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1 May 2026
The case for the benefits of reading is easier to make than the case for the benefits of writing, which seems dubious to say the least except insofar as it enables the benefits of reading to be fulfilled. Although readers may be pleased that a writer has enabled the activity they have chosen and may therefore be inclined to tolerate writers per se, this does not reveal why it is that writers write. Egocentrism and unnatural personal extension into posterity are, really, vices, I would say, but are there reasons to write that are not exactly this sort of vice? If writing is done in the consideration of a reader, however hypothetical that reader, just who does a writer think they are to impose themselves upon this reader and demand the precious currency of their attention? The hypotheticality of a reader makes the impulse on the writer no less actual. Should everyone write, in the same way that everyone should read? Obviously not: already there is an oversupply of writing and the vast majority of it will bring little satisfaction to either its writer or any reader unless the reason for this writing is something other than the connection between these two on which our usual production models attempt to establish their validity. What else is there? Lydia Davis was asked to contribute a lecture and essay on the subject of ‘Why I write’, and soon regretted agreeing to do so. Her attempts to address the circumstance by, really, primarily writing about what she has been reading have produced a companionable and interesting little book, even if she largely avoids the question that provoked it. (Q: Why does she write this book? A: Because she thoughtlessly said that she would.) Davis gives us a good idea of why she reads, what she reads, how she writes (“When I am asked why I write, I instead think about how I write.”), what she writes, what someone else writes and how they write it and, to some extent, why she thinks that this someone might have written what they wrote (a piece of speculation that, I suppose, lies acceptably within the occupation of a reader). Throughout the book Davis does reveal a few what could be valid non-reader-oriented reasons for writing. She does seem to write in order to test and perfect, or, rather, move towards perfection, the transformation of thought into language (the inverse corollary of the activity of a reader), often reducing the size of her palette to the infraordinary contents of her daily experience in order to clarify this process of translation and to further sharpen the technical precision for which she is justly well known. Consciousness, after all, is only achievable through the suppression of the vast majority of stimuli that impress themselves upon us, and Davis similarly makes language alert by the rigour of her composition. Davis admits also that “I also write, sometimes, to figure out something that I don’t understand and that I want to understand,” which, I suppose, is fair enough, and also that she writes to “be rid of” a thought that “bothers” her (she thinks of this bother as a pleasurable sort of bother but I don’t see why unpleasant bothers should not also be a stimulus to writing — maybe even more so). Just as Kafka suggested that we photograph things in order to forget them, it is possible that we write things for the same reason, and this negative achievement is satisfyingly obliterative, at least to me. Davis is known for her cool descriptions, but, she writes, “Though my objective portrayals may not appear overtly loving, there is love in the motivation behind them.” Which is interesting. She also writes, nearly at the end of her book and feeling that she perhaps has still not addressed the question that provoked it: “It must be that relieving myself of the burden of strong feelings, by taking them out of myself and putting them into an objective form, a form that can also be shared by others out in the world, is just another reason why I write.” Writing “it must be” does not convince me that this last ‘reason’ has any particular validity, especially for this fine, clear writer whose finesse and clarity is achieved in part by the rigorous avoidance of exactly this sort of cliché.
Walls, straight roads, borders, maps, places in the landscape, a meeting place, construction on taken land, roads dismissed, control, histories overwritten, obliterated, questions of the past for the present and the future, justice, the disappeared, the unnavigable, violence, justification, denial, displacement, erasure. In Minor Detail Adania Shibli takes us to the desert. It’s 1949 and the military have set up camp near the Egyptian border, to stake their ground, and to wipe the remaining Arabs from the new state of Israel. Told from the perspective of the officer in command of a platoon, the observation is crystal clear in his description of the landscape — the Negev both brutal and awesome, his encounter with a scorpion — the wound on his swelling leg repulsive, as are his actions towards the young Bedouin girl the soldiers have abducted and raped, and he has killed. The horror of this crime is never glazed over, and the actions of the officer are never questioned by those around him. In fact, his fellows fight to get in the queue. The horror of this event is voiced by an increasingly agitated dog. The motif of the barking or howling dog continues into the second part of this novella. A young Palestinian woman in Ramallah on discovering this event when the archives are opened is compelled to travel to the place of reckoning. Compelled by compassion, and a minor detail: her birthday is the Bedouin girl's day of death. To travel to the zone she must borrow a fellow worker’s ID, and rent the car in another’s name. As she travels with two maps overlayed, one historic showing the villages and roads that have now been almost completely obliterated, and the other the zones of the Israeli state, she drives to museums, settlement villages and towards the military-controlled zones, the new roads burn their straight lines and codes of engagement into the landscape, as well as her psyche. She is haunted by the girl, and there is always a dog pacing or howling nearby. You question her sanity in carrying out such a mission, and then question your own judgement. Should confronting an injustice be abandoned because it is dangerous? As she passes through each checkpoint, each glance at the borrowed ID, it feels as if a knife is being drawn slowly over a whetting stone, its edge sharper each time. And you realise that living under an authoritarian regime where you are a person without freedom of movement, where you are marked as unwanted, means that your last breath could be at any moment — a gun always trained on you. Shibli’s writing is sparse and evocative, the tension tautly held — there is no let up. Minor Detail is a powerful display of resistance.
