Read our 444th newsletter!
15 August 2025
CHICANES by Clara Schulmann (translated from the French by Naima Rashid, Natasha Lehrer, Lauren Elkin, Ruth Diver, Jessica Spivey, Jennifer Higgins, Clem Clement and Sophie Lewis)
Chicanes is a collection of short pieces about voice and women’s experience. Schulmann dips and pivots, captures, and lets fly. She delves into literature and classics, art and film, exploring how women use their voice and how they are used (or stigmatised) by their voice. Her digressions move against each other, building questions and ideas under the chapter headings ‘On/Off’, ‘Breathing’, ‘Fatigue’, ‘Overflowing’, ‘Speed’, and ‘Irritation’. The essays and snippets are both personal and critical (feminist theory and art critique are bundled here nicely, without being too pointy-headed; in other words, you can take it as you find it or investigate further), angry, and amusing. Taking her watching (cinema) and reading (essays and fiction), Schulmann drives us, never in a straight line, so we can observe her thinking about voice — its physical, emotional and intellectual power — and its cultural significance. How are women through their voice portrayed in films? Are they mostly silent/ screaming/ husky or simpering? How do women use their voices to protest and complain about inequality? Is it subtle? A pointed yet subtle change in mode or a tirade of small irritations (no time, too many family demands, commonplace sexism at work)? There are so many ideas packed into these short pieces, and they point in further directions and diversions. She quotes writers and draws up a map by which we can navigate her thinking out loud — about voice and in voice. In French the title is Zizanies, which translates as discord or disharmony. When we say the word ‘voice’ we are likely to think of harmony or articulation. Yet if we think about the idea of voice as Schulmann has in the context of gender, discord is more than appropriate. The English language title, Chicanes: a sharp double bend, likely with some obstacle; is an apt descriptor also. Interestingly, there are several translators (one for each section), each with their own ‘voice’ interpreting Clara Schulmann’s interpretations. This observation by the author of language and tone (voice) by other writers/artists and then in turn via interpretation gives readers in English another level of voice. And then, in turn, we use our voice in its imperfect way (but probably less imperfectly than a chatbot, as if perfection was even the aim), to reflect our emotional and cultural condition. The book is immersive and curious in the best possible way.
GOOD MORNING, MR. CRUSOE — The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the year MDCCXIX, which for 300 Years has instructed the Men of an Island off the Coast of Mainland Europe to Contemn all Foreigners and Women. by Jack Robinson [Charles Boyle]
When Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name discovers the footprint of a stranger on the margins of the island he considers his domain, he builds defences and prepares violence. He wants to keep for himself his table, made with his own hands, his rude bowl, likewise the project of a man who has brought to DIY the gravitas of a spiritual exercise, and his parasol, but even more he wants to keep for himself the puritanical practices of useful labour, useful thought, austerity and self-restraint — he made a very small amount of rum last for ten years! — that are both the expression and the perpetuation of his isolation. He remains resistant to all that is not him. When given the opportunity, upon a suitably disadvantaged other, he shows himself prepared to teach but not to learn. The propagation of Defoe’s novel as an English classic over the centuries has both epitomised and contributed to a particularly noxious strand of Anglo-Saxon masculinity compounded of an arrogance and a superiority complex on the one hand and a concomitant deep insecurity and fear on the other, resulting in an instinct to devise rules, build defences and prepare violence. Jack Robinson, in this quick and subtle little book, not only sketches the deleterious effect upon English society of this thread of Englishness, leading to the Brexit crisis and all that has followed resulting from the projection of threat onto difference, but also traces the literary offspring of Ur-Crusoe, so to call him: Robinsons in books by Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Muriel Spark and others, and in the films of Patrick Keillor, each either or both perpetuating or degrading the character with whom they are inescapably associated. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains a central topos for reactionary British nativism. It is no coincidence that, in the space of populist disaffection resulting from governments’ austerity policies, a prominent contemporary British fascist has adopted the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’ in his xenophobic campaign for “respect for British heritage, values and tradition.” Robinson Crusoe, despite circumstances that make his attitudes increasingly ridiculous, cannot help but insist, with increasing violence, that he is master of ‘his’ island. Jack Robinson’s quarrel “is less with Defoe than with Crusoe and the uses which the book has been put to.” He observes that “Crusoe has amassed such gravitas — or rather, his emblematic status in British culture became so far-reaching — that the natural development of his descendants was inescapably stunted.” Can this be healed? In Crusoe’s unthinking adherence to “heritage, values and tradition”, he is incapable of change or growth or understanding, incapable of opening himself to new experience, of accepting as an equal anyone different from himself. When Crusoe leaves the island he remains the slaver and misogynist he was when he arrived. All he has done is survived. “Defoe denies Crusoe self-doubt, which is another way of infantilising him. His blind trust in God shuts off all radical introspection.” Without that introspection there is no hope.
The legacy of William Blake stretches 200 years to today not only through poetry and art but traditions of social, spiritual, sexual and political noncomformity. Philip Hoare drags himself from the company of whales and follows Derek Jarman to follow Paul Nash to photograph the megaliths at Avebury and towards a shared encounter with the luminous William Blake, electrically alive and inspiring to them all. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the unfettered genius of William Blake. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. As Hoare shows, art and poetry still have the power to make change.
