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

Rise up and get a book. A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

Garments Against Women

Beg, Steal & Borrow

Against Disappearance

Contre-Jour

The Book Against Death

Girls Against God

Against the Loveless World

The Opposite of a Person

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, classicist and translator. In Wrong Norma, variously described as prose poems or prose pieces, she is confronting writing and ideas. She allows thoughts to take the lead, to follow the other, in sometimes bewildering, sometimes illogical ways to paces where juxtapositions and contradictions segue into each other with a wonderful ‘wrongness’. And what is the idea of wrong? Her description of this project (as most of her published works are: she makes a handmade book, which is then produced as a facsimile by her publisher) is elusive and offers a brief explanation: “...a collection of wrings about different things..” And this collection is wide-ranging in subject matter, from swimming to snow, Joseph Conrad and Emily Dickinson, riffs on Socrates and violence, observations on poverty and displacement, a piece of writing by the Sky, in fact a week-long journal, my favourite being a conversation on Wednesday with Godot, and an image essay reimagining the meeting of the German philosopher Heidigger and the Jewish writing Paul Celan in 1966. Re-reading any one of these prose pieces is submerging. (The idea of suubmerging also links strongly to the first piece on swimming, so desire to be in water, out of air). They are endlessly curious, striving forward, to what one is never completely sure, and this makes them compelling. You return to discover something new and surprising each time, and it makes you ask questions rather than look for answers. In this work, Anne Carson seems to be asking questions and there are these wonderful scrap paper interludes between each piece. Some with merely a faintly typed comment or questions. Others that are dialogue, questions and answers, the questions often repeated, the answers varied — are they questions put to a host of visitors or characters or the author talking to herself? These repetitive questions include: “ Do you like the films of Eric Rohmer?”, followed by “Do you like jam?”, as if asking these simultaneously is a given. The other question that pops up repeatedly is “ What is yor philosophy of time?” With answers variously being: “I’m quite sure we’ll surrender” to “ how it’s sweet and how it’s moving” and “ a shallow closet with narrow bench and a rope to pull you up”. Are the recipients answering this question or even hearing it? Or are we always in conversation at cross purposes? Many of the text peices are reflecting on the process of writing. What is language, and how does it work? When translation is evoked, what happens to the text, whether this is translating yourself or others? Perspective and observation can be wrong and this wrongness leads to discoveries. Anne Carson calls these pieces wrong and enjoys herself. These is intelligent and playful writing. There is much here to amuse, as well as provoke thinking. But who or what is Norma? There is a reference in one piece to Norma Desmond, a character played in a film by Gloria Swanson, but I wondered if here the translator in Carson comes to the fore. Norma in latin can mean rule or pattern; in Greek, examiner. In an interview with Paris Review, Carson describes writing like seeing and following a fox. “I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track.”

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5 July 2024

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The idea we have of the world is inextricable from the words which could either be said to describe it or to comprise it. As children, our knowledge of objects, actions and expectations is gained concurrently with the words and phrases that, at the moment of their learning, both separate these objects, actions and expectations from the undifferentiated mass of the Unknown and incorporate them into the networked mass of social constructs we think of as our world. In the novella ‘The Book of Words’, we are presented with what at first it seems a series of childhood memories presented in relation to the words that describe them, and it is not not this. As well as being a tender reminiscence of a young girl’s life, presented in crystalline present tense with all the quirks and facets of a child’s view, increasingly we find, in the same language, the trace of something horrible, something that has erased the words that could be used to describe it. People who have featured in the narrative begin to be absent from it. Awful details appear and are, initially, quickly brushed aside or overwritten by other memories. Hints of wrongness in the world beyond the family start to insert themselves into the girl’s memories, despite her resistance to them or because of her innocence about their significance. The particles of wrongness in this novella are all the more horribly wrong for having such weights of benign quotidian detail levered upon them. Language, which builds as a child learns, cracks, distorts and fragments under trauma, as does the concept of reality that it bears. As the narrative continues, it becomes increasingly horrific, increasingly hysterical, increasingly divorced from rational sense, the language distorted and abused by the horrors that it conceals. The motto “Silence is health,” innocently mentioned early on, becomes an uncomfortable call to turn the head away from that which cannot be faced. Towards the end of the novella, as the girl is given an early birthday party (and she is much older, therefore more mentally stunted, than we had imagined) and the family flee the country after what we surmise has been a political reversal, we learn that that father has been a torturer in the old regime, his activities being described in the same tone, the child’s tone, as the innocent details of the child’s life, all the more horrific for being so described: “Once you’ve connected a body to an electrical circuit the truth comes out of it like a worm.” Although not specified, details in the text suggest the complicity of the father, apparently a Nazi post-war immigrant, in Argentina’s CIA-backed ‘Dirty War’, and in the disposal of the bodies of the ‘disappeared’. “What is sick will die out. The future belongs to us,” the father declares, in ultimate futility. What future is there, though, for the narrator, whose world of words has been so malformed by the circumstances of her upbringing? 