High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been. She Who Remains has been short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
A negative selection. Don’t not click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self $38
In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self's pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. The disaffected, middle-class, middle-aged urbanites that populate the novel seem helpless to stop the decay of their intimate, self-conscious social circle. And yet, as Self's skewering (and self-skewering) grows ever more wildly imaginative, targeting faith, death, money, queerness, Jewishness and nearly every piece of our social fabric's connective tissue, it becomes all too clear that the decay cannot simply be cut out - their lives are rotten to their core. With recurring - if defeated - appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, this new work shows Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humour and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. The Quantity Theory of Morality delicately bookends his award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, which Martin Amis likened to “a cross between a manic J. G. Ballard and a depressed David Lodge.” Although, as ever, “Will Self's world is all his own.” [Paperback]
”Reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic in his performance of linguistic jokes — rollicking, unsettling and furiously intelligent.” —Guardian
”While dripping with acidic satire, The Quantity Theory of Morality is also full of pathos and penetrating insights into the best and worst in human nature. A consummate performance, it's a book that might finally silence Self's critics.” —Spectator
”This new novel stretches this critic's adjectives. It is deliriously poignant. It is heartbreakingly antic. It is sincere and wry at the same time. Self's funniest book for some time.” —Stuart Kelly, Scotsman
>>Is morality a zero-sum game?
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley $38
Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: he has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon 'call me Shove' Halfpenny. Laura has her own problems: a prickly mother and a tricky past, and in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious. But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back. A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley's trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us — somehow — with a curious sense of possibility. [Paperback]
”This pristine book confirms Riley's position among the finest novelists working today. Her sentences are crystalline and perfect, and her attention to the world is always acute and occasionally tender - I love this book, and am awed by Riley's accomplishment.” —Sarah Perry
”Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless. What is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep and unshowy solace of friendship, moments of tenderness so exquisitely and exactly rendered that they are almost too intense to bear.” —The Guardian
”Outstandingly brilliant.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”The Palm House on almost any page will give you more delight than most other novels published this year.” —John Self
>>Don’t mind me in my coffin.
>>Carted off.
>>Eight lanes of traffic.
>>The wreckage of middle age.
Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada (translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani) $33
Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow; Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard; on the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges. In the three stories in Facing the Bridge, obsession becomes delight as the reader is whisked into a world where identities flicker and shift. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.” —Sara Baume
”Magnificently strange.” —Rivka Galchen
”Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.” —Madeleine Thien
”What propels Tawada's stories is the unassailable logic of dreams and fairy tales, coupled with verbal energy. Tawada's images resonate simultaneously on different levels.” —Village Voice
>>A genius in any language.
>>Other books by Yoko Tawada.
Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding home in the 21st century by Ece Temelkuran $38
”Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?” Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn't happen in their country that fascism is coming. Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise — as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can't turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed — she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another. Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”Nation of Strangers is perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times. To read it is 'to stiffen the sinews.'" —Michael Morpurgo
"Nation of Strangers is essential reading — a bold reminder, a stern warning, a soft prayer and courageous song. Without doubt, Nation of Strangers is my number one favourite book of these times, navigating the truth of who we really are and who we pretend to be. It is a most exquisite narration of the sense of belonging in the unbelonging. Nation of Strangers is a critically honest observation of us, of you and me in the now and here, our fragile notion of home, the homes we leave behind, the home we carry with us. I have been walking around with Ece's book in my bag like a friend, I keep re-reading it, I feel like she is writing to me personally, teaching me to be stronger and much more resilient." —Selena Godden
"A new book from Ece Temelkuran is a new way of understanding the world. She is lucid, honest and often wryly funny about where we are now, and who we are becoming. And Nation of Strangers is her most ambitious and dazzling book yet." —Brian Eno
"Ece Temelkuran, with her beautiful, elegiac new book on becoming 'unhomed', is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt." —Yanis Varoufakis
"Homelessness, both literal and spiritual, is increasingly the contemporary human condition, and in Nation of Strangers, Ece Temelkuran gives it the sustained and close attention it deserves. She not only elegantly and movingly diagnoses our shared plight; she describes the wise and viable solutions we so desperately need. No one baffled and estranged by our age's relentless shocks can afford to miss this book." —Pankaj Mishra
>>The pace of change.
>>An antidote to loneliness.
The Migrants: A memoir with manuscripts by Chrisopher de Hamel $65
Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realisation that they too are migrants far from home. The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonisation and the migration of culture — of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters — bringing us face-to-face with history. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket's Boethius, and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842. We travel with the author today back to where these manuscripts began their own lives, through France and Poland and medieval England, discovering their first owners and following the longest journeys on earth. [Hardback]
”Christopher de Hamel combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated. The joy of this book are de Hamel's true 'intimate companions', the manuscripts, and his ability to evoke the thrill and wonder he feels as he encounters them, whether it's a 12th-century copy of Boethius he finds in Wellington, probably designed for Thomas Becket, or a Bible in Auckland, which he traces back to a Cistercian monastery in north-central Poland.” —Mark Bostridge, Spectator
Son of Nobody by Yann Martel $38
Harlow Donne has sacrificed his life to the study of the Classical world. So when he is invited to Oxford University to work on an obscure collection of papyrus fragments it is an academic's dream come true. He must leave behind his daughter and wife in Canada, but offers like this don't come twice and he badly needs a change of fortune. Then, while studying in the Bodleian Library, he unearths a completely undiscovered account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilisation itself. He names the poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a commoner identified only as Psoas, the son of nobody. As sole translator and author of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter Helen, allowing the text to unlock the echoes of the ancient Greeks into the present day, and to share a personal message with his beloved child. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn't frayed — the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief. [Paperback]
”A brilliant novel of ideas: a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes; all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud. A stunningly imagined revisitation of an ancient past that is every bit as awful as the present.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>Both epic and intimate.
>”I hate the rich people of this world — of which I’m one.”
>>On work-life balance.
Hotel Exile: Paris in the shadow of war by Jane Rogoyska $45
The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only 'grand' hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. Andre Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service - and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”An exceptional work of non-fiction — you couldn't just call it a history book, it's more than that. Rogoyska captures the historical moment with a rare combination of urgency and empathy. She has trawled memoirs from hotel staff and ex-officers, unearthing stories that are peculiarly resonant. This is a scintillatingly good book. I think it will win prizes — not least because it is subtly experimental. It slips in and out of the present tense like a contemporary novel, and feels thrillingly immersive. In fact, I've rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it's this one.” —James McConnachie, The Sunday Times
>>Hotel/hostel/hospital.
Snack by Eurie Dahn $23
In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial perhaps even childish especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries. Eurie Dahn traces the story of snacking culture through specific snacks, including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, cheese crackers, and Choco Pies, and in the contexts of ethnicity, popular culture, diet culture, and even parenting. Snack is an idiosyncratic cultural history that offers surprisingly filling food for thought. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This tempting morsel of a book invites you to consider the history, culture, and even theory of those little bites we snatch between meals. Dahn's lively storytelling and digestible research invite us to slow down and take a hard look at that aisle full of temptations at the convenience store. With her help, we now see behind the colorful packages a surprising history of food, leisure, and pleasure.” —Sean Latham
>>Affective connections.
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.
How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a failing system by Wolfgang Streeck $27
After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated. In How Will Capitalism End? Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is seemingly no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalisation of the markets. Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand. [Paperback]
”Neoliberalism continues to delimit political choice across the globe yet it is clear that the doctrine is in severe crisis. In Wolfgang Streeck's powerful new book How Will Capitalism End? Streeck demonstrates that the maladies afflicting the world-from secular stagnation to rising violent instability-herald not just the decline of neoliberalism, but what may prove to be the terminal phase of global capitalism.” —Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism
”At the heart our era's deepening crisis there lies a touching faith that capitalism, free markets and democracy go hand in hand. Wolfgang Streeck's new book deconstructs this myth, exposing the deeply illiberal, irrational, anti-humanist tendencies of contemporary capitalism.” —Yanis Varoufakis
The Expedition by Tuvalisa Rangström and Klara Bartilsson (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $40
A band of intrepid explorers embarks on a voyage through a strange frontier filled with mystery and beauty: the human body! Donning his frock coat and ruffle collar, Tusseson documents everything that happens in his logbook: traveling by boat across the Stomach's Stormy Sea, paddling through the Small Intestine's Emerald Green Canals, camping at the Lungs (despite all the wind!), climbing the Muscle Mountains, escaping through the Nerve Forest to marvel at the night sky, Iris, reflected in the Pacific Tear Channel. As his fellow travelers return home one by one, Tusseson is left to carry on alone... but he won't give up until he finds the Mystical Meadows of the Brain. Featuring lush and surreal illustrations, The Expedition renders the systems of the human body into wondrous landscapes that take readers on a fantastic voyage like no other. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Sourdough Everything: sweet and savoury recipes for beautiful breads and other bakes by Rachel Pardoe $55
While it's part science and part craft, baking sourdough is actually very easy — create a starter, feed it with care, and then combine it with a few simple ingredients to make something truly magical. Even if you already have your own starter languishing in the fridge, Sourdough Everything will reinvigorate your sourdough experience and elevate your baking skills with an array of recipes ranging from artfully crafted loaves to flavorful rolls, sweet breads, and pastries. Featuring over 70 recipes, including sourdough raisin bread, pumpkin chocolate rolls, French crullers, and sourdough pretzels, Sourdough Everything will help you slow down and savor the experience of creating flavorful sourdough that is also a feast for the eyes. With step-by-step instructions, you'll learn how to: Create and care for your starter; Use proper baking techniques; Confidently navigate more advanced recipes; Use simple, everyday tools to create beautiful designs. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Pardoe is a good and clear explainer.
Despite it all, there is no shortage of good books. Whether you want to engage more deeply with the world or seek refuge from it, a book opens a door at your fingertips.
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24 April 2024
I read Swimming Studies when it was released in hardback back in 2017. It’s one of those books that stays with you. I enjoy Shapton’s writing and her quirky book projects, and my first discovery was her relationship breakup novel told as an auction. Swimming Studies is a series of essays on swimming, through word and art. Whether it’s the act of swimming, Shapton’s history of competitive swimming, her daily dips, the other swimmers, or descriptions of water, the science of water, the ocean, the pool, each encounter with the act and the world of swimming is intimate and perceptive. There’s the delight of swimming in the essays, alongside immersive layers exploring memory, adolescence, drawing, obsession and solitude. Aside form Shapton’s particular eye, one of the things that lifts this book above others in the ‘swimming book’ genre is the inclusion of artworks — Shapton’s own. There are abstract watercolours of swimming places, the movements of the bodies in the water, and portraits of swimmers. And being Shapton, there are objects (she was one of the authors of Women in Clothes — out of print at the moment but a new edition looking likely in 2027) — her swimsuit collection. And of course, the stories that come with them. Luckily, Swimming Studies is available again as a lovely Daunt Books paperback with french flaps, complete with all the artworks and a new foreword by author Rita Bullwinkel.
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
Nothing drives an obsession to unsustainable extremes more than the unnameable terror that a more moderate degree of enthusiasm would be overwhelmed by its complementary revulsion. Our so-called cultural artefacts and so-called social institutions are, likewise, mechanisms for privileging one chosen pole of an ambivalence, mechanisms for giving a (usually) positive cast to what we think of as our individual or communal selves. For some individuals, including, seemingly, Leonid Tsypkin and, especially, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (the ostensible subject of Tsypkin’s novel), whatever it is that separates the existential extremes is either exceptionally rigid and brittle or unusually permeable when unattended or in some way unreliable or, possibly, sporadically assailable, which enables, for those individuals, transports both of remarkable insight and of terrible psychological risk. In Tsypkin’s novel, the narrator Tsypkin (or ‘Tsypkin’) is travelling by train from Moscow to Petersburg to visit the Dostoyevsky museum. As he travels, he reads the diary of Dostoyevsky’s young second wife Anna concerning their time spent in Europe, mainly staying in various German towns and suffering, often, from the financial consequences of Fyodor’s gambling addiction (which he had written about in The Gambler and practiced thereafter). Tsypkin’s astounding book, in which each paragraph is a single virtuoso sentence building, often, to hysterical length, dissolves the distinctions between the author (or ‘author’) and his subject, slipping, unnoticed and often within a few clauses, over a century in time and deep into the inner life of Dostoyevsky, revealing the sufferings, tensions and passions that both caused hardship for Dostoyevsky and his wife and enabled Dostoyevsky to write novels of such psychological penetration. The uncommon access that the past has to the present and to cause harm there, what we might call memory, repeatedly damages Dostoyevsky — for instance the humiliations visited upon him during his imprisonment lead him to repeatedly set himself up for humiliations that replay that he had received at the hands of the commandant — but also provide him and us with an intimacy with aspects of human experience that might otherwise be inaccessible. Dostoyevsky’s cycles of enthusiasm and despair are described with great sympathy, both for him and for Anna, and Tsypkin’s unsparing portrayal of the faults of his literary hero produce a suitably ambivalent effect, often within a single sentence, moving at once towards both ridicule and sympathy (readers of Thomas Bernhard will appreciate the mastery here). How is it possible to love another (as Tsypkin loves Dostoyevsky, as Anna loves Fyodor) despite their faults, despite, even, their unforgivable faults? “Why was I so strongly attracted and enticed by the life of this man?” asks Tsypkin, who, like many other Jews, has found that Dostoyevksy and his novels possess a “special attraction” despite Dostoyevsky’s antisemitism. “It strikes me as strange to the point of implausibility that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and the injured … despised me and my kind.” While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
Who was Gertrude Stein? And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out about the avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home there and became godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. In Paris, the narrator meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks — about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language — how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together — an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire, and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world. [Hardback]
”In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both.” —Atlantic
”Wonderfully entertaining; a witty scherzo of a ‘fiction’. We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy — this is ‘a fiction’, after all — but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is — odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining — triumphantly proving her wrong.” —Guardian
”Ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but, at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don't need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story. Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve.” —AnOther Magazine
”A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud. It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy's narrator observes of Stein: ‘Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.’ A compelling contemporary fiction.” —The Conversation
>>In search of Gertrude Stein.
>>Why the novel matters.
No Ghosts by Max Lury $40
After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead — faces, gestures, glances — in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's — and the ghosts' — disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Read an extract.