What’s with the titles? A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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Mr. Distinctive by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), illustrated by Joanna Concejo $50
A gorgeously illustrated picture book for adults — with two double-gatefold openings inside. Mr. Distinctive has a memorable, attractive face. He only has to walk down the street, and everyone turns to smile at him. Once he starred in a TV commercial and was praised and congratulated for having a face that sold the product well. Mr. Distinctive is very pleased with himself and loves to take selfies with his cellphone. He posts countless images of himself that are shared all over the internet. One day Mr. Distinctive looks in the mirror and sees that his features have begun to fade, his face has changed into a blur. With every new photo he posts, his distinctiveness dwindles. Determined to regain his flawlessly beautiful face and the adoration it brought him, Mr. Distinctive seeks out an extreme solution. But are the lengths he goes in order to restore his sense of being unique and exceptional worth it? In their new story, Nobel prize in literature winner Olga Tokarczuk and esteemed illustrator Joanna Concejo show us a world of obsession with personal appearance and self-promotion, where ‘happiness’ is an imperative, and the cult of youth rules. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Flower by Ed Atkins $30
”I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.” Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable — something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter's improvised games, poor internet writing, and shitty A.I., Ed Atkins equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur — Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I feel like a permanent conduit has been built between my brain and this book. Atkins is relentless, beautiful, hideously and angelically honest. Sometimes it brought me to tears and I’m not even sure why. It’s the stuff most of us leave out, or wouldn’t even know how to articulate. By which I mean this book has made so much other writing feel like propaganda. It’s heroic. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from it.” —Luke Kennard
”Every sentence in this delightfully bizarre techno-memoir could stand alone on a page and command allure. Like splicing the miniature divulgences of Édouard Levé with the ominous bombast of Jenny Holzer, Flower makes automatic non-fiction feel like sci-fi, and it’s instantly unforgettable.” —Blake Butler
”Flower is propulsive and it doesn’t let up. It’s about vulnerability, sort of, and invincibility: it swings between these poles. It’s about mortality, too, and in that sense humanity. To speak the book back at itself, I confess it did get to me.” —Isabel Waidner
”Ed Atkins is a radical humanist who rediscovers the human in the most inhuman of states, when the usual supports – ego, language, people, technology, media, food – all fail. In Flower Atkins turns that abjection towards us, in a spleeny anti-autofiction that is his own version of Les Fleurs du Mal.” —Hal Foster
in the cracks of light by Apirana Taylor $28
The seventy-three short poems here challenge our conceptions of poetic form. They are minimalist in construction but ambitious in emotional impact. They burst out of their small spaces like gas expanding in a cylinder and pushing a piston. They expertly inhabit both the natural and the political worlds, sometimes simultaneously, because Taylor is wise enough to know that they can't be separated, especially in a colonised land. [Paperback]
”in the cracks of light presents heart-centred poems that are deeply rooted in te taiao. Reading this book will give you the strength both to fight your battles and observe the world around you with fresh insight. These short verses are profound soul nourishment.” —Kiri Piahana-Wong
”Another book by Apirana Taylor, whether poetry or prose, is always good news. He is an originator and accomplished practitioner of what might now usefully be termed a Māori poetics in English, deeply sourced in whaikōrero. It’s no surprise, then, that the poems comprising in the cracks of light nimbly explore and exploit the border line between spoken and written text.” —Tony Beyer
>>Read Tony Beyer’s full review.
Proto: How one ancient language went global by Laura Spinney $40
As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate cultures: Dante’s Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen? Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings — the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost languages: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. From the author of Pale Rider. [Paperback]
”Thought-provoking. A lively and fascinating account of how these languages split from their root, developed in different ways, mingled with each other, crossed tracks, flourished and died. I loved it!” —David Bellos
>>Cultural exchange builds a language.
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s most notorious prisons in 16 recipes by Sepideh Gholian $27
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors — they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet — in spite of anything and everything — they resist: they bake, they console each other, cry together, dance together. Sepideh Gholian, in prison since 2018, bakes scones for Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe’s daughter'; a pumpkin pie for Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi; and madeleines for Marzieh Amiri, serving time for a May Day demonstration in 2019. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Sepideh Gholian's account of life on the women's wards in Bushehr and Evin prisons is a blindsiding blend of horrifying concrete detail, dizzying surrealism and wild optimism.” —Guardian
”My heart broke while reading this book, but it also gave me hope. I read this book filled with outrage against the system that has put Sepideh Gholian and so many like her in jail, torturing them, killing them. But I was filled with hope, amazed by and thankful for those like her, telling the story. They are our beloved guardians of truth.” —Azar Nafisi
>>Like no other recipe book you’ve ever read.
