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12 December 2025
A conversation about hoarding, about collecting scraps of material and balls of wool, lead me to this delightful book. If you are a maker you will understand the problem of, and the desire for, a wardrobe just for fabric, wool, art supplies, and other ‘useful’ materials. You will also know the beauty of changing something from an remnant into an item — something that has a new lease of life, whether that is practical or simply to behold. If I could do one thing, and one thing only, it would be to make. Current sewing projects include recutting a vintage velvet dress (some rips, some bicycle chain grease) into a new dress, and, recently finished, a long-forgotten half-made blouse — fabric a bedsheet from the op shop. So I felt completely at home in Bound. And I devoured it with pleasure over one weekend. This is a book about a sewing journey, and a discovery journey. It’s about the end of things and the beginning of things. All those threads that tangle, yet also weave a story about who we are, where we come from and, even possibly, needle piercing the cloth, stitching a path to somewhere new. Maddie Ballard’s sewist diary follows her life through lockdown, through a relationship, from city to city, and from work to study, all puncutated with pattern pieces, scissors cutting and a trusty sewing machine. Each essay focuses on a garment she is making, from simple first steps — quick-unpick handy—to more complex adventures and later to considered items that incorporate her Chinese heritage. These essays capture the joys and frustrations of making, the dilemmas of responsible making (ethically and environmentally), the pleasure of repurposing and zero-waste sewing, and our relationship with clothes to make us feel good, to capture who we are, and conversely to obscure us. The essays are also a candid and thoughtful exploration of personal relationships and finding one’s place in the world. The comfort of one’s clothes and its metaphorical companion of being comfortable in one’s own skin brushing up sweetly here, like a velvet nap perfectly aligned. The book is dotted with sweet illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright of Ballard’s sewing projects, reels of thread, and pesky clothes moths. The essays are cleverly double meaning in many cases. ‘Ease’ being a sewing term, but also in this essay’s case an easing into a new flat; ‘Soft’ the feel of merino, but also the lightness of moths’ wings; ‘Undoing’ the errors that happen in sewing and in life that need a remake. There’s ‘Cut One Pair’ and' ‘Cut One Self’. This gem of a book is published by a small press based in Birmingham, The Emma Press, focused on short prose works, poetry and children’s books. Bound: A Memoir of Making and Re-Making is thoughtful, charming and a complete delight. What seems light as silk brings us the hard selvedge of decisions, the needle prick of questions, and the threads that both fray and bind. Bravo Maddie Ballard and here’s to many more sewing and writing projects.
In Suicide, Levé ostensibly addresses a childhood friend, or, rather, the memory of a childhood friend, who committed suicide twenty years ago, at the age of twenty-five. Levé says he has felt closer to his friend after his suicide than he ever did in the days of their friendship, and speculates about how death has rewritten his friend’s life: "I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act," the single detail that retrospectively subsumes all other possible narratives. The text of the novel (so to call it) takes the form of memories and observations structured in a seemingly casual way, all in a second person register, which seems at times projected onto the reader, or a possible reader, but which, as the book proceeds and Levé provides more and more intimations that he could not have had access to, the reader disconcertingly begins to realise is referring to Levé himself, the author addressing himself in the second person register and in the past tense (even when referring to the present), denying his own agency, opening himself up to his own scrutiny (which can hardly be thought of as self-scrutiny), distancing himself from himself, denying his identity at every opportunity and thus excusing himself from responsibility for the arc of his own narrative. The text is full of ironies, self-obsession and slippery logic ("You don't make me sad, but solemn. I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive.") and is stubbornly opaque about the specific motivations (if any) for the suicide (other than simultaneously authentic/inauthentic statements such as “The desire to live could not be dictated to you. The moments of happiness you knew came unbidden. You could understand their sources, but you could not reproduce them.”). Levé is under no illusions about the effects of suicide on the bereaved, but is himself numbed to these effects: “Your regrets would disappear along with you: your survivors would be alone in carrying the pain of your death. The selfishness of your death displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s commotion.” A statement such as this is riven: it is at once both undeniable and intolerably wrong. “Everything I write is true, but so what?” wrote Levé of himself in Autoportrait (>you can read my reviews of this book here). Ten days after delivering the manuscript of this book to his publisher, Levé committed suicide (this was also the last day that he and I were exactly the same age). Was Levé's suicide implied by the various strands of his literary and photographic work, all of which seeks to undermine the stability of 'identity' and 'authenticity', or did he make his suicide the "foundational act" of his life, the detail that retrospectively subsumes and rewrites all other possible narratives? In what ways did he take control (from us) of our reading of his work by his act of self-erasure?
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm”. "Heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”. And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and political essays, through today.
A selection of books from our shelves. 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.
Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben $35
In the ‘middle of life’ — although this is only thirty-six — and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last. The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw. [Paperback with French flaps]
”So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer's mind.” —Isabel Quigly, Financial Times
”Her heroine is a solitary woman who tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written.” —Hilary Bailey, The Guardian
”Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. An achievement to celebrate.” —Maggie Gee, The Observer
”From the publisher that brought Ann Quin back into print comes another lost classic from an English visionary. Rosalind Belben's work is both terrific and disconcerting, an essential read for lovers of extraordinary fiction.” —Camilla Grudova
>>”Rivals anything by Virginia Woolf.”
>>Writing ugly.
>>The foreplay of wordplay.
>>No ticks in the long grass.