I was drawn to this novel firstly by the cover. Who can resist a typewriter? And then by the description of a story pieced together by encyclopedic entries, typewriter exercises, immigration manual snippets, and snapshot interludes. That it is also published by the interesting and excellent Transit Books and the author is Chilean all added to this one finding a place on my shelf. Ania is a woman, about 40, who is in limbo. She has quit teaching and pet-sits for a bit of cash; her father has remarried and has ‘another family’ — one which Ania feels ousts her from her place as ‘daughter’; and her boyfriend is a remote figure in this story — whether this is her perspective or a reality we never know. And this is what hooks you in — Ania always seems like she is looking in, but never really participating. Her present is something she wishes to escape from and her past haunts her yet draws her back — seems to have a hold on her. This is a story about exile and migration, about worlds cleaved between past and present but inextricably linked. It’s a tale of never quite fitting in — an exploration of what belonging is and whether it can be truly achieved if you are severed from a part of yourself (whether that be literally, as in physical space, or metaphorically, as in a mental state). When Ania's uncle Augustin dies, her father asks her to go to Argentina in his place (he is unable to leave Chile while his wife is convalescing). Crossing the mountains brings back memories of her childhood summers spent with her grandparents and extended family. Every summer she would spend months as the ‘Chilenita’ — her otherness the role cast for her. Yet she was not the only outcast. Nelida (Augustin’s mother), the young bride who came from Italy and never adjusted, spends her days in the cool of her dark room slowly subsiding into madness (or sadness). Augustin wants to escape his home but doesn’t have the courage to abandon his family, so faithfully takes his typing lessons and remains bound to his mother. He is enamoured of his friend Garigilo’s ease of being and infatuated with Ania. The reader is left to pull the threads together about the state of the relationships between these characters. It seems as though something has occurred that has had an impact on all three, yet the action, if there was one, has happened off the pages, beyond the book, and it is only a residue — an unsaid feeling — that circles beneath Ania. Returning to the town, the memories of childhood are both threatening and endearing. Here she has a role, she is the ‘Chilenita’. As she is drawn into the vortex of her own past, she thinks about her family and their life as migrants from Italy. Her childhood memories butt up against her adult knowledge. What allowed her father to find his escape, while Augustin was stuck in time and place? Why did Nelida find it so hard to adjust, and does she carry a similar burden? What is the way forward if you are an exile in your own life or mind? Costamagna’s writing effortlessly moves across characters and time. The typewriter exercise, family snapshots, and encyclopedia entries give the reader pause as well as context and are interwoven between the unfolding narrative at just the right pitch. The Touch System is a beautiful example of fine writing and intriguing themes — a novel that compulsively draws you in where you are at fingertip distance of something palpable. 

A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

The Power of Words

The Old Child and The Book of Words *

The Words for Her *

The Touch System *

The Dictionary of Animal Languages

A Silent Language

Language City

Fifty Words for Snow

*Read Our Reviews

At once an intelligent discussion of urgent issues — from the ambivalent needs for independence and belonging that beset us individually, to our collective crises of politics, environment and climate — and an enjoyable, witty and often very funny novel that propels the reader deep into the hearts and lives of its characters, The Alternatives tells the story of four successful Irish sisters, three of whom come together to overcome their alienation from each other over the years since the deaths of the parents when they were teenagers — and decide to seek the fourth, who really doesn’t want to be found. Both deeply humane and a compelling novel of ideas.

• A geologist, a philosopher, a politician and a chef walk into a bar…

• Women who centre work in their lives.

• Even being hit by a truck didn’t stop this author finishing her novel.

• Testing the bonds of sisterhood.

• Troubled and talented.

• Follow your own path.

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.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Mānawatia a Matariki!

Read our latest newsletter and step into a new year of reading.