Days of Light by Megan Hunter $50
Easter Sunday, 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready for her life to finally begin. Her sprawling, bohemian family and their friends gather in the idyllic English countryside for lunch, arranging themselves around well-worn roles. They trade political views and artistic arguments as they impatiently await the arrival and first sight of Frances, the new beau of Ivy's beloved older brother, Joseph. In this auspicious atmosphere of springtime, Ivy's world feels on the cusp of something grand-but neither she nor those closest to her predicts how a single, enchanted evening and an unexpected tragedy will alter the rest of their lives. A philosophical and intimate journey through time, Days of Light chronicles six pivotal days across six decades to tell the story of Ivy's pursuit of answers — to the events of this fateful Easter Sunday and to the shifting desires of her own heart. [Hardback]
”Think One Day written by (and starring) Virginia Woolf… This is a lyrical and captivating book, dropping decade by decade into a single day in the life of the brilliant, headstrong Ivy.” —The Observer
”Days of Light is sublime. Wielding tremendous emotional power, it is a novel that is both raw and reverent, attuned to the intricacies of loss, desire, hope and how to be in the world.” —Hannah Kent
”Megan Hunter writes with such delicacy about how a single moment can shape and echo through a life. Her sentences are sensory events, open to every texture and shadow. A beautiful book.” —Sophie Elmhirst
”What Megan Hunter does in time and space within the confines of this book is amazing. Days of Light has that quality that all Megan's books have, restrained but with so much momentum, an exacting turn of phrase and the ability to make the hair on your arms stand up through beauty and also something much darker.” —Evie Wyld
”It channels Woolf and Mansfield and yet feels completely fresh.” —Mark Haddon
Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, policewomen and girlbosses against liberation by Sophie Lewis $45
Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. We know that leaning in won't make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today's anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategising that is truly antifascist. At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism. [Paperback]
"A field guide to reactionary archetypes from fascists to TERFs, Enemy Feminisms surfaces a hidden vein of feminist conservatism. A welcome alternative to political history as an accumulation of social media screenshots." —Malcolm Harris
"Where would we be without Sophie Lewis? In a more impoverished political world. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future. Honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant." —Judith Butler
"Enemy Feminisms is a compelling, provocative, ferocious book that shreds one received wisdom after another in a poised balance of incisive argument and elegant writing. Sophie Lewis has become an indispensable thinker for our era." —Torrey Peters
Mouthing by Orla Mackey $26
Ballyrowan is a sleepy corner of rural Ireland where nothing ever happens. Where everyone knows everyone else's business, and everyone has an opinion on it. Where family feuds simmer and intensify across the generations. Where young and old delight in dragging each other down like crabs in a barrel. Following the fortunes of this small community from the mid-20th century to the early 21st, Mouthing is a bittersweet love letter to the pleasures (and frustrations) of village life. [Paperback]
”Engrossing, acerbic and brilliant. Everyone here has a tale to tell. There is a pub and there is a priest. There are secrets and lies. It is by turns funny, horrifying, and all too real. Mackey's structure requires the reader to constantly reassess their opinions of the characters. It is a fascinating magic trick, shimmering with fractal richness: again and again we meet a character, form an opinion, and almost immediately have that wittily torpedoed.” —The Irish Times
The Big Myth: How American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway $49
The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a startling history of one of America's most tenacious and destructive false ideas: the myth of the ‘free market’. In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with ‘big government’ and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labour. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career. By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, resulting in a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and the baleful US response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy. This book is particularly pertinent to New Zealand politics right now. [Paperback]
”Literature on neoliberalism tends to focus either on the intellectual genealogy of neoliberal thought or on the political history of neoliberal policies. The Big Myth adds a third dimension to the story. An immense scholarly feat.” —The New Yorker
”The important and frequently infuriating history of how it is that Americans came to equate the broad concept of freedom with an almost religious belief in the free market.” —The Washington Post
”A persuasive examination of how corporate advocates, libertarian academics, and right-wing culture warriors have collaborated to try to convince the American people that economic and political freedom are indivisible, and that regulation leads inexorably to tyranny. Polemical yet scrupulously researched, this wake-up call rings loud and clear.” —Publishers Weekly
If I Must Die: Poetry and prose by Refaat Alareer $45
"If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale." This compilation of work from the Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his poetry and writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. ‘If I Must Die’ is included here, alongside Refaat's other poetry. Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout. Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by Refaat's friend and collaborator Yousef M. Aljamal. [Hardback]
"Compelling. A glimpse into a restless political and literary mind, one that was still rising to the height of its powers." —The Guardian
Mexican Table: 100 recipes, 12 ingredients from the heart of Mexico by Thomasina Miers $65
Mexican cooking centres around 12 staple ingredients: Citrus / Nuts / Tomatoes / Chillies / Beans / Courgettes / Sesame / Herbs / Onions / Eggs / Cinnamon / Chocolate. Chef Thomasina Miers brings vibrant, smart ways to use these ingredients to bring maximum flavour with minimum effort. Taste bold flavours everyday like guajillo prawn burritos with lime slaw, cauliflower and orange salad with turmeric and almond honey dressing, whole roast chicken with Yucatecan almond & garlic mole, waste-less houmous with toasted chillies, sticky dulce de leche & tahini buns, garlic fried courgette tagliatelle, smoky kimchi quesadilla with herb salad, and coconut & tequila sorbet. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Salutation Road by Salma Ibrahim $38
23-year-old Sirad Ali is a woman adrift. Abandoned by her father in childhood, she does her best to support her mother and younger brother in their small flat in South London. But she can’t help but wonder if this is the life she really wants. Until one morning, when she boards the bus to work in Greenwich, she finds herself transported to an alternate reality in present-day Mogadishu. There she encounters her double, Ubah — the woman she could have been had her parents never fled to London during the Somali Civil War. And what follows will change both of their lives for ever. [Paperback]
”A bold, intriguing act of imagination. Salutation Road confronts important questions about parallel existences splintered by immigration, the price of survival, and the ways migration and distance reshape blood ties and family.” —Aube Rey Lescure
>>Exploring who we are.
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8 August 2025
"It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off”: the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt.