Hell of Solitude: Selected writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (translated from Japanese by Ryan Choi) $40
Hell of Solitude presents a varied and eclectic selection of writings by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most important and beloved Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time here – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English, alongside ‘Art and Other Things’, a fragmentary essay in which Akutagawa expounds his aesthetic views while drawing on examples from world literature and art. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. The collection includes a foreword by writer and translator Polly Barton, questioning why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrating his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling. [Paperback]
“Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.” —Polly Barton
”One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing.” —Haruki Murakami
”The quintessential writer of his era.” —David Peace
”Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear.” —Jorge Luis Borges
”At long last, a new volume of Akutagawa’s writing has been ushered into English by the consummate translator Ryan Choi. He has rendered the master storyteller’s previously unavailable prose pieces and poetry more readable than ever. The exquisite subtlety and inimitable charm of the tales, sketches, and poems in this volume will captivate new readers and scholars alike.” —L. S. Popovich
”For the past decade, Ryan Choi has quietly been doing the heroic work of bringing Akutagawa’s lesser-known writings into English. What we are given in this collection are impressions and observations, anecdotes, philosophical digressions, stories that read like poems that read like dreams remembered the morning after. The writings are restrained, understated, precise and fractured. The surfaces of these texts crackle with the charge of Akutagawa’s inimitable mind. Choi’s translations are a revelation.” —Stephen Mortland
”Choi is Akutagawa’s boldest – and best – translator. Hell of Solitude restores Akutagawa, the most daring architect of modern Japanese literature, to his rightful state: bewildering beauty, a cascade of shifting rhythms and forms, and the penetrating alertness of a truly aesthetic mind. Akutagawa’s soul is here in this book-shaped vessel, waiting to be known.” —Dreux Richard
>>What do we have when we do not have a story?
Ashimpa: The mysterious word by Catarina Sobral $40
One day, a researcher makes an important discovery. A mysterious word buried in an old dictionary: ASHIMPA. Quickly the news spreads. Everyone wants to use the new word, but no one knows what it means or even what part of speech it belongs to. A 137-year-old is certain that it's a verb: people ashimped and would always ashimp. A linguist is convinced it's a noun. Soon there would be people who claimed to have seen live ashimpas — and in colour. "They still exist abroad. They're green!" From renowned Portuguese author and illustrator Catarina Sobral, Ashimpa is the story of language that takes on a life of its own, leading young readers through the hilariously ashimpish life and grammar of a mysterious word. [Hardback]
"A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the elasticity of language, Sobral's latest sparkles with profound wit thanks to a wonderfully bizarre premise. Ashimpishly delicious fun." —Kirkus Reviews
>>Look inside!
The Original by Nell Stevens $40
Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with distinctive intelligence, style and wit, The Original is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. [Hardback]
”What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell herself.” —Olivia Laing
”A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. THE ORIGINAL asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.” —Claire Fuller
”A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world.” —Jessie Burton
”Intricate, and endlessly intriguing. The reader is kept guessing until the very end; as Stevens deftly raises the stakes, the pages seem to turn themselves. The narrative captivates intellectually, too, probing questions of authenticity, imitation, and self-realisation, in love and in art. The overall effect is of an author boldly stepping out on her own, pursuing themes that were hers all along.” —Observer
>>Written by the light of a lava lamp.
Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (translated from Russian by Roger and Angela Keys) $28
A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator — Tsypkin is on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything ‘right’. Nothing is invented; everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and gives an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel. New edition. [Paperback with French flaps]
"A short poetic masterpiece." —New York Review of Books
"Gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving." —The Los Angeles Times
”While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.” —Thomas
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Loving Dostoyevsky.
Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the origins of our authoritarian age by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies 'great replacement theory', which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik's massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today. [Paperback]
>>In twenty years most of the world could be racist dictatorships.
>>A renovation of Nazi ideas.
The Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich $38
”It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python's kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.” Written over two decades, Erdrich's story collection features a range of characters — a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe — a creative collaboration between mother and daughter. [Paperback]
”One of the greatest American writers.” —Guardian
>>Talking animals and the analogue world.
>>Little travels.
Is a River Alive? A journey with water by Robert Macfarlane $30
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. Now in paperback. [Paperback with French flaps]
” 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
>>’The river is writing me’ — Q&A
>>The Power of Rivers
>>Poetry and Adventure
>>The Rights of Nature
>>Read an extract
>>Can personhood recue a river?
>>Also available in hardback.
Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, tragedy, and history’s greatest Arctic rescue by Buddy Levy $39
In 1908-09, American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, in separate expeditions, both claimed they'd reached the North Pole first, but their claims were seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian Roald Amundsen — who'd made history and a name for himself by being the first to sail through the Northwest Passage and the first man to the South Pole — attempted to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, and launched a major rescue operation. [Paperback]
Te Ahikāroa: Artists and stories of Dunedin Public Art Gallery $70
This stunning book displays Ōtepoti’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s significant collection of artworks made either in Aotearoa or overseas, from the Renaissance to the present, and is full of both iconic works and suprises. Te Ahikāroa is the result of collaboration between the Gallery, mana whenua and other writers from around Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. A joint introduction by Director Cam McCracken, alongside Claire Kaahu White, Robert Sullivan and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe creates a foundation that places Kai Tahu values in relation to the journey of the Gallery since its establishment in 1884. Essays by curators Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds explore the history and vision of the Gallery. Each artwork in the book is brought to life by subject experts, who contribute new perspectives on everything from beloved historic artworks through to recently acquired contemporary works. This publication brings together written contributions from Ruth Buchanan, Komene Cassidy, Gina Cole, Sophie Davis, Edward Ellison, Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, Rauhina Kohuwai-Banks, Moewai Marsh, Ngahiraka Mason, Sophie Matthiesson, Finn McCahon-Jones, Cam McCracken, Anna McLean, Olivia Meehan, Gerard O'Regan, Hana O'Regan, Joanna Osborne, Bridget Reweti, Anya Samarasinghe, Robert Sullivan, Taarati Taioroa, Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, Claire Kaahu White. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $42
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The cult of Solvej Balle.