29 June 2024

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The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies.  It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.

Medical misadventure is the stuff of shouty headlines and third-hand anecdote: told, embellished and finger-pointing. We all know mistakes happen in all professions but when it comes to medicine we are quick to blame and sharply condemn. Accountability is fine, but where is the line between personal responsibility and institutional culpability? In Carl Shuker’s A Mistake, his latest novel, we are in crisis mode from the opening pages. A young woman with severe abdominal pain is in A&E — immediate surgery necessary. Elizabeth Taylor, perfectionist, surgeon, 27 hrs on her feet, is in charge and the theatre is ready — the stage set. We know that this is just the beginning of a disaster, and just as we, the reader, are shunted into the midst of this medical freneticism, the author calls cut and the clapper board comes down and we are taken back to 1986 — to the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. The tension is the same, the anticipation and our watchfulness as the audience just as intense. From the small confines of the theatre and looking down through Elizabeth’s eyes at her patient (well, her patient’s body — her awareness of the woman sometimes seems absent), we are suddenly surrounded by the hype and immensity of space science and we are looking up at the sky in wonder — waiting and on tenterhooks as the countdown begins. Shuker cleverly moves between these two situations building an energetic forcefield — and what some readers will feel is a distraction is anything but: technical language — medical in our hospital theatre and astrophysical at NASA mission control, blow-by-blow action — as the surgeons operate and as the NASA team relay information (the as-it-happens variety), the power hierarchy — who’s in charge in each scenario, and the realisation of the error (too late to save anyone). It all piles up around us — the chaos growing. Yet it is what happens next that will reveal more: the consequences for the medical team and for the engineers. Shuker’s Elizabeth Taylor is not the easiest character to slide along with — she’s a perfectionist, dedicated, frustrating, sometimes a lousy friend, brash, dismissive of fools, and is described variously as a brilliant surgeon and a ‘fucking psychopath’. Yet she's loyal, takes the rap for the mistake and, unlike the bureaucratic nightmare she has to work under, she’s not looking for the ‘good’ PR story even when there is wriggle room for her to distance herself from the crisis. But it’s hard to tell whether she has been altered by the mistake or is ultimately only concerned for her own record. Ego, power and success are themes that you expect in this story, and with these comes the flip side: young doctor burnout and suicide, overwork, failed relationships, doubt, recklessness and the unrelenting pressure to be right always. Shuker’s new novel is a departure in style from his previous work. The Method Actors, his first novel, which I read back in 2005, was a big, brilliant, complex book. A Mistake is sharp, scalpel-fine. Shuker has pared this novel back to bone and gristle, letting the reader feel, by being stabbed repeatedly with attack language, reckless behaviour, fleeting insights and snide dialogue, the intensity of this life and this error. The ending is as abrupt as the start and you will be wounded — but intrigued by that scalpel cut. Long after you read this novel you will have a scar to remember it by. 

[Now, also a film! Directed by Christine Jeffs, the film premiered at Tribeca Festival earlier this month. Interview with Jeffs. Releasing Aotearoa in July NZIFF.]

Rachel Cusk continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction — Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. {Thomas}

• Read Thomas’s ‘review’.

• Knitted cathedral.

• Relentless dismantling.

• Exterminating the novel while still writing one.

• Art, violence and freedom.

• Not feeling gendered.

• Second nature.

• Striking out against conformity.

• A leap into unknown territory.

• The feminine non-state of non-being.

• Read Thomas’s reviews of the ‘Outline’ trilogy: Outline, Transit, and Kudos.

• Read our reviews of Second Place.

Books — always the right choice! A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

Things Are Against Us

The Loser

Losers

Infinite Resignation

A Mistake

On Extinction

Wrong Norma

Some Things Wrong

The Right Intention

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!

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our latest newsletter. Celebrate Solstice with a new book!