Kirsty Gunn can write, she really can, but do I want to read these stories? Yes, with caution! In Pretty Ugly Gunn confounds us with the sublime and the rot. Here what seems too good to be true is just that. Not good. The opening story, ‘Blood Knowledge’, lets us wander in a beautiful garden with a successful author. We warm to the narrator’s voice, her frustration with her role as wife and mother, as an author with a predictable and highly sort after series. Her next book is overdue and as we read on we sense a festering sore. A scab picked at. This isn’t a nice suburban story, not a success story except in the warped mind of our narrator. Yet it’s compelling in its horror, has catches of humour, and observations that capture society’s double standards. Ultimately it’s horrific, but getting there raises questions which deserve consideration. The human condition examined with the sharp edge of Gunn’s pen leaves us exposed and sometimes guessing — piecing clues, trying to catch the unsaid — reading between the lines; we enter the stories with a sense of innocence and leave with a shudder. Pretty Ugly fits in the New Zealand gothic tradition, with the likes of The Scarecrow (Morrison) and Sydney Bridge Upside Down (Ballantyne). Here the edges press in. Gunn from here and living elsewhere (Scotland) has lost none of the sense of the impending gloom, the darkness of wild and unfettered places, and here she uses nature’s darkness to unsettling good effect, double-dosing not only with environment but with the dark corners of the psyche. Each word is necessary in Gunn’s writing, and each encounter slippery — our narrators unexpectedly draw us in and repel us. Pretty Ugly is intriguing, questionable, and razor sharp.
Is a River Alive? is an exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days.
Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has.
‘ A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.’ — Elif Shafak
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The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson $70
This deeply researched and beautifully presented book traces the origins of early Waitaha and Kāti Māmoe, and the later migrations, conflicts and settlements of the hapū who became Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on tribal knowledge, early written records and archaeological insights, he details the movements, encounters and exchanges that shaped these southern regions. He shows how people lived seasonally from the land and sea, supported by long-distance trade and a deep knowledge of place. These were the communities that the first Europeans encountered, as whalers, sealers and missionaries made their way around the coast. New edition, greatly expanded and updated. [Hardback]
”The Welcome of Strangers is, I believe, the best ethnohistory produced in New Zealand to date. Underpinned by whakapapa and methodical research, it provides solid evidence of our Ngāi Tahu past and sets it firmly in its context. The work of an accomplished scholar and longtime associate, the revised edition is strengthened and sharpened with new research, biographical detail and rich imagery of people and place. It is pleasing to have this scholarly yet accessible volume available to a new generation of New Zealanders – and even more so, Ngāi Tahu whānui, both scholars and at the flax roots.” —Sir Tipene O’Regan ONZ, Chair, Te Pae Kōrako; Upoko, Te Rūnaka o Awarua
”With one eye on the universal and the other on the particular, Atholl Anderson reveals how culture and nature shaped one another in southern Te Waipounamu for some five hundred years, down to the mid-nineteenth century. Born from the head of a world-leading archaeologist and the heart of a much-loved son of Kāi Tahu, this is a signally important text in the canon of Māori history.” —Michael Stevens, Professor and Director, Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha / University of Canterbury
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Girlbeast by Cecilie Lind (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $38
Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless? With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal — a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times. [Paperback]
”Girlbeast is a fever dream of a novel that put a knot in my stomach. A provocative, vulgar and tender fable about the uneasy ruin of girlhood.” —Lucy Rose
>>Read an extract!
Lexicon of Affinities by Ida Vitale (translated from Spanish by Sean Manning) $39
With entries as varied as 'elbow', 'Ophelia', 'progress', the painter Giorgio Morandi, 'chess', 'Eulalia' (a friend of the author's aunt), and 'unicorn', Ida Vitale constructs a dictionary of her long and passionately engaged artistic life. Taking the reader by the arm, she invites us to become her confidant, sharing her remarkable 20th century as a member of a storied generation of Latin American writers, of whom she is the last remaining alive. It's a compendium of friendship, travel, reading, and the endless opportunities she found for 'the joyful possibility of creation.' Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its exuberant, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Vitale's prose is drop dead gorgeous." —Jeremy Garber
"Extraordinary. Giving due attention to Vitale's prose will bring you reassurance and optimism." —Lunate
"A vibrant and playful memoir-in-dictionary-form. A joyous celebration of a life well lived, with entries that range from the simple to the titanic." —Literary Hub
"Indispensable. Vitale's language has a precision that reminds us that memory exists: that today precision is an act of distinction and recognition." —Letras Libre
>>Something of a refuge.
>>”One hundred years don’t weigh me down.”
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine $38
Three women from very different families are brought together when their sons are accused of assaulting a young woman whose social standing they see as far below their own. Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed. Brutal, tender and intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, multi-voice presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny. [Paperback]
”This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens. Erskine — a gifted short story writer — deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters. For all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice.” —Robert Collins, Sunday Times
”This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys' parents. Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy.” —Guardian
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke $30
The first of our organs to form, the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of all that makes us human: as long as it continues to beat, we hope. One summer day, nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident. Though her brain and the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira's parents and siblings agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max had been hospitalised for nearly a year with a virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max's parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family. This is the unforgettable story of how one family's grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of Keira's heart and explores the history of the remarkable medical innovations that made it possible, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”The best narrative non-fiction I've read in years. Rachel Clarke has written a profound piece of investigative journalism and wrapped it up in poetry.” —Christie Watson
Juice by Tim Winton $38
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism. [Now in paperback]
”A barnstorming, coruscating work of fiction, a heavyweight literary novel that sits squarely in the growing canon of ‘climate fiction’ and it feels to me to be an instant classic of that genre. I strongly recommend it.” —Emily H. Wilson, New Scientist
”Juice, Winton has said, means ‘human resilience and moral courage’, and there is that in spades in this complex, riveting book already being hailed as a masterpiece..” —Sydney Morning Herald
”This is page-turning stuff, gripping and awfully gratifying. Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time.” —Rachel Seiffert, Guardian
The New Age of Sexism: How the A.I. revolution is reinventing misogyny by Laura Bates $40
Step into a world where: Little girls dressed up as women dance for an audience of adult men. A pornographic deepfake image or video of you exists on the internet and you just don’t know it yet. Men create ‘perfect’ AI girlfriends who live in their pocket — customised to every last detail, from breast size to eye colour and personality, only lacking the ability to say no. This isn’t an image of the future. Sex robots, chatbots and the metaverse are here and spreading fast. A new wave of AI-powered technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, is putting women everywhere in danger. In The New Age of Sexism, author and campaigner Laura Bates takes the reader deep into the heart of this strange new world. She travels to cyber brothels and visits schools gripped by an epidemic of online sexual abuse, showing how every aspect of our lives — from education to work, sex to entertainment — is being infiltrated by ever-evolving technologies that are changing the way we live and love forever. This rising tide, despite all its potential for good, is a wild west where women’s rights and safety are being sacrificed at the altar of profitability. [Paperback]
>>Misogyny in the Metaverse.
The Secret Green by Sonya Wilson $25
It's almost a year since Nissa Marshall was found alive after miraculously surviving a month lost in the vast, dense, isolated bush of Fiordland. Strange, magical things happened when Nissa was lost in the wilds but was it actually real? Or had she made it all up in the forest inside her head? When the mysterious forest creatures come for Nissa again, she discovers that Fiordland is under threat. What are the sparks so afraid of? What is the secret they're so desperate to protect? And why do they think a thirteen-year-old kid can save them all? This thrilling sequel to Spark Hunter crackles with the magic of the ancient forest. It's a high-stakes adventure through a vast wonderland with a great green secret hidden from humans for thousands of years. [Paperback]
”Perfectly pitched for middle fiction readers, Spark Hunter weaves history, culture, conservation, humour, tension and adventure into the story of Nissa Marshall, who has always known there is more to the Fiordland bush than meets the eye. While leaning into the fantastic just enough to encourage the imagination, the inclusion of archival excerpts will spark keen readers to hunt out their own discoveries within the mysterious history of this corner of Aotearoa. Making this story's light shine bright is te reo Māori blended throughout and a cast of supporting characters that are easily recognisable as classmates, teachers, and friends.” —New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults judges’ citation for Sparkhunter
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four women who wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff $30
In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles. [New paperback edition]
I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally $42
A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about his stint as a child actor, his travels along the hippie trail, his wives and children, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety. [Paperback]
>>The least hospitable man.
Indian Kitchens: Treasured family recipes from across the land by Roopa Gulati $60
Gulati travels through India and celebrates the wonderfully varied food that makes up a nation, making pitstops at the homes of the people who cook it every day. From dals to masalas, and quick and easy suppers to feasts for a crowd, the easy-to-follow recipes are bursting with authentic flavours using ingredients found in your local supermarket. Recipes include aubergine pakoras with onion and tamarind relish, potato and paneer tikki, sweetcorn bhajis, Tandoori sea bass, home-style Punjabi chicken curry, Kashmiri lamb with saffron, cardamom and red chillies, cumin potatoes, Bengali-style butternut squash with tamarind and jaggery, channa dal with spinach, black eye beans in garlic tomato masala, phirni with honey, orange and saffron syrup and pistachio and cardamom biscuits. From the monsoon-washed backwaters of Kerala to the crowded markets of Mumbai, and from remote kitchens in Gujarat, with shelves stacked high with pickle jars, to the old French quarter of Ponducherry, where lunch is served on banana leaves picked fresh from the garden, this celebration of regional cooking will bring the sights, sounds and flavours of India to your table. [Hardback]
”Roopa's masterpiece. I want to make and eat every single thing in it.” —Bee Wilson
>>Look inside.
A Dim Prognosis: Our health system in crisis — and a doctor’s view on how to fix it by Ivor Popovich $38
A gripping expose of New Zealand's failing health system This compelling tell-all reveals the realities of working as a doctor in New Zealand. Fast-paced and darkly funny, it chronicles ten years of working in medicine and sheds a light on where and why the health system is failing. From bullying and toxic culture to under-staffing and mismanaged priorities, this is a clear-eyed account of a health system on its knees. [Paperback]
”Brave, funny and heart-rendingly sad. Every healthcare worker in Aotearoa will feel seen.” —Dr Emma Wehipeihana, author of There's a Cure for This
”A must-read for all who care about the future of publicly funded healthcare in Aotearoa.” —Dr David Galler
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1 August 2025
“Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” states Manguso in one of the 300 aphorisms and ‘arguments’ (as in ‘the argument of the story’ rather than a disputation) that comprise this enjoyable little book. Indeed the whole does feel as if it bears some relation to another considerably longer but nonexistent text, either as a reader’s quotings or marginalia, or as a writer’s folder of sentences-to-use-sometime or jottings towards a novel she has not yet written (“To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say that it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer”). Many of the aphorisms are pithy and self-contained, often dealing with awkwardness and degrees of experiential dysphoria, and other passages, none of which are more than a few sentences long, are distillates or subsubsections of stories that are not further recorded but which can be felt to pivot on these few sentences. Some of the ‘arguments’ reveal unexpected aspects of universal experiences (“When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief” or “Hating is an act of respect” or “Vocation and ambition are different but ambition doesn’t know the difference”) and others are lighter, more particular (and, I'm afraid, a few do belong on calendars on the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms). Some of the arguments are just singular observations: “The boy realises that if he can feed a toy dog a cracker, he can just as easily feed a toy train a cracker” or “Many bird names are onomatopoeic — they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.” To read the whole book is to feel the spaces and stories that form the invisible backdrop for these scattered points of light, and the reader is left with a residue similar to that with which you are left having read a whole novel.
May’s been made redundant from her Human Resources job. She trained the AI too well. She’s the main breadwinner for the family. Her husband Jem does gig work. He had been a professional photographer. Now he catches mice and other pests for the wealthy. Lu and Sy are kids in the world of climate anxiety, measuring the air quality and doing disaster drills. With no work on the horizon, May’s ex-boss tells her about a trial programme that pays well. A trial that changes your face, just slightly, with high tech tattooing. A procedure that makes her unreadable by the surveillance cameras. She doesn’t ask why the Hum are interested in this research — she’s desperate for the money. She’s also desperate to give herself and her family a special experience. An experience from the past when trees grew and the air was clean. A past reminiscent of her childhood walking through the forest (all burnt now). A family ticket to the Botanical Gardens is on the top of her list, even though it is wildly extravagant for this middle class family. This is a gated retreat — a curated space. (As I was reading Hum, I came across an article in The Guardian about manufactured wilderness spaces.) Set in the near future, this is a dystopian novel that is close to the bone. (It’s not so distant considering the speed of change, and Phillips references current articles and research at the close of the novel.) There is AI — the Hums are well developed. The climate crisis is at an elevated pitch. Many traditional human work roles have disappeared. This could have been a hard-edged doom-scrolling novel, but it is far from this. Hum is set in a world where relationships within families matter and the Hum are not hard cold machines. They are all-knowing — clue privacy issues here — but also highly empathetic to the humans. They understand you like no one else, they are observant, caring and they know how you tick. Frightening and reassuring. May and Jem’s children are hooked on their Bunnies — Alexas on steroids — and all the family members are enchanted by (addicted to) their Wooms: cocoon-like high-tech places of refuge and privacy, if you don’t count the pervasive advertising and the recording of your every desire/search/interaction. The internet plus plus. The trip to the Botanics is dreamy until the children get lost. They inadvertently leave the sanctuary via a utility door, and without their Bunnies (which May has ‘ripped off’ their wrists prior to the holiday) they are untrackable. Yet the lost children are not the climatic scene in this novel. Phillips is more interested in what comes next. Internet shaming, family services alerted, suspicion and blame, love and understanding. This is a novel about how technology can change us, and how we may affect it. The Hum will surprise you. It’s a novel about connection, about how to find connection as a parent, in your most intimate relationships, and with yourself in a world flooded with distraction and pervasive change.
Educator Welby Ings is concerned that our overemphasis on ‘measurability’ and the ‘correct’ recall of facts has resulted in too narrow a view of Intelligence, effectively sidelining a significant portion of the population whose minds work in different but no less gifted ways. Too often, children are ‘written off’ both by schools and by their parents even though they are naturally curious and engaged (good markers of intelligence), resulting in poor life outcomes and behaviour problems. Ings’s insightful and helpful book helps us to broaden our idea of intelligence and to support young people to flourish at school and in their wider lives. A broader and more inclusive approach to education will have benefits for us all.
A selection of books from our shelves that use the accumulation of fragments as a literary form.
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When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back
All your choices are good! Choose from our latest selection of new releases and click through to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose $40
Women in Dark Times begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women, bound together by their struggles against iniquity, blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century — revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream — and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Bringing to the surface the subterranean depths of history and the human mind that dominant political vocabularies cannot bear to face, pioneering critic and public intellectual Jacqueline Rose forges a new language for feminism. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to 'honour' killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.” —Ali Smith
”A rigorously argued and at times breathtaking book. Many paragraphs contain a controlled explosion; her analysis of men's fear of and fascination with female sexuality, born from the boy's early proximity to the mother's body, is one of them. The book closes with a clarion cry: "Women have been reasonable for far too." Her reasoning, ironically, is as tight and sinuous as a constrictor knot. It is a time to be afraid of the dark.” —Frances Wilson, Telegraph
”The kind of restless and confrontational thinking of Women in Dark Times's feminism is essential, yet it is up against a vast apparatus of material power opposed to letting it take root. For all its interest in the darkness of our minds, the feminism of Women in Dark Times seems profoundly hopeful and generative, always leaving the gap between who a person is and who they can be. Transformation is always possible.... It may be easy to deem the exploration of one's inner life as privileged navel-gazing, but Rose's scandalous feminism takes that as a basis to create a new world: one that puts our vulnerability at its very core.” —Rebecca Liu, ArtReview
Invisible Intelligence: Why your child might not be failing by Welby Ings $45
In Invisible Intelligence, educationalist, filmmaker and best-selling author Welby Ings considers how schools measure intelligence and shows how narrow definitions of literacy and numeracy can lead to bright students being described as ‘behind’ and positioned as problems, when they are not. Ings mixes poignant, humorous and insightful storytelling with current research to explore the ways that some children’s intelligent approaches to problem-solving are dismissed or ignored, with devastating consequences for individuals and society. Yet Invisible Intelligence offers hope. Written with wisdom, experience and compassion, it is the kind of book that ‘puts an arm around the shoulders’ of those who love and work with kids whose intelligence is not recognised because they don’t learn the same way as other children. Pragmatic, wise and helpful, Invisible Intelligence shows what we can do better in education, and why it’s so important that we do. [Paperback]
>>Other ways to demonstrate intelligence.
>>Obsessed with assessment.
>>Disobedient Teaching.
Children of Radium: A buried inheritance by Joe Dunthorne $45
this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis. When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. "I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles," he wrote. "I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience." Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection-first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz. Armed only with his great-grandfather's rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg — a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil — to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family's past. [Hardback]
”The best book I've read in the past year. Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man's depression, ‘washing dishes as if trying to drown them’. A masterpiece. . It will be huge.” —Andrew O'Hagan, Financial Times
”A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story. The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness.” —Observer
”Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful. Joe Dunthorne infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book's final quarter more profound. Remarkable.” —The New York Times
>>A dark legacy.
Solenoid by by Mercea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter) $33
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history — the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript —Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the present. Winner of the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. [New paperback edition]
"Solenoid is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist's cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of Garcia Marquez and Bruno Schulz's labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu's anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel's sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature he also affirms the possibility inherent in the 'bitter and incomprehensible books' he idolises. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself." —New York Times
Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu $30
A collection of poems that speak to the complexity of family, identity, and the importance of te reo and ta ao Māori. The poems of Mettle echo through past and present lives — memories are recorded and futures imagined. Te Whiu draws on stories from her childhood and a lifetime of listening and learning about her whakapapa. Te Whiu’s poems are a lens through which to look 'now' straight in the face, without shame or fear, and to acknowledge that while trauma is transmitted generationally, so too are the gifts of resilience and fortitude. [Paperback]
”Te Whiu's poetic voice is bright, and new. As well as vividly poetic storytelling the humour here is mordant. In the best spirit of a bustling diverse indigenous poetics, it excels.” —Robert Sullivan
”A stunning debut, threading land, ocean and heart together in an expansive Māori tapestry that speaks to our present, shared moment. Mettle is alive with ancient knowing, breathing possibilities into every line. An outstanding read.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with recipes by Caroline Eden $65
Beginning in Armenia, moving northwards through Georgia and ending at the Black Sea, Green Mountains weaves together the enchanting geography and the cult of the kitchen that prevails within these two countries. Tales of testing hikes and unpredictable terrain are punctuated by the foods Eden eats for respite - citrus, herbs, flatbreads, nuts, apricots, mountain greens and magical cheeses - the recipes she shares and the stories she uncovers. Sharing both the deep comfort and satisfaction of a meal served after a long walk, and the unique relationships she forms with her hosts, Eden offers readers rare insights into the culture and food of these two countries. With meticulously researched histories, a catalogue of more than 30 recipes from her travels, and rich, compelling stories, this is an enjoyable journey! [Hardback]
"There is nobody writing about food at the moment who's committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line." —Tim Hayward, Financial Times
>>Look inside!
>>Green mountains, red chairs.
Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel $35
Stories of Ireland is a compendium of mid-century Irish experience from one of Ireland's outstanding writers, Brian Friel. Demonstrating all of Friel's instinct for voice, scene, and the uncanny mystery found in the everyday, these tales tell of struggle, beauty and discovery — from the drowning of a man in the bog-black waters of Lough Keeragh, to the camaraderie of teenage potato gathers in County Tyrone, and from the careful work of the German War Graves Commission in Glenn na fuiseog, to trawlermen's talk of sunken gold off the coast of Donegal. Selected by Friel himself, and introduced by Louise Kennedy. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A solid gold treat from top to tail. A tremendous set of stories by the great Irish playwright.” —John Self, The Observer
”There is a touch of spring about this collection and I find myself curiously helpless in front of them. The funny stories are a complete joy. The serious stories are concerned with the subtlest nuances of human emotions and relations which can neither be described nor directly expressed.” —The Irish Times
”Some of the best stories ever written. They are everything short stories should be — deft, skilfully written, funny and quite often breathlessly sad.” —Edna O'Brien
”As natural and as beautiful as you can imagine — full of vitality, full of life.” —Kevin Barry
Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) $48
From the author and translator of the International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand comes a kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured society, loosely based on the gathering violence that led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992. Against this backdrop, Shruti, a writer paralysed by the weight of events, tries to find her words, while Sharad and Hanif, academics whose voices are drowned out by extremism, find themselves caught between cliches and government slogans. And there's Daddu, Sharad's father, a beacon of hope in the growing darkness. As they each grapple with thoughts of speaking the unspeakable, an unnamed narrator takes on the urgent task of bearing witness. First published in Hindi in 1998, Our City That Year is a novel that defies easy categorisation — it's a time capsule, a warning siren and a desperate plea. Geetanjali Shree's shimmering prose, in Daisy Rockwell's nuanced and consummate translation, takes us into a fever dream of fragmented thoughts and half-finished sentences, mirroring the disjointed reality of a city under siege. Readers will find themselves haunted long after the final page, grappling with questions that echo far beyond India's borders. [Paperback]
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on survival and resistance by John Berger $29
From the 'War on Terror' to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Hold Everything Dear is a meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering. These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself. [Paperback]
”John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel, how to stare at things till we see what we thought wasn't there. But above all he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity.” —Arundhati Roy
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer $28
Annie is the perfect girlfriend. She has dinner ready for Doug every night, wears the outfits he buys for her, and caters to his every sexual whim. Maybe her cleaning isn't always good enough, but she's trying really hard. She was designed that way, after all. Because Annie is a robot. But what happens when she starts to rebel against her stifled existence and imagine the impossible — a life without Doug? [Paperback]
Winner of the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.
”An intense, compelling tale that, like all good stories about robots, is ultimately about the human condition.” —Guardian
”A smart dive into big questions about identity, autonomy and power. Packs an impressive punch.” —The Times
”Slyly profound — a brilliant pas de deux, grappling with ideas of freedom and identity while depicting a perverse relationship in painful detail.” —New York Times
Woman’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell $39
Scrutinising the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Women's Estate describes the organisation of women's liberation in Western Europe and America, locating the areas of women's oppression in four key areas — work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children. Through a detailed study of the modern family and a re-evaluation of Freud's work in this field, Mitchell paints a detailed picture of how patriarchy works as a social order. A searing analysis first published in 1970, with a new preface by the author. [Paperback]
”Juliet Mitchell's brilliant book from 1970 knew in advance that movements of liberation are linked, that economic analysis alone cannot fully explain women’s oppression.” —Judith Butler
The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Niho Satake $20
The fierce little woman lived in a house at the end of a jetty. She knitted socks in blue and green wool to sell to sailors who had got their feet wet. But when there were no ships at her jetty, she was quite alone.
One stormy day, a pirate came to the house on the jetty. He stood on his toes, and starting tap-tap-tapping on the window… After a battle of words through the jetty trapdoor, these two windswept heroes find they are suited after all. A new edition of an old favourite, with new illustrations. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
Human Nature: Nine ways to feel about our changing planet by Kate Marvel $45
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and researcher whose work on climate change led her to grapple with strong, complicated emotions. Initially, she resisted those feelings, afraid they would interfere with her objective scientific judgement. But over time she realised that there is no one way to think — or feel — about climate change. To live on and care for our changing planet, we need to embrace the full spectrum of human emotion. As Marvel argues, we need every emotion we can muster if we're going to counter the usual myopic perspectives on climate change and care enough to make better decisions. And this book is a dazzling call to care. In Human Nature, each chapter uses a different emotion to illustrate the science behind our changing climate. We feel the wonder of being able to use climate models to predict the future. We feel anger at those who have knowingly destroyed the planet for profit. We feel love for our beautiful Earth, the only good planet. With Marvel as our guide, we get to feel it all — and we can begin to turn our strong feelings into strong action. Human Nature is a hopeful look at climate science that prioritises feelings — and in doing so charts a path forward for life together. [Paperback]
”This is the best climate book I've ever read. It's magnificent — both planetary and personal, saturated with electric metaphors, incisive vignettes, legitimately funny jokes, and an unflappable, knowing love for Earth, our home.” —Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
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25 July 2025
Léger was commissioned to write a short biographical entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopaedia but ended up writing a very interesting and quite unusual book. Loden directed one film, >>Wanda (1970), about a woman who leaves her husband and who, passively and therefore pretty much by chance, attaches herself to a man who is planning a bank robbery for which, following his death in a police shoot-out and despite her lack of initiative and her not even being present at the robbery (she took a wrong turn in what was supposed to be the getaway car), she will be sent to jail for twenty years. The book operates on many levels simultaneously: it is ‘about’ Léger’s attempts to excavate information about Loden, principally beneath the ways in which she has been recorded by others, notably her husband the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who also wrote a novel in which Loden features, thinly disguised; it is ‘about’ Loden’s making of the film Wanda; it is ‘about’ the character of Wanda in that film, a character Loden played herself and with whom she strongly identified personally; it is ‘about’ the tension between the “passive and inert” Wanda character with whom Loden identifies and Loden as writer and director, and about the relationship between author and character more generally in both an literary/artistic and a quotidian sense; it is ‘about’ Léger’s search for and discovery of the true story that inspired Loden to make the film, a botched 1960 bank robbery after which the passive and inert Alma Malone politely thanked the judge for handing her a twenty-year sentence; it is ‘about’, therefore, the relationship between inspiration and execution, and between actuality and fiction; it is ‘about’ portrayal and self-portrayal and ‘about’ who gets to define whom (“To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.”); it is ‘about’, cumulatively, the way in which, as she delved more deeply into the specifics of another whom she sought to understand, Léger come up more and more against the unresolved edges of herself so that the two archaeologies became one (she also ended up learning quite a lot about her mother and the imbalanced mechanics of her parents’ relationship). When Wanda was released in 1970, it was disparaged in many feminist circles for its portrayal of a passive woman. Léger shows the film to be a useful mirror in which to recognise passivity as not only an impulse for self-erasure on a personal level but as part of the wider social mechanisms by which women are erased and colonised by projections, and in which the feminist critique and frontline necessarily become internal and self-reflexive. There is also in this book a strong sense of the inescapability of subjectivity, that in all subject-object relationships the subject perceives only and acts only upon a sort of externalised version of itself (the object being passive and without feature (effectively absent, effectively unassailable)); and also that when attempting to be/conceive of/portray oneself one has no option but to use the template of that with which one identifies but which is not in essence (whatever that means) oneself (except to the extent that one’s ‘self’ perhaps exists only in the mysterious act of identification). Oh, and Léger‘s writing is exquisite.