>>The Faber edition of this volume is also available, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.
My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) $45
A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. [Paperback]
"Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly
"Essential feminist, anticolonial reading. My Dreadful Body is about power. The power of one nation to colonise another, which is in turn echoed by the power of men to control women. It is about having the power to be in control of one's own body. But it is also about having the power to fight back." —Full Stop
"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel. An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries." —Foreword Reviews
>>Tongue.
>>Silence speaks.
>>Illness as a sometimes-liminal space.
Discipline by Larissa Pham $40
When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story? Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel — a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming. Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor's isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she's worked so hard to create. [Hardback]
”Discipline coolly questions the ethics and processes of fiction and art, examining the toll they take both on the practitioner and anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit” —Financial Times
”A deceptively quiet and beautifully written story, Discipline plays masterfully with issues of consent, memory and artistic licence. It asks its readers to judge which is more real: what actually happened in the past, or how we feel about it in the present.: —Buzz Magazine
”A story of ideas, but it combines deep philosophical inquiry with thriller vibes.” —Crack
>>Protect that pain.
>>Writing toward the void.
>>”I want to lie.”
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated from Fench by David Bellos) $30
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface — What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity — and possibly his sanity — as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed — but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s novella presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. [Paperback]
”Perec's novels are games, each different. They are played for real stakes and in some cases breathtakingly large ones. As games should be, and as literary games often are not, they are fun.” —Los Angeles Times
>>A one-sentence review.
>>Questioning the quotidian.
False Calm: A journey through the ghost towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver) $28
With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes. Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next. Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld. [Paperback with French flaps]
”An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
”It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.” —Philippe Sands
Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
An internationally acclaimed novel that traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, the novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Originally published in Persian in 1989 and banned in Iran ever since, Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Foreword by Shirin Neshat. [Paperback]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepoplis
"Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.
Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal el-Mohtar $45
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. [Hardback]
"An essential collection of work from one of today's most poignant speculative writers. El-Mohtar creates immersive worlds with beautiful language." —Library Journal
"A collection of 14 stories and four poems that shine both individually and as a whole, while still showcasing El-Mohtar's characteristic lyricism and striking imagery. There's not a false note here." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales.
>>There is no art that is separate from politics.
Cello: A journey through silence to sound by Kate Kennedy $30
Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic and ultimately fatal concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires. Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello and, crucially, the absence of the cello had meant to some other cellists, past and present. [Paperback]
”This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.” —Hermione Lee
”Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.” —Jenny Uglow
>>A different life.
>>Kammersonate.
>>The ’Mara’ Stradivari.
Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Stanley Bill) $28
A fantastical collection of short stories by one of the twentieth century's most iconic cult authors. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. Contents: August / Visitation / Birds / Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles / Cockroaches / The Gale / The Night of the Great Season / The Book / The Age of Genius / My Father Joins the Fire Brigade / The Sanatorium under the Hourglass / Father's Last Escape / Undula. [New paperbback edition]
“One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” —John Updike
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
”Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality.” —Chris Power
”I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life.” —David Grossman
”Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness, and at the same time his writing is very complex. Reading him for the first time was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him.“ —Alejandro Zambra
Black Bag by Luke Kennard $38
A penniless out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation. A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane. [Paperback]
”Gleefully absurd, a triumph of deadpan comedy. From his gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life. Kennard is superb at capturing a chaotic interior life. The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters, and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
”Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair — through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other.” —Joe Dunthorne
>>Theories of attraction.
>>Waiting for it to happen.
MEDesque: Everyday recipes with Mediterranean roots by Georgina Hayden $60
”Warmth, boldness, approachability and a general sense that all is good in the world. All this applies to the food in MEDesque. It's joyful, generous and drenched in olive oil.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”With this wonderful new book Georgie takes us on a dream tour around the Mediterranean and picks up all the best bits so that our meals can be sunnier, happier, easier and infinitely more delicious — what a treat!” —Itamar Srulovich, Honey & Co.
”Irresistible recipes that spark cravings on every page.” —Yasmin Khan
Includes: Lamb, apricot and feta sausage rolls; Gnocchi puttanesca; Spiced lemony roast chicken with crushed baby potatoes; One-pan 'nduja, pepper and three cheese lasagne; Double chocolate pannacotta with cherries; Salted honey butter madeleines. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>All of Hayden’s cookbooks should be on your cookbook shelf.
Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Choose from our new releases bulletin. Read our interview with Lynley Edmeades.
17 April 2026
A Skinful of Shadows is an immensely compelling novel for children and adults alike. Frances Hardinge creates wonderful characters, intriguing plots, and ideas that will stay with you long after you shut the covers. A Skinful of Shadows is set in England in the 1640s, the English Civil War is brewing, Puritans and Catholics are at loggerheads, and so are the King and parliament. In a small village called Popular, Makepeace lives with her mother. Making a piecemeal living from lace-making and odd jobs, they live in a small barren room in the home of her aunt and uncle, barely accepted by them or the village. When her mother dies, Makepeace is sent to the home of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, where she becomes a kitchen skivvy. Makepeace, an illegitimate child, has the Fellmotte gene, one that enables them to possess ghosts. The Fellmottes have dangerous and dark plans for her — ones that will consume her in their obsession to preserve the family line, the Fellmotte power and property. Not everyone is an enemy, though, and she makes plans with her half-brother James to escape Grizehayes. After many failed attempts, the chaos of the Civil War gives them the perfect opportunity to escape. When James lets her down, Makepeace finds herself in an even more precarious situation, but with the help of a bear and her overwhelming desire to survive she begins a journey across England to find a document worth more than gold, a document that will grant her freedom from the Fellmotte family and ensure their fall from grace. Like all good mysteries, there are plenty of turns and forks on the road, and those that help and those that hinder. Yet the more intriguing elements are those that involve the ghosts or the souls that are possessed, some of which are malevolent, others helpful. Makepeace is an excellent heroine and her relationship with Bear is endearing. A story about power, possession and purpose.
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilt upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948/49 Nakba. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for each of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerricans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience of that day, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is no there but near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book.
This superbly well written novel is comprised of two reflecting parts: the first narrating the fate of a young woman abducted by soldiers during the 1948/49 Nakba; the second telling of a contemporary woman's obsession with finding out more about this 'minor detail' of history. Shibli is interested in how the past remains in and shapes the present, and in how mechanisms of power harm both the wielders and the victims of that power.
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On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $33
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The New Directions edition of this volume is due later this week, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.
The Way to Colonos: Sophocles retold by Kay Cicellis $38
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone — a stylish woman in her thirties —wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II. As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work-written in English, her second language, offers particularly "shocking insight into the secret lives of young women" and is only now "free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes. … The book is written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master." [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Myths of meaning.
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis $38
A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality. Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it's not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered. [Hardback]
”Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.” —Neel Mukherjee
”Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light — now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined — Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.” —Chris Power
”With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that's serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.” —Tom McCarthy
”The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka's.” —Zadie Smith
”A subtle and courageous writer.” —Ali Smith
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $30
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a collection of prose poems that invites the reader to consider the relationships between internalised beliefs and the development of illness, drawing on psychology texts and the language of self-help, and the exploration of character traits and dramatic tropes. What are the appropriate emotions. Even with a map, it was difficult to determine. An ache which means let go. If she didn't have the thought, she wouldn't have the feeling. Wheels fall off to create drama. Through shifting frames of reference, wordplay, aphorism, and inversions, the poems reform, unfold and rebound to create a collage of melancholy and comic transformations. One thing leads to a mother. Butcher-McGunnigle's poems explore the relationship between unexamined subconscious thinking and physical and mental health, resisting singular, fixed meanings and inviting the reader to reflect on their own experiences. [Paperback]
"These poems are compressed and layered like paper folded to its tightest square. Here is an exquisite restraint that feels almost brutal, that always manages to surprise. This book has a rare force." — Sholto Buck
"Butcher-McGunnigle transforms malady into force; a leaf in a whirlwind, splitting memory from frame…this collection forms a prelude to her stunning body of work." —Autumn Royal
"Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a prequel to Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s catalogue, one that enriches all you’ve read from her before. Bleakness and a light touch. It all comes back. I read it in one sitting and it felt like being spelled." —Hollen Singleton
”Butcher-McGunnigle’s work is fulll of moments that, to me, are perfect — consummately whole, exactly right, every element in glowering harmony, as densely fixed as a neutron star." —Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Sydney Review of Books
"Butcher-McGunnigle is compulsively readable, hilarious, wonderful — a master of the whiplash turn, the dark plunge." —Ashleigh Young
>>Read an excerpt.
>>About the writing of this book.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.
Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $33
We are made up of stories, but which ones belong to us? What are the boundaries between our bodies and the outside world? Autobiography of a Marguerite is a profound, book-length poetic work about chronic illness, family dysfunction, and identity, and how they can shape one another. The narrator struggles with the effects of her autoimmune illness, and struggles to separate herself from her troubled mother. A doctor tells the narrator that there is 'no cause and no cure' to her ailment, but the book attempts to explore how familial environments might contribute to the development of ill health. Butcher-McGunnigle's experimentation with form overlapping voices, footnotes, fragments, found text and photographs illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, the repressed grief of chronic illness and its disruptive effect on the sufferer's sense of time's passage. The poems make visible the often-hidden experience of disability, and the reader becomes both a witness and an actor, piecing together a narrative that challenges what an autobiography can be. New edition. [Paperback]
"Recursive, clear-eyed and flatly funny, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle captures here all the strangeness, fragility and wry sufferings of a young life." —Jessica Au
"Like nothing else you’ll encounter. A meditation on pain and illness made strange by close proximity, a child and parent leaking into each other. Butcher-McGunnigle has developed a brand new way of creating story to make this stunning work possible." —Pip Adam
”One of the most innovative New Zealand books published in recent years.” —Siobhan Harvey, Booknotes
”Astonishing. This poetry is unlike anything I have seen.” —Paula Green
”A grand achievement. The writing goes to the aching heart of disconnection and of longing for repair. Butcher-McGunnigle has created a crooked beauty out of shards.” —Sue Wootton, Takahe
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A note from the author about the book.