21 June 2024

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It was entirely appropriate, he told me, and when he said those two words, entirely appropriate, he said them in such a way that if they had appeared in written form instead of spoken form they would certainly have been written in italics, if not, perhaps, underlined, it was entirely appropriate to the book he was reading, Outline by Rachel Cusk, that he had begun reading it while flying on an aeroplane to Auckland, as the first of the ten conversations that comprise the book takes place between the narrator, so to call her, and the man in the neighbouring seat in an aeroplane flying to Athens. It was entirely appropriate, he said, because the content of the novel and the context in which it was being read were so similar and so particular that, for much of the flight, the so-called fictional world and the so-called actual world merged seamlessly into one experience, an experience he considered to be appropriately termed ‘reading’, perhaps due to the passivity that is incumbent upon being a passenger, a role that demands an almost complete withdrawal of personal presence, so to call it, except to the extent that one is required, out of politeness, to speak, or at least to smile and make a slight fluttering gesture with a hand, in order to refuse the biscuits, tea, magazines and lollies proffered by the cabin attendant. “Tell me about it! I used to eat ten of these a day, maybe twelve,” the cabin attendant had said, he told me, when the woman across the aisle from him had refused a biscuit because she was “trying to lose weight.” “I was really packing on the kilos,” the cabin attendant had said, “And then I thought, something has to change, this isn’t doing me any good, and so I stopped. I took up smoking again and I stopped the biscuits, I was eating up to thirty of the things a day, between flights. I took up smoking and the kilos just dropped off.” The cabin attendant was looking pretty trim, it was true, he said, in his pin-striped uniform, the pin-striped trousers and the waistcoat made of pin-striped fabric on the front and some sort of baby fabric on the back, a uniform that is serious but not too serious, a uniform in which the wearer could never be mistaken for a pilot, even though he wore a little brass name-badge in the form of a wing, the uniform of someone perhaps pretending to be a pilot, a uniform almost unbearably camp on an adult, a ‘dress-ups’ uniform, a uniform that constantly condescends to its wearer. Cusk, he told me, would undoubtedly notice a detail like that, the lenses of her noticing, of her reading of the world, bitterly acute. The novels of what he called Cusk’s ‘Faye project’, Outline, Transit, and, most recently, Kudos — in all of which the narrator is named Faye, though she could just have easily been named Rachel Cusk, or any other name, the name of the reader perhaps — were all concerned with the withdrawal, so far as it is possible, of the narrator from her context, in order, perhaps, for her to be able to see her context and the persons that it serially contains, more clearly. When reading the books of what he called Cusk’s ‘Faye project’, he felt that he was learning to read, to read both literature and, maybe, even, under Cusk’s tutelage, life. This last he said under his breath, as if embarrassed, lest, he said, it be mistaken for some sort of what he termed, involuntarily turning down the corners of his mouth, corners that were in any case quite naturally rather turned down, spiritual improvement, when the books would in fact relieve the reader of even the undeclared presumptions inherent in the ghastly term spiritual improvement, the books’ equation of bitterness and clarity, he said, would soon disabuse anyone who might have begun to think that what he was describing was a spiritual improvement. He took out a piece of paper and read to me something he had copied from Cusk's book, Outline, and he read it rather haltingly as his handwriting was small and cramped and barely legible even to himself. “I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it. It seems as though we looked out of the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discerned the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them,” he read. “Life is a series of punishments for moments of unawareness.” When I remarked that what he had read resembled what I thought of as spiritual improvement, he grimaced, and perhaps would have spat if he had been a person who spat, and said that what he was describing was merely what he termed, and what surely anyone would term, learning to read. If “context is a kind of imprisonment”, and here he quoted, presumably, Cusk, from his notes, then the only useful response is to withdraw oneself, if not physically then at least in terms of what he called mental positioning — and here I had to assert that the term held no meaning, but my assertion went I think unnoticed by him — for, he said, this withdrawal in terms of mental positioning, exemplified in the novels of Cusk’s ‘Faye project’, placed a writer in a new position with regard to the text she produces, places a narrator in a new position with regard to the text in which she appears, places a reader in a new position with regard to the text which he is reading, and, he contested, could place a reader in a new position with regard to the context in which he finds himself in, so to call it, real life. It is the height of foolishness, he contested, to think that we can have any idea of who we are, ideas of who we are can be formed only by other people, and are always, in any case, inevitably wrong, or, rather always of, at best, only limited truth, revealing, as they do, more about those who have the ideas than about the subject to whom those ideas refer. Only by removing, as far as is possible, everything that we imagine to lie within the outline of ourselves can we truly begin to read that part of the world that is not not-us, and here he not only said the term not not-us in the way that I have previously compared to text in italics but made an incomprehensible and rather silly gesture with both hands as well, as if this would incline me to take his theory any more seriously than the look on my face perhaps was conveying that I currently did. He read again aloud from his notes, explaining that the passage he was quoting was quoted by the narrator from the story of another woman telling her, the narrator, about her conversation with the man in the neighbouring seat to her during a flight on an aeroplane to Athens, where, obviously, the two women have met. “In everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This antidescription had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while she herself remained blank. Yes, this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time a sense of who she now was.” It was quite possible, he said, that, as well as providing a method of what he called learning to read, the novels of Cusk’s 'Faye project' could also constitute a method of learning to write, in other words, they demonstrated a way of generating texts from ordinary life, not perhaps of making writing easier so much as of making it easier to reach the level of writing that is difficult, the level of writing at which — and here the compounding of his italic talk was becoming preposterous — subject and object wrestle openly with each other for control. I smirked at the thought of this wrestling, and asked him if he would be likely to be generating any texts himself by this Faye method. No, he said, he was far too busy to do anything like that. All he wrote these days were brief weekly reviews of the books he had been reading, written in urgency before their deadlines. He never had a chance to do what he termed considered writing, not that he saw any point, really, for him, in doing what he termed considered writing, even if he had had the time in which to do it. His point was, he said, that each week he had a constrained slot of time on a Friday in which to write his review for the weekly newsletter of the bookshop to which he was attached, an exercise of writing that he had to perform regardless of inclination or mood or headaches, and without what he termed the self-indulgence of waiting for the muse — waiting for the muse was an avoidance of labour, he said, which was in fact implied, now that he thought about it, in the very term considered writing — and certainly without the luxury of any protracted review of his text. This was writing, he said, as a performance art, writing in real time, whatever that meant, writing, he stressed, thankfully without romance. At this point he looked at the clock and I knew from the expression on his face, an expression of both horror and relief, that, on account of the length of our conversation, this week he would not have time to produce the review of which he spoke.