Lorem Ispum by Oli Hazzard $40
Lorem Ipsum consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means ‘following the brush'. This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely. Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of ‘shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken. [Paperback]
>>Should a novel avoid the processes of its own composition?
>>Technology, attention, and the extremely long paragraph.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez $42
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories — literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma's characters unspool their secrets. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States. The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing." —New York Times
>>From the mouth to the page.
Ice by Anna Kavan $28
Ice will soon cover the entire globe. As the glacial tide creeps forward, society breaks down. Hurtling through the frozen chaos is a nameless narrator, seeking the white-haired girl he once loved, desperate to rescue her - or perhaps to annihilate her. Through nightmarish, ever-shifting scenes, she flees him and his powerful enemy, the Warden. But none of them can outrun the ice. Anna Kavan's masterwork is an apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence, rendered in unforgettable, propulsive, hallucinatory prose. [New paperback edition]
”A strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that with foreboding and deep compassion maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation.” —Jeff VanderMeer
”One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.” —New Yorker
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Self-medication.
Suicide by Édouard Levé (translated from French by Jan Steyn) $33
Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel — it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend — perhaps real, perhaps fictional — more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favour of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend: it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life. Back in print at last. [New paperback edition]
"With a precision that can be frightening, Leve describes a man who is wholly alienated from the consolations of the outside world, beholden only to the tiniest shifts in his perception and sensations. As the narrator's revelations about his friend's inner life become increasingly complex, the reader comes to see "tu" as a stand-in for the narrator's own self, an externalised form that allows him empathic clarity about the most disturbed parts of his own being." —Hannah Tennant-Moore, n+1 Magazine
"If this irony-laden book contains a message to the reader it may well be this: 'You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.' If one were to substitute 'reading' and 'reader' with 'creating' and 'creator' one might conclude that it's possible to read Suicide not simply as a veiled cri de coeur by a man looking to air the messy circumstances for which he took his life, but as a controlled work of art by a conceptual artist who wanted to leave us with a lasting document from which we might, paradoxically, muster the strength to carry on." —Christopher Byrd, The Guardian
"Suicide is both fiction and final, nonfictional statement, both novel and memoir. It is we, as readers and participants, who stand at the center of these two mirrors hung opposite each other and find the author infinitely, diminishingly multiplied. Though we'll probably never know whether Levé — who in addition to being a writer was a successful photographer with an interest in conceptual art — killed himself to bring his grim metafiction full circle, it is all but impossible not to read his haunting Suicide in this troubling light." —Laird Hurt, Bookforum
"Suicide reads like a photo album. This is no surprise, considering that Levé was as much an accomplished photographer as he was anything else. The prose is clipped, almost terse; while each line can be seen to represent a single idea in just the same way a photo in an album represents one moment in time. Suicide is at times beautiful, immensely sad at others, and in more moments than one might want to admit there is the potential in the text to be deeply relatable." —Tom McCartan,Three Percent
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Pulverised non-narratives.
>>Also in stock: Autoportrait.
Equality Is a Struggle: Bulletins from the front line, 2021—2025 by Thomas Piketty $45
In this new volume drawn from his columns for the French newspaper Le Monde, renowned economist Thomas Piketty takes measure of the world since 2021: leaders grappling with the aftershocks of a global pandemic; politics shifting rightward in Europe and America; and wars breaking out and escalating, from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Together with an extended introductory essay arguing that an ecological socialism remains the best hope for global equality, these articles present Piketty's vivid first draft of history—on the rise of China, political upheaval, armed conflict, inequity within and between nations, discrimination, and beyond. Despite the gathering clouds, Piketty continues to find reasons for hope. [Hardback]
"In this compelling book, Piketty advocates for ecological socialism. His vision is ambitious but realistic, being based on a majestic understanding of the history of capitalism and detailed pragmatic knowledge of anti-inequality policies." —Ha-Joon Chang
TELENOVELA by Gonzalo C. Garcia $42
Set in Santiago towards the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, TELENOVELA explores the secret lives of a family swept up in this dark period of Chile's history. There is Lucho: bullied by fellow soldiers for his love of poetry, thwarted in his ambitions to become a writer, unhappy at work. He seems like a loving father. He seems plain loveable, in fact. And maybe he is. But as TELENOVELA unfolds, other things come to light about Lucho that are less easy to indulge — or forgive. There is Ramona, Lucho's wife: tormented by anxiety, overwhelmed by self-loathing and body image problems. As a drama student, Ramona once hoped to become a Telenovela star; she secretly daydreams that she might still get her big break. Guileless, gentle, Ramona seems like an innocent. But is she? Then there is Pablo, their son: dreamy, gentle, eager to make friends, to form his own band and write some worthwhile songs. Desperate to be cool. And increasingly, just desperate. Gonzalo C. Garcia makes us feel for these characters and want to understand them — but, as the novel unfolds, come to the frightening realisation of what it really means to have such understanding. And so it is that deeply human and deeply personal stories of mislaid ambition, failure and intergenerational trauma take on national — and universal — significance. [Paperback]
“A unique and breath-taking talent.” —Scarlett Thomas
“Consistently funny — and unexpectedly sympathetic.” —The Guardian
>>Resisting cliche through prose.
There’s a Horse in the Art Gallery! by Sarah Pepperle $25
A delightful new board book introducing young children to the animals living in the art gallery! Full-page colour artworks by amazing artists from Aotearoa and around the world, warm and friendly read-aloud texts, animal names in English and te reo Maori, paintings, sculpture, photