly foretold earthquake arrives, unleashing a flood and destroying their home. With the help of the birds and new friends they meet on the way, the hawk siblings journey through the Valley, keeping an eye out for a menacing flock of magpies who are on a mission to take back the Valley for their own. Can they stop Tū the makipai and her flock from ruining the harmony of the Valley? Will aroha win out over hate? And will Poto realise that everyone has something special to offer, even if they can't do everything quite like she does?

Maurice and Maralyn: A whale, a shipwreck, a love story by Sophie Elmhirst $45

Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England - and its oil crisis, industrial strikes and inflation — forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On their tiny raft, over the course of days, then months, their love is put to the test. When Maurice begins to withdraw into himself, it falls upon Maralyn to keep them both alive. Their pet turtle helps, as does devising menus for fantasy dinners and dreaming of their next voyage. Filled with danger, spirit and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive — not just at sea, but in life.
”Electrifying. A tender portrait of two unconventional souls blithely defying the conventions of their era and making a break for freedom.” —Fiona Sturges, Guardian
”Easily one of the most captivating works of narrative nonfiction I've ever read.” —Oliver Burkeman

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler $30

When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn't pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA — a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence — has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research. But the stakes are high: the octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence and there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of their advancements. And no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
”A first-rate speculative thriller, by turns fascinating, brutal, powerful, and redemptive.” —Jeff Vandermeer

Out of the carton and into your hands!
Click through for your copies:

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson $38

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years, and a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, annotated and corrected by the author. Anne Carson is famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word ‘idea’, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong’.”

• Look inside.

• Unjoined-up thinking.

Hard by the Cloud House by Peter Walker $40

The legend of Pouakai, a.k.a. the extinct Haast's Eagle, takes Peter Walker on a journey from an 1860s Canterbury sheep run to a deep cave near Karamea as he learns the story of the mighty hunter that inhabited a peak in the foothills of the Southern Alps. Was it the same creature as The Rukh of Arabic legends? And, if so, was that evidence that in the twelfth century Arabic and Chinese explorers ventured as far as the South Pacific, saw Pouakai, and traded with Maori? From Kai Tahu's fatal encounter with colonisation to the glories of tenth century Baghdad and ceremonies at the great Tahitian marae Taputapuatea, Hard by the Cloud House is a heady, powerful, speculative, seductive mix of history, memoir, science and myth.

• Show us the bird.

Counterfutures #15 edited by Neil Vallelly $25

COUNTERFUTURES is a multidisciplinary journal of Left research, thought, and alternatives, with a focus on Aotearoa. The essays, articles, interviews and reviews are urgent, thoughtful, and vital. This issue includes: An interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Bifardi on ‘Futurism without a future’, and on using psychoanalysis to comprehend political events today; A review of Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, which situates it within a revision of the South Island myth that has occupied a privileged place in settler aesthetic traditions; An assessment of the 2023 New Zealand General Election by Metiria Turei, Sue Bradford, and Jack Foster, and its implications for left politics in Aotearoa; An exploration by Neil Vallelly of the entwined relationship btween democracy and violence, as revealed in the current Israeli siege of Gaza; An analysis of the ‘religious right’ and its involvement in politics in Aotearoa, by Isabella Gregory; An overview of contesting Treaty histories, by Emma Gattey; Essays on the growing importance of a nationally co-ordinated union movement, the possibilities of inclusive debt forgiveness, and on the meeting of theory and the lived experience of sex workers in Aotearoa.

• Previous issues are available on the Counterfutures website.

Splinters by Leslie Jamison $40

In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life — her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope — and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.
”Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title — a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life. This memoir is a masterclass.” —Maggie Smith

• More than a divorce memoir.

• A different kind of love story.

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman $70

"What do women hold? The home and the family. And the children and the food. The friendships. The work. The work of the world. And the work of being human. The memories. And the troubles. And the sorrows and the triumphs. And the love." Women Holding Things features Kalman’s signature bright, bold images accompanied by thoughtful and intimate anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations. Many of the subjects draw from her own personal history, and most of the paintings are portraits of women, both ordinary and famous, including Virginia Woolf, Sally Hemings, Hortense Cezanne, Gertrude Stein, as well as Kalman's family members and other real-life people. These women hold a range of objects, from the mundane — balloons, a cup, a whisk, a chicken, a hat — to the abstract — dreams and disappointments, sorrow and regret, joy and love. Kalman considers the many things that fit physically and metaphorically between women's hands: We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of the women's lives — their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain. Ultimately, she reveals that many of the things we hold dear — as well as those that burden or haunt us — remain constant and connect us from generation to generation.

• Look inside!

• Even more look inside!

Greekish: Everyday recipes with Greek roots by Georgina Hayden $60

Georgina Hayden’s Taverna: Recipes from a Cypriot kitchen is one of our favourite cookbooks at home, so we can’t wait to start using her easy-to-us but entirely delicious new book, Greekish, which contains 120 dynamic recipes springing from her Cypriot Greek heritage and into the everyday. Standout recipes include: Fried sesame cheese bites to serve up as an irresistible snack;Tuna, egg and caper salad to make an easy lunch; Sticky aubergine and pomegranate tart for a crowd-pleasing centrepiece; Spanakopita jacket potatoes as a twist on the weeknight classic; One-pot pastisio for an easy meal everyone will love; Kebabs delivering the ultimate barbecue; Baklava cheesecake as a show-stopping dessert. There are easy breakfasts, small dishes and snacks, salads, desserts and even whole sections of recipes inspired by the iconic spanakopita and baklava.

• Look inside!

• Portokalopita!

H is for Hope by Elizabeth Kolbert and Wesley Allsbrook $40

Climate change resists narrative and yet we must see clearly what's happening in our world. Millions of lives are at stake, and upwards of a million species. We must act. In H Is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the history, and future, of climate change from A, for Svante Arrhenius, who created the world's first climate model in 1894, to Z, for Net Zero. Along the way she looks at Greta Thunberg's 'blah blah blah' speech, flies an all-electric plane, experiments with the effects of extreme temperatures on the human body, and struggles with the deep uncertainty of the future. Complemented by Wesley Allsbrook's gorgeous, colour illustrations, H Is for Hope offers an inspiring, worrying and, above all, hopeful vision for how we can still save our planet.

• Look inside!

• Climate change, A to Z.

Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich $33

On the longest night of a Berlin winter two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia.
A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. Neither speak. As silence weighs heavy between them, decades of Ukrainian and Russian history resurface, from Yiddish jokes, Kyiv's DIY queer parties and the hidden messages in Russian pop music, to resistance in Odessa, raids in Moscow clubs and the death of their friend. As the requiem inside the narrator's head expands within the darkness of the room, she asks the all-important question: what does it mean to have hope?
”Yelena Moskovich is a true original, a literary titan, an innovator, her prose is both poetry and punk, political without any obviousness to it, pure, demented in the best possible way, and always brilliant..” —Jenni Fagan

• Other books by Yelena Moskovich.

• Read Stella’s review of Virtuoso.

Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai $30

Nine of Franz Kafka's most memorable tales are here given fresh life with dazzling graphic renderings by the brother-and-sister manga creators Nishioka Kyodai. With their distinctive, surreal style of illustration, they have reimagined the fantastic, the imperceptible and the bizarre in Kafka's work, creating a hauntingly powerful visual world. These stories of enigmatic figures and uncanny transformations are stripped to their core, offering profound new understandings. Includes The Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and A Country Doctor.

• Look inside!

Humanise: A maker’s guide to building our world by Thomas Heatherwick $38

A story about humanity told through the lens of our buildings. Our world is losing its humanity. Too many developers care more about their shareholders than society. Too many politicians care more about power than the people who vote for them. And too many cities feel soulless and depressing, with buildings designed for business, not for us. So where do we find hope? Thomas Heatherwick has an alternative. By changing the world around us, we can improve our health, restore our happiness, and save our planet. The time has come to put human emotion back at the heart of the design process. Drawing on thirty years of making bold, beautiful buildings, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Heatherwick brings together vivid stories and hundreds of beautiful images into a remarkable visual compendium.
”Humanise is a masterwork.  It's quietly furious, impassioned, rigorous and forensic in all the right doses.  It leaves me very hopeful indeed about how things could go from here.” —Alain de Botton

• Look inside!

• Against the blandemic.

• A bit of optimism.

An African History of Africa: From the dawn of humanity to independence by Zeinab Badawi $40

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.For too long, Africa's history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa's spectacular history - from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story. The result is a gripping new account of Africa — an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

• The book began as a television series.

The Book of All Loves by Agustín Fernández Mallo (translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead) $33

Blending fiction and essay, poetry and philosophy, Agustin Fernandez Mallo's The Book of All Loves is a startling, expansive work of imaginative agility, one that makes the case for hope in the midst of a disintegrating present. In the wakeof the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into philosophy, geology, physics, linguistics. Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. As they roam the city, strange occurrences accumulate, signalling that the world around them is heading towards a point of no return. 
”There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you'll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolano another. Agustin Fernandez Mallo has become one, too.” —Chris Power
”The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.” —Mathias Enard

• Atypical talk.

Swimming Pool (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Piotr Florczyk $23

As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture. Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.
”Having spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it's more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad.” —Rada Owen

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

• It seems OK to me.

Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh $43

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of ‘disintermediation’: cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the  economic imperative to intensify circulation when production  stagnates. ‘Flow’ is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality and big ideas instead.

• Why is our culture so obsessed with individual experience?

• A waxing of affect.

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler $55

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers — Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich — lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music, scores that carry forward the echoes of lost time.

The Apprentice Witnesser by Bren MacDibble $20

That's what my photos are. Little moments. All the good moments, the kind moments, the moments of care and love that, if you add them all together, make a life sweet. Bastienne Scull is a young orphan who lives with the local Witnesser of Miracles, Lodyma Darsey, who investigates 'miraculous events' and spins them into stories she tells at the night markets. After Lodyma's husband and elder son died of a sickness that continues to sweep the land, she sent her teenage son Osmin into the hills to live with the mountain men. That was ten years ago, and Lodyma doesn't know if he's alive or dead. And she's taken Bastienne as an apprentice to fill the void of her lost family. One day, two young boys arrive in town asking Lodyma to go on a mysterious mission to a monastery. And when Lodyma and Bastienne arrive, what they discover will change their lives.
”A classic MacDibble: young Basti is a delight as she searches for her strength and a family in a post-apocalyptic world, leaving us with a glimmer of hope for her future and our own.” —Wendy Orr
”Bren MacDibble has become well-known for her unique and heartfelt adventure novels. She is particularly astute at writing timely and inventive stories exploring the impacts of climate change. There are plenty of twists for younger readers who enjoy a good dash of marvel and intrigue with their adventure stories. MacDibble's use of language is unparalleled, and she illustrates hope and resilience through her characters.” —Books & Publishing  

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton $28

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other? New (cheaper) edition.
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." —Eleanor Catton

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The Vast Extent: On seeing and not seeing further by Lavinia Greenlaw $50

An ingenious constellation of ‘exploded essays’ about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Ranging across caves, seasickness, early photography, boredom, wonder, mountains, mice, the body and its shadow, from the Arctic at midwinter to a shingle spit in Norfolk at midsummer, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before or what helps us to see more clearly or persuades us to see what's not there. Art, science, vision and memory inform one another in this original and illuminating work.

• Look inside.

• Caves, sleep, absence of light.

• How do we make sense of what we see?

Ans Westra: A life in photography by Paul Moon $50

In a career that spanned six decades, the Dutch-Kiwi photographer Ans Westra (1936–2023) made it her life’s work to capture the growth of a nation through hundreds of thousands of images. Her photographic catalogue is now widely thought of as a photo album of Aotearoa New Zealand. This richly illustrated biography interrogates her remarkable — and at times controversial — practice, and a life that always put photography first.

• Look inside.

Verdigris by Michele Mari (translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore) $35

At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however, doesn't come from a book — it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colourful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography — a quest that leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means merely a horticultural threat. And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
”A gripping, beguiling, occasionally discomfiting, and utterly fascinating tour de force.” —Kirkus

• Read the first chapter!

Orbital by Samantha Harvey $40

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
”Beautiful in every aspect.” —Sarah Moss
”One of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time.” —Mark Haddon

• Space pastoral.

• Try orbiting.

The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston $38

As foot and mouth disease spreads across the hills of Cumbria, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke, Steve Elliman and William Herne, two neighbouring farmers, join forces to reverse their fortunes by rustling livestock from the south. With the struggles of the land never far away, Steve's only distraction is his growing fascination with William's wife, Helen. When their mountain home comes under the sway of a ruthless outsider, it is left to Steve to save himself and what's left of their farming community, in a savage conflict that threatens an ancient way of life. A reimagining of the American Western for the fells of northern England, Scott Preston's thrilling debut tells of men and women battered by circumstance, struggling to make lives for themselves in an unyielding land. Lyrical, cinematic, visceral and steeped in local folklore, The Borrowed Hills is an epic tale of a forgotten Britain.
”Preston's blistering tale of land and violence is written in his distinctive Cumbrian voice, a vernacular stripped to its bones that encompasses stark prose and sudden startling flashes of poetry. The result is half Tarantino and half pitch-black northern realism that slides under the skin and lodges deep. A sucker-punch of a novel, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty.” —Guardian
”Scott Preston lifts the veil from the picture-postcard beauty of Britain's Cumbrian fells to expose an atmosphere of festering despair in the lives of two farmers who lose everything when their sheep are destroyed by the government in order to contain an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease. When they take desperate measures to rebuild their shattered world, what happens feels tragically inevitable. The Borrowed Hills is a story of anger and violence, devotion, love, and back-breaking hard work, told with dark, dead-pan humour and a rough kind of poetry.” —Carys Davies

Hunter in Huskvarna by Sara Stridsberg (translated from Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner) $28

A young woman becomes obsessed with her psychoanalyst's daughter. A police officer's mistress clandestinely cares for his dying wife. A boy goes missing from the Swedish town of Huskvarna after he was last seen walking with a wolf. From the inside of a dead whale's belly, to an industrial town emptied out after its factory's closure, to a Texan prison where a young man visits his sister's murderer on death row, Stridsberg approaches both the strange and the mundane with a fairy-tale sensibility that lights our world anew.
Time runs through this collection like water, variously ebbing, flowing and rippling beneath the shimmering surface of Stridsberg's prose. These genre-spanning stories are held together by a sense of longing: for escape from the narrow margins of a prescribed life, for a past which promises an undiscovered future, for a place or a person that feels like home.
”There's a dreamy quality to these death-stalked tales from Swedish author Stridsberg, which marry old-world mysteriousness to modern sensibilities.” —Daily Mail

• Compellingly strange and sinister.

Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt $65

Today the work of Alberto Giacometti is world-famous and his sculptures sell for record-breaking prices. But from his early days as an unknown outsider to the end of a dramatic international career, Giacometti lived in the same hovel of a studio in Paris. Arriving in Paris from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with artists and writers — from Picasso, Breton and Dali to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett — but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the city's unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the cafe-terraces buzzing with ideas and gossip. In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, who spent thirty years documenting the Parisian art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew, charts the course of the artist's life and work. From falling in and out with the Surrealists to years of artistic anguish, from devotion to his mother to intense friendships, tragic love affairs and a fraught marriage, this is an intimate portrait of an artist in exceptional times.
”Marvellous, intimate and insightful. It reads like a novel by Samuel Beckett.” —Paul Theroux

• Look inside.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian memoir by Raja Shehadeh $25

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights. Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably. This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship. Now in paperback.
”It's a mark of Shehadeh's brilliance that this latest revisiting is full of surprises: it's even in tone, but jet-fuelled by implicit emotion; there's no conventional suspense, but it is absolutely gripping.” —Rachel Aspden

• After six months of war.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray $26

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car dealership is going under, and while his wife is frantically selling off her jewellery on eBay, he's busy building an apocalypse-proof bunker in the woods. Meanwhile their teenage daughter is veering off the rails, in thrall to a toxic friendship, and her little brother is falling into the black hole of the internet... Where did it all go wrong? The present is in crisis but the causes lie deep in the past. How long can this unhappy family wait before they have to face the truth? And if the story has already been written, is there still time to find a happy ending? Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. New, cheaper, smaller edition.
”It can't be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray's brilliant novel, about a rural Irish clan, posits the author as Dublin's answer to Jonathan Franzen. A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting oozes pathos while being very funny to boot. Murray's observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page — every line, it sometimes seems — abuzz with fresh and funny insights. At its core this is a novel concerned with the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They're all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish.” —Anthony Cummins, Observer

• Find out more.

First Things: A memoir by Harry Ricketts $35

In First Things, poet Harry Ricketts chronicles his early life through the lens of ‘firsts’: those moments that can hold their detail and potency across a lifetime. Set mostly in Hong Kong and Oxford, these bright fragments include the places, people, writers, encounters and obsessions that have shaped Ricketts’ world, from his first friends and rivals to his first time being caned by a teacher and his first time dropping acid. There are other, more enigmatic firsts here too, like the first time he realised what really mattered, and the first time he began doubting God. Who really were we, back then? Which parts of ourselves get to be remembered and carried along with us, and which parts are gone forever? In First Things, the gaps in between shine as brightly as the memories themselves.