[2018]

Cruelty is never too far from the surface of the Rachel Cusk novel, Second Place. M owns an idyllic home on the marshland with her second husband Tony. They have rescued the land and built a home for themselves in this remote and abundant place, and share it, that is the cottage—the Second Place—by invitation. M has been fascinated by the art of L since an early encounter with his work in Paris after a nightmarish experience on a train, an experience that the reader is never fully informed about, yet the spectacular—a devil, metaphorical or real—remains as a threat throughout. So when M, after years of obsession with L, finally convinces the artist to come and stay, to retreat and paint, her expectations, as you can anticipate, are high. Her expectations of fulfilment, creatively and psychologically, are painfully ridiculous in a middle-aged, privileged sense. What does she expect from this special bond with L? When L arrives—by private jet of a friend’s cousin—with said friend in tow, the beautiful and young Brett, M is miffed. You can’t help but feel little empathy for her. Her desires are unreasonable and ethically questionable, let alone uncomfortable. M’s obsession with a self-seeking, seemingly loathsome and churlish fading artist is misguided at best. Add to the mix M’s daughter Justine and her German boyfriend Kurt, arrived from Berlin as their jobs pack in due to a downward economy (and Covid—although this isn’t mentioned by Cusk), and the perfect pressure cooker for a melodrama is set. The novel is told as to ‘Jeffers’ by letter. We never meet Jeffers and have little knowledge of who Jeffers is and why he plays such an important role as confidant to M. What we can decipher later, from the afterword, is that the novel is inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir Lorenzo in Taos, published in 1932 (there’s a contemporary review in the New York Times archive) about D.H.Lawrence’s stay at her artist retreat in New Mexico. Here too, is a story of obsession and delusion, and letters to Robinson Jeffers about Mabel’s experience with the Lawrences. Yet you don’t need to know this to find the writing compelling, the prose poised and the content both farcical (the storyline of Kurt deciding to be a writer and his ‘reading’ is priceless) and unsettling. It will make you squirm. This is a novel about ownership—who owns whom—and the power or agency of one over the other or the ideas of the other. M will come to despise L and L already despises M, and sets out to destroy her. Yet his ability to do so is compromised by his own weakness, according to M. And here lies the dilemma: the narrator. You can’t like her. Her complete preoccupation with herself and her property, whitewashed, much like the walls of the cottage, with a veneer of care, is revealed in her asides to Jeffers and by her knowing attitude about the creative process within the isolation of someone basically just talking to themselves. Yet, the novel reverberates within its cliches and set-ups to bring the reader to the eye-watering conclusion that Cusk has cleverly played a game of cards where most of the best cards are hers—and the reader is in second place.

[2021]

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