A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the radical history of mothering by Elinor Cleghorn $40
Mothers make history. Yet for centuries, patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated acts of growing, birthing, nurturing and loving children to the sidelines, deeming the work of mothering to be unworthy of historical enquiry. In A Woman's Work, Elinor Cleghorn retells the story of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, and community leaders who have shaped the course of history. These inspiring figures include Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval nun and mystic with pioneering views about the maternal body; Mary Wollstonecraft, who laid the intellectual groundwork to release motherhood from male control; and Sojourner Truth, who drew attention to the abhorrent treatment of mothers under chattel slavery. Beginning in the ancient world, we learn how each era constructed its own idealised notion of motherhood — from the misogynistic dogma of the early church and the stigmatisation of single mothers in 17th century England, all the way through to the post-war myth of the perfectly contented housewife. But we also learn how mothers of all classes and circumstances fought back, and lobbied to be valued, respected and supported — not as reproductive vessels, but as people. From the author of Unwell Women, A Woman's Work is a bold and radical new history of mothering, and a timely reminder that the fight for reproductive justice is far from over. [Paperback]
>>The horrors persist.
>>Women aren’t the solution to an aging population.
Sororicidal by Edwina Preston $38
A punk-gothic historical novel in which sisterhood is the defining experience of two women's lives — and also the potential death of them. Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary's high-handed malice finds a match in Margot's growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero. Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety — and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency — Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation. Sororicidal is the story of womanhood across a convulsive century — and the ordinary lives of two sisters who remain inextricably linked across a lifetime: as mirrors, rivals, and executioners of one another's dreams. It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes. [Paperback]
Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $28
Intricately built and wickedly humorous, this is a novel in five parts, all about one thing: money. From an interview with a child star turned thief to the mysterious death of an employee at a drug manufacturer — or the couple feigning married bliss to keep their inheritance, Small Comfort carefully unravels the value we place on both money and people. What does it really mean to be in debt to someone? How does our financial worth permeate the ways we think and feel? And what do we lose when we supposedly win? Small Comfort skewers its characters, slyly implicating the reader along the way. [Paperback]
”Money makes the world go round and Ia Genberg has a deep, clear-eyed vision of how. The dramatic distinctness of the five stories that make up Small Comfort speaks to the might of Genberg's imaginative powers, while the intricate threads tying them together are testament to her subtleness as a thinker. It couldn't work without Kira Josefsson's staggeringly flexible translation, which also stands out for the naturalness of its dialogue and wonderfully rhythmic prose. This duo's writing zings and smarts in all the right places as we see ourselves reflected in the characters, warts and all. Breathtakingly original, profound but with a delicious dose of irreverence.” —2026 International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Not the way it was planned.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) $38
Hana has nothing but she's hopeful. She's fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana's dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that caters to hostesses and their marks, small-time crooks, men with low morals and deep pockets, and anyone down on their luck. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible. But in the seedy streets of Setagaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana's hope, her optimism, and her drive, will be tested to the limit. Twenty years later, Kimiko is on trial. Now Hana must wrestle with her own actions, and face their devastating consequences. [Paperback]
”I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami
”Mieko Kawakami is a genius.” —Naoise Dolan
>>Sisterhood, survival, and finding hope in the darkness.”
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín $32
In the stories collected in The News from Dublin Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home. A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America. Three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia. [Paperback]
”Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for.” —Clare Clark, Guardian
>>A complex business.
>>How evil is tolerated.
The Last Witch on the Knock by Aimée MacDonald $38
”Wouldn't you rather be a witch than a victim? I didn't realise those were my only options.” In need of a fresh start, Thomasin leaves her toxic boyfriend, absent father and empty friendships to spend the summer in the Scottish Highlands with her eccentric Aunt Agnes and stern little cousin, Nina. But amidst the sprawling fields and ragged hills thrums a secret that has cursed the land for generations. 300 years earlier, Kate McNiven labours in The Big House by the Knock hill, wishing for a brighter future far away from the lecherous clutches of her master, the Laird. When she is exiled as a witch for refusing to succumb to his advances, Kate finds the escape she so desperately seeks in Thomasin, whose vulnerable body becomes her unwilling host. In the thin place between centuries, through a pulsing wound that bleeds out history, the truth of the past is finally ready to be revealed. [Paperback]
”Tense, harsh and haunting, The Last Witch on the Knock explores toxic relationships in myriad ways. Through a blend of body horror and poetic insight, Aimee creates a compelling tale.” —Lynsey May
”A lyrical exploration of identity and shared trauma, reminding readers of the power of folk. MacDonald's writing is unflinchingly visceral.” —Amy Twigg
”Mesmeric from the first page. A twisting, haunting tale where the present thrums with the bloody heartbeat of the past. MacDonald's prose is poetic and sharp.” —Lucy Steeds
”The Last Witch on the Knock does witches differently; here, a feral, intimate honesty lights the pyres.” —Charlotte Tierney
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10 April 2026