Alexandria: The city that changed the world by Islam Issa $60

A city drawn in sand. Inspired by the tales of Homer and his own ambitions of empire, Alexander the Great sketched the idea of a city onto the sparsely populated Egyptian coastline. He did not live to see Alexandria built, but his vision of a sparkling metropolis that celebrated learning and diversity was swiftly realised and still stands today. Situated on the cusp of Africa, Europe and Asia, great civilisations met in Alexandria. Together, Greeks and Egyptians, Romans and Jews created a global knowledge capital of enormous influence: the inventive collaboration of its citizens shaped modern philosophy, science, religion and more. In pitched battles, later empires, from the Arabs and Ottomans to the French and British, laid claim to the city but its independent spirit endures. In this sweeping biography of the great city, Islam Issa takes us on a journey across millennia, rich in big ideas, brutal tragedies and distinctive characters, from Cleopatra to Napoleon. From its humble origins to dizzy heights and present-day strife, Alexandria tells the gripping story of a city that has shaped our modern world.
”In Islam Issa's monumental and vividly imagined new tale of the city, Alexandria comes to life. Issa's Alexandria arrives at 2011's Arab Spring having covered more than two millennia in just over 400 pages — no mean feat. But his real success is the book's sense of personality. It ends with Issa walking through the modern city that now stands on the ancient site, passing its markets and Art Deco cinemas. He writes about the present as vividly as the storied past. This book is a fitting tribute to a city that has survived, changed and grown for so many centuries.” —Francesca Peacock, Daily Telegraph

Sociopath: A memoir by Patric Gagne $40

“Your friends would probably describe me as nice. But guess what? I can't stand your friends. I'm a liar. I'm a thief. I'm highly manipulative. I don't care what other people think. I'm capable of almost anything.” Sociopath: A Memoir is at once a mesmerising tale of a life lived on the edge of the law, a redemptive love story and a moving account of one woman's battle to create a place for herself and the 5% of the population who are also — like her — sociopaths. Ever since she was a small child, Patric Gagne knew she was different. Although she felt intense love for her family and her best friend, David, these connections were never enough to make her be 'good', or to reduce her feelings of apathy and frustration. As she grew older, her behaviour escalated from petty theft through to breaking and entering, stalking, and worse. As an adult, Patric realized that she was a sociopath. Although she instantly connected with the official descriptions of sociopathy, she also knew they didn't tell the full story: she had a plan for her life, had nurtured close relationships and was doing her best (most of the time) to avoid harming others. As her darker impulses warred against her attempts to live a settled, loving life with her partner, Patric began to wonder — was there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And could she find it before her own behaviour went a step too far? Interesting.

Air Conditioning (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Hsuan L. Hsu $23

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception or the sensory perception of temperature is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management. Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody — its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.
”A cool blast of discomforting brilliance, Air Conditioning examines the conditioning of our indoor and interior climates of work, domesticity, and consumption. It is not inward looking to the sealed boxes and bubbles of air-conditioned detachment, but focused on the complex exchanges and inequalities involved in sustaining comfortable places, cooled bodies and technologies by making other places, and other (often poor and racialised) lives, uncomfortable and unliveable. Hsu's book hums, ventilating ideas in an insistent, vital tone to show how this ordinary object, submerged within walls and behind vents, has mattered so much to us.” —Peter Adey, Royal Holloway University of London

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum (translated from Korean by Shanna Tan) $37

Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju — they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.

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Hine Toa: A story of bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku $40

A memoir by a trailblazing voice in women's, queer and Māori liberation movements. In the 1950s, a young Ngāhuia is fostered by a family who believe in hard work and community. Although close to her kuia, she craves more: she wants higher education and refined living. But whanau dismiss her dreams. To them, she is just a show-off, always getting into trouble, talking back and running away. In this fiery memoir about identity and belonging, Ngahuia te Awekotuku describes what was possible for a restless working-class girl from the pa. After moving to Auckland for university, Ngahuia advocates resistance as a founding member of Nga Tamatoa and the Women's and Gay Liberation movements, becoming a critical voice in protests from Waitangi to the streets of Wellington.
”Remarkable. At once heartbreaking and triumphant.” —Patricia Grace
”Brilliant. This timely coming-of-age memoir by an iconic activist will rouse the rebel in us all. I loved it.” —Tina Makereti

• A living legend.

• The revolution will be memoired

Julia by Sandra Newman $37

London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It's 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen - cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She routinely breaks the rules but also collaborates with the regime whenever necessary. Everyone likes Julia. A diligent member of the Junior Anti-Sex League (though she is secretly promiscuous) she knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She's very good at staying alive. But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department — a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith — when she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she impulsively hands him a note — a potentially suicidal gesture — she comes to realise that she's losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world. Newman’s feminist narrative stands in parallel to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and is full of comtemporary resonance and urgency.
”Sandra Newman's Julia, approved by Orwell's estate, is neither an anachronistic betrayal of the source material, nor some parched scholarly exercise. Rather, it is a vibrant, full-blooded book that adheres to the spirit of the original while tearing elements of it — namely the character of Winston Smith — to pieces. It is very funny, peppered with fresh observations that made me laugh out loud. Newman hits all the big beats from Orwell's book — the torture in Room 101, Julia and Winston's final meeting, but what is so wonderful about this is not just its depiction of Julia as even cleverer than you might imagine, but also its rich understanding of what Orwell meant about society's three strata locked in an endless battle for supremacy. Julia, living in this pressure cooker, is often cruel as well as astute. She is the one in the end who understands this.” —I Paper
”Julia's story is so well engineered it perfectly matches the contours of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The same goes for Newman's dialogue and descriptive language, both of which have an Orwellian melody. This is a good book, which offers an optimistic take on the pessimistic original.” —Irish Independent

• A different ending point.

• A bonkers idea.

• Not quite that hopeless.

Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson $37

The sea is steady for now. The land readies itself. What can be done with the woman on the cliff? On a wild and rugged island cut off and isolated to some, artist Nell feels the island is her home. It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in landscape, folklore and ‘the feminine’. The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature. All the islanders live alongside the strange murmurings that seem to emanate from within the depths of the island, a sound that is almost supernatural — a Summoning as the Inions call it. One day, a letter arrives at Nell's door from the reclusive Inions who invite Nell into the commune for a commission to produce a magnificent art piece to celebrate their long history. In its creation, Nell will discover things about the community and about herself that will challenge everything she thought she knew.

• Uncanny notes that plague this place.

• Interview.

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan $38

An artist in her late twenties awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear. She is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the spectre of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year — a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned — while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog. Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters — with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers — making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalising intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.
”A young woman's sudden hearing loss initiates and propels The Hearing Test. But affliction is also a catalyst for the many irresistible twists and digressions that make this novel of derive so compelling. Callahan never explains; with steely reserve she observes and chronicles, makes ingenious, delirious connections and transitions, and takes us on a journey through her cultural mindscape of artists, writers, cinema and music, offering it up with muted irony and a limpid grace. The Hearing Test is ecstatic prose.” —Moyra Davey
”Eerie and tender and utterly consuming, The Hearing Test has built an entirely new world from the materials of the one we know. It takes you to a restaurant called the void, Il Vuoto, and serves you its primal, beguiling sustenance: a nourishment of pauses, estrangement, and bewilderment. The voice here is wise and wry and wondering; in its fresh and faltering silences are frequencies I've never heard before. From the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to keep reading Eliza Barry Callahan forever.” —Leslie Jamison
”A composer suffering from sudden hearing loss finds herself even more sensitive to the lives of others, observing neighbors and the absurdities of the city, always punctuated by art and literary gossip. This debut work by Eliza Callahan is an extraordinary piece of literature, to be read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza.” —Kate Zambreno

• From a place of remission and recovery.

• Moments of elevation.

Feedback: Uncovering the hidden connections between life and the universe by Nicholas R. Golledge $60

We live in a world where things come and go, rise and fall, grow and decay, tracing out cycles of change that are ordered and predictable. But amongst those well-behaved rhythms hide other phenomena, pulsing and fizzing and refusing to play by the same rules. Earth and the life upon it have evolved over billions of years to be right where we are now only because of feedbacks that pushed those systems until they broke. And then those systems adapted, reorganized, and rebuilt. With each new cycle of growth it was feedbacks that created order from disorder and gave rise to a world perfectly optimized for everything it needed to be. Now the latest scientific research is revealing that the exact same patterns that describe plate tectonics, evolution, and mass extinctions also emerge in the heartbeat of our everyday lives, underpinning everything from the cohesion of our social networks and personal relationships to our emotional well-being and spiritual beliefs. In Feedback, we embark on a backstage journey revealing how these lesser-known processes keep us operating right where we need to be, poised at the edge of chaos. In a world simultaneously threatened with social and environmental disasters this journey uncovers the hidden connections that unite us not just to those around us but also across vast scales of time and space to the very fabric of the universe. An important book from a Pōneke climate scientist.
”Left me fizzing with the joy of being alive.” —Rebecca Priestley

• Find out more about the book.

I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast $50

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast's new graphic narrative, explores the surreal nighttime world inside her mind — and untangles (or retangles) one of our most enduring human mysteries: dreams. Ancient Greeks, modern seers, Freud, Jung, neurologists, poets, artists, shamans — humanity has never ceased trying to decipher one of the strangest unexplained phenomena we all experience: dreaming. In her new book, Roz Chast illustrates her own dream world, a place that is sometimes creepy but always hilarious, accompanied by an illustrated tour through ‘Dream-Theory Land’ guided by insights from poets, philosophers, and psychoanalysts. Illuminating, surprising, funny, and often profound. Recommended!

• Look inside!

Pencil by Carol Beggy $23

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object. Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually.

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

The Morningside by Téa Obreht $40

There's the world you can see. And then there's the one you can't. Welcome to The Morningside. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place she was born and spent her early years; nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's lonely and impoverished reality. Enchanted by Ena's stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities, and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building; she has her own elevator entrance, and only leaves to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.
”Obreht is a novelist of great skill and warmth, for whom the ancient forms of storytelling — folk tales, myths and legends — retain all their capacity to explain and mystify, soothe and terrify. Though The Morningside could be called dystopian, to this reader it feels hopeful in the way it imagines the near future. It is more about the ways we pull together than the ways we fall apart.” —Guardian

The St Ives Artists: A biography of time and place by Michael Bird $75

The flourishing of international modernism in Cornwall was a unique episode in the story of modern art in Britain. No other small seaside town has been host to such a roll-call of major artists. Weaving in-depth research into a narrative of 'startling anecdotal richness', Michael Bird explores the many — often unexpected — connections between St Ives artists and broader currents in 20th-century British history. He sets the careers of international artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon in the context of a local environment that held powerful meanings for their work.
Bird examines the influence of the two world wars, the birth of the Welfare State and the Cold War, the space race of the 1960s — all of which found echoes in artists' work — as well as the position of women artists in St Ives, the role of social class, and relations between artists and the community. The artists themselves emerge as vivid personalities. Do Alfred Wallis, Naum Gabo, Bernard Leach and Roger Hilton really have anything in common? The answers Michael Bird uncovers add up to a fascinating and highly readable account of the St Ives phenomenon. A new edition of this superb book.

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Ora — Healing Ourselves: Indigenous knowledge, healing, and wellbeing edited by Leonie Pihama and Linda Tuhiwai Smith $65

This collection brings together indigenous thinkers and practitioners from Aotearoa and internationally to discuss the effects of trauma on indigenous peoples across social, economic, political and cultural environments. The authors explore understandings and practices of indigenous people, grounded in the knowledge of ancestors and based on research, that facilitate healing and wellbeing. The first part of the book focuses on research findings from He Oranga Ngākau: Māori Approaches to Trauma Informed Care, which supports health providers working with whanau experiencing trauma. It discusses tikanga Māori concepts, decolonising approaches and navigating mauri ora. The subsequent chapters explore indigenous models of healing, focusing on connections to land and the environment, whakapapa connections and indigenous approaches such as walking, hunting, and growing and accessing traditional foods for wellbeing. Important.

A Very Private Eye by Barbara Pym $30

Selected from the diaries, notebooks, and letters of this beloved novelist A Very Private Eye is a unique, continuous narrative autobiography, providing a privileged insight into a writer's mind. Philip Larkin wrote that Barbara Pym had "a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies of everyday life." Her autobiography demonstrates this, as it traces her life from exuberant times at Oxford in the Thirties, through the war when, scarred by an unhappy love affair, she joined the WRNS, to the published novelist of the Fifties. It deals with the long period when her novels were out of fashion and no one would publish them, her rediscovery in 1977, and the triumphant success of her last few years. It is now possible to describe a place, situation or person as "very Barbara Pym."
”One does not laugh out loud while reading Barbara Pym; that would be too much. One smiles. One smiles and puts down the book to enjoy the smile. Then one picks it up again and a few minutes later an unexpected observation on human foibles makes one smile again.” —Alexander McCall Smith

Bicycle by Jonathan Maskit $23

These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. Jonathan Maskit takes us on an interdisciplinary ride to see what makes the bicycle a magical machine that could yet make the world a safer, greener, and more just place. There is so much that can be achieved if we apply our musculature to an external skeleton!

• Other ‘Object Lessons’.

The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov (translated by Boris Dralyuk) $38

Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko's father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father's collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him — or finish what the Cossack started. Inflected with Kurkov's signature humour and magical realism, The Silver Bone takes inspiration from the real life archives of crime enforcement agencies in Kyiv, crafting a propulsive narrative that bursts to life with rich historical detail.
Long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

The Letter with the Golden Stamp by Onjali Q. Raúf $20

“I can't remember how old I was when I first started collecting stamps. But I've got a whole shoebox full of them now. Mam used to help me collect them ... Before she got so ill that she lost her job, her friends...everything. Now it's my job to take care of her and protect her - and my little brother and sister too. But to do that, I have to make Mam a Secret. A secret no-one can ever find out about. Not even my best friends at school, or Mo, our postman. Or the stranger living in the house across the street. The one no-one has seen, but who I know is spying on us. The one I think might be Them...”

• Engaged.

Tibbles the Cat by Michal Šanda and David Dolenský $30

In 1894 Tibbles the cat moved to Stephens Island in the Marlborough Sounds to accompany her owner, the new lighthouse keeper. Tibbles ‘discovers’ a rare flightless species of wren, to the great excitement of ornithologists from around the world. Their demand for specimens and Tibbles’s natural habits soon caused the wren’s extinction, however. This event brought to the worlds attention the dangers of introducing exotic animals into fragile habitats.

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Ngā Wāhine e Toru: Three Women by Glenn Colquhoun $45

In this collection of poems Glenn Colquhoun writes to his daughter, former partner, and mother, using the medium of Māori oral poetry. In doing so he explores oriori, karakia, haka, mōteatea, pātere, waiata aroha and waiata tangi. It is a companion volume to Myths and Legends of the Ancient Pākehā, his collection of oral poetry in English. Bilingual edition. “Māori oral poetry is a living tradition that is constantly added to. It contains remarkable stories. It uses metaphors drawn from our own land, sea and sky. It is sung to the tunes of the wind and of water and of birds. Working within its traditions I have come to see that at the heart of all poetry, written or spoken, is a kind of cry. And if a poem cries well, then its meaning is always simply in the nature of that cry first and foremost. Language, understanding, cognition, are always second to this. Of all of the arts practised by Māori and Pākehā our two poetries have remained the most stubbornly separated from each other over time. I hope these pieces go some way towards addressing that gap. More than anything else they are a gift to the people of Te Tii for all they have done for me. I have always hoped that I might finish them in time for some of those kuia who were there when I arrived on New Brighton Road bedraggled and naive, to listen to. They are the product of their work as much as my own.” —Glenn Colquhoun

• Well past time.

• A soundtrack to the book.

Myths and Legends of the Ancient Pākehā by Glenn Colquhoun, illustrated by Nigel Brown $45

In this collection of poems Glenn Colquhoun explores a range of Pākehā oral poetic forms; sea shanties, hymns, ballads, nursery rhymes and clapping songs. It is a companion volume to Three Women, his collection of poetry in Te Reo Māori, and is richly illustrated by Nigel Brown. “It was by looking at Māori oral poetry more closely that I came to ask what it is that a Pākehā oral poem might sound like. And whether it is capable of holding the same power. Might a sea-shanty meet the energy of a haka? Can a hymn stand up to a mōteatea? To find out I went back to the ways that spoken English poetry first arrived in New Zealand: via sea-shanty and hymn, lullaby and nursery rhyme, working song, clapping song and skipping song. I also went back to what has often been the concern of oral poems, our histories.” —Glenn Colquhoun

• Look inside.

• Well past time.

• A soundtrack to the book.

New books for a new month! Click through to our website for your copies:

Brown Bird by Jane Arthur $20

Sometimes it can take one special friend to show you what you’re capable of, even if does take you a while to believe it. Eleven-year-old Rebecca tries to make herself invisible so people won’t call her weird. Resigned to spending the holidays by herself in a new neighbourhood while her mum works long hours at the supermarket, she meets Chester, who has come to stay for the summer. He is loud and fun and full of ideas. But will Rebecca be able to cope with being taken so far from her quiet comfort zone? Rebecca is about to find out that she can be braver than she ever thought possible . . . The book is beautifully written; Jane Arthur perfectly captures the voice of eleven-year-old Rebecca, and expresses the uncertainties, awkwardnesses and hopes that we all experience.

James by Percival Everett $38

James is an enthralling and ferociously funny novel that leaves an indelible mark, forcing us to see Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a transformed and transformative light. The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .
”Percival Everett is a giant of American letters, and James is a canon-shatteringly great book. Unforgiving and compassionate, beautiful and brutal, a tragedy and a farce, this brilliant novel rewrites literary history to let us hear the voices it has long suppressed.” —Hernan Diaz
”James is funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting. In telling the story of Jim instead of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett delivers a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history. I found myself cheering both the writer and his hero. Who should read this book? Every single person.” —Ann Patchett

• Race, language and art.

• His target may be language itself.

• “I hated them all.”

• Two masterpieces.

• The matrix of performance.

• Owning the language.

• Voice and power.

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan $40

May 2021. London. Campbell Flynn - art historian and celebrity intellectual — is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and novelty, he doesn't take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Manghasa, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, has experiences and ideas which excite his teacher. He also has a plan. Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes and secrets and scandals will be revealed, and Campbell Flynn may not be able to protect himself from the shattering exposure of all his privilege really involves. But then, he always knew: when his life came tumbling down, it would occur in public.
”A brilliant state-of-the-nation novel that pulls down the facades of high society, and knocks over the 'good liberal' house-of-cards. O'Hagan is not only a peerless chronicler of our times, but has other gifts — of generosity, humour and tenderness - which make this novel an utter joy to read.” —Monica Ali

• Uncharted streets.

• Pause for fifteen minutes.

The Economic Possibilities of Decolonisation by Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman $18

What do the economics of decolonisation mean for the future of Aotearoa? This question drives the work of Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman as they explore the complex relationship between tangata whenua and capitalism. By weaving together historical insights and contemporary analysis, this Text reveals the enduring influence of Māori economies and illuminates how these perspectives could radically transform Aotearoa’s political economy for the better.

Sophie Calle by Sophie Calle, with an introduction by Clément Chéroux $35

The perfect primer on acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle. Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. Her work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is renowned for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives, which she has deployed in her acclaimed works Suite Venitienne, The Hotel and Address Book. She has had major exhibitions all over the world, including at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and has worked closely with the writer Paul Auster. The Guardian called her ‘the Marcel Duchamp of dirty laundry’, and she was among the names in Blake Gopnik's list 'The 10 Most Important Artists of Today', with Gopnik arguing, “It is the unartiness of Calle's work — its refusal to fit any of the standard pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa — that makes it deserve space in museums.”

• Look inside!

• Find out more about Sophie Calle and read our reviews of several of her books.

Kai and Kindness by Jane Rangiwahia and Paul Ranguwahia $55

Brother and sister health-advocate-and-artist Paul and food-writer Jane have combined their skills to produce a book that nourishes the body and the mind. Their aim is to help start conversations about health and emotional wellbeing and promote positive action — whether it is in the kitchen or in the mind. Jane's delicious, comforting recipes are no-fuss and focus on making food to share with friends and family. The book is richly illustrated with food photography and Paul's artworks, including Paul's inspiring 'A Mental W.O.F', which frames short discussions about aspects of emotional and mental health. Jane and Paul say, “The body goes where the mind goes, and they go well when they are both nourished.”

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The Levantine Vegetarian: Recipes from the Middle East by Salma Hage $70

140 easy-to-make, bright, uplifting plant-based recipes, including classics such as falafels, hummus, and tabbouleh, as well as unique dishes reflective of region, religion, and culture across the Levantine. The food is fresh and delicious, whether  it’s garlic-laced mezze dishes, pittas stuffed with pickles, tahini, and grilled vegetables, or sweet and spicy desserts. Covering a vast area straddling Africa, Asia, and the gateway to Europe, the book embraces the culinary traditions of all corners of the Cradle of Civilization. Hage, one of the world’s authorities on Middle Eastern home-cooking, has taken her inspiration widely and created new ‘fusion’ dishes alongside classics. Featured recipes include: Parsnip and Cumin Beignets; Sesame Halloumi Fries with Chilli Yogurt; Black Lime and Herb Tofu; and Za’atar Cucumber Noodle Salad; and each is accompanied by newly-commissioned photography and double-page tablescapes that capture the vibrancy and the plentiful, sharing nature of the Middle Eastern dining table.  
“Stella made me Levantine-themed food for my birthday this year, and it was memorably delicious. This book didn’t exist then, but it would have featured centrally if it had. I can’t wait to cook from it.” —Thomas

• Look inside!

• Other excellent cookbooks by Salma Hage.

Clear by Carys Davies $30

1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger's intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John's wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission. Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland during the Highland Clearances, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us.
”A jewel of a novel. It's hard to overstate how deftly and viscerally Davies's prose conveys this world. We see and hear and smell it, shiver with it. Every scene is imbued with austere beauty. Davies's prose, bone-clean and achingly simple, moves with hymn-like richness. What quietly happens feels astonishing. —Washington Post
”A love letter to the scorching power of language, a power that Davies has long understood. She writes with amazing economy: in a few words she can summon worlds. Davies is a writer of immense talent and deep humanity, capable of balancing devastating audacity with equally devastating restraint.” —The Guardian

• Language and isolation.

The Stirrings: A memoir in Northern time by Catherine Taylor $38

This is a story about one young woman coming of age, and about the place and time that shaped her: the North of England in the 1970s and 80s. About the scorching summer of 1976 — the last Catherine Taylor would spend with both her parents in their home in Sheffield. About the Yorkshire Ripper, the serial killer whose haunting presence in Catherine's childhood was matched only by the aching absence of her own father. About a country thrown into disarray by the nuclear threat and the Miners' Strike, just as Catherine's adolescent body was invaded by a debilitating illness. About 1989's 'Second Summer of Love', a time of sexual awakening for Catherine, and the unforeseen consequences that followed it. About a tragic accident, and how the insidious dangers facing women would became increasingly apparent as Catherine crossed into to adulthood. (Fun fact: the author was born in the Waikato.)
”Part poignant memoir of time and place. Part record of the violence, and indifference, against which most girls grow up. The Stirrings is a pleasure and a shock.” —Eimear McBride
”A superb, moving and disturbing memoir — haunting and unforgettable.” —Jonathan Coe

• A touchstone of Sheffield’s radical history.

• Persistent, essential.

• A distance of years.

The Mark by Fríða Ísberg (translated from Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer) $40

In the near future, in Reykjavik, in a world like our own, society is divided about the controversial Empathy Test, which measures an individual’s capacity for compassion and identifies anti-social behaviour in citizens. Two thirds of the country, including public servants and politicians, have undergone the test, and ‘marked’ themselves in an official register, open to the public. One third remains ‘unmarked’ and more and more private and public spaces are closing their doors to them. In two months’ time, citizens face a national referendum, in which they will vote on whether the test should be mandatory or not. Amid the rising tension and via the voices of four compelling characters—the sceptical teacher Vetur, the influential psychologist Óli, the businesswoman Eyja, who fails the test, and the school dropout Tristan, who is fighting for the right not to be tested—we are confronted with urgent ethical dilemmas, prejudice, injustice, and private trauma. The suspense intensifies as these four individuals try to navigate a brave new world. The rules of the game have changed. What are the consequences?
”This whip-smart, brilliant novel crackles with tension and intelligence. It left me utterly in awe. Frida Isberg is a creative powerhouse.” —Hannah Kent
”Gripping and sharply imagined. The Mark presents crucial ethical questions about the risks of social engineering and the boundaries of individual agency. Absolutely stunning.” —Hernan Diaz

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez $37

Who gets to leave a legacy? 1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by progeny of film producers, C-Suite executives, and international art-dealers, most of whom float through life knowing that their futures are secured, Raquel feels herself an outsider. Students of colour, like Raquel, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret. But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita's story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist. Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.
”The sharpest and best written social comedy in a while.” —Los Angeles Times

• Reframing art history.

• You can borrow my story but you have to use my voice.

Helle and Death by Oskar Jensen $37

A snowstorm. A country house. Old friends reunited. It's going to be murder... Torben Helle — art historian, Danish expat and owner of several excellent Scandinavian jumpers — has been dragged to a remote snowbound Northumbrian mansion for a ten-year reunion with old university friends. Things start to go sideways when their host, a reclusive and irritating tech entrepreneur, makes some shocking revelations at the dinner table. And when these are followed by an apparent suicide, the group faces a test of their wits... and their trust. Snowed in and cut off, surrounded by enigmatic housekeepers and off-duty police inspectors, not to mention a peculiar last will and testament, suspicion and sarcasm quickly turn to panic. As the temperature drops and the tension mounts, Torben decides to draw upon all the tricks of Golden Age detectives past in order to solve the mystery: how much money would it take to turn one of his old friends into a murderer? But he'd better be quick, or someone else might end up dead... This witty murder mystery puts a modern spin on the classic country house whodunnit.
”A glorious feat that intrigues, surprises and delights from page one. This gem is a solid gold revival of the golden age whodunnit, with a delicious Danish twist.” —Janice Hallett
”A love letter to the classic Country House murder mystery. If Agatha Christie had written The Big Chill it would have been very much like this.” —J.M. Hall

• The poisoner’s cabinet.

• Detective, meet author.

The Program by Suzanne Young $25

Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone. With suicide now an international epidemic, one outburst could land her in The Program, the only proven course of treatment. Sloane's parents have already lost one child; Sloane knows they'll do anything to keep her alive. She also knows that everyone who's been through The Program returns as a blank slate. Because their depression is gone — but so are their memories. Under constant surveillance at home and at school, Sloane puts on a brave face and keeps her feelings buried as deep as she can. The only person Sloane can be herself with is James. He's promised to keep them both safe and out of treatment, and Sloane knows their love is strong enough to withstand anything. But despite the promises they made to each other, it's getting harder to hide the truth. They are both growing weaker. Depression is setting in. And The Program is coming for them.
"The uncomfortable mix of the good intentions and horrific outcomes of The Program is chilling, and will likely haunt readers as a slightly-too-plausible path adults would choose to ‘save’ their teens." —The Horn Books

Unstoppable Us, Volume 2: Why the World Isn’t Fair by Noah Yuval Harrari $36

Something really strange happened 10,000 years ago, and it changed everything. Why did millions of people agree to obey a few leaders? Where did kings and kingdoms come from? The answer to that is one of the strangest tales you'll ever hear. And it's a true story. Have you ever wondered how we got here? From gathering berries and hunting mammoths, to shopping at supermarkets and letting people tell us what to do? You might hear a lot of people say 'the world isn't fair'. But why isn't it? And how did it become so? In Unstoppable Us: Volume 1, we learned how humans told stories to become rulers of the world — for good and bad. Now, in this next chapter of the incredible true tale of the Unstoppables, find out how humans learned to control animals like dogs, chicken and cows . . . And how a handful of humans learned to control everyone else.

• Look inside!

• How Humans Took Over the World (Volume 1).

Tetromino City: A geometric jigsaw puzzle by Peter Judson $49

Using the seven basic geometric shapes known as tetrominos (and familiar to anyone who has ever played or seen the videogame Tetris) you must reconstruct Peter Judson's geometric cityscape Each of the seven different kinds of piece is repeated more than 40 times: can you figure out where each one goes? Recommended as suitable for the season!

• Have a closer look!

• This is how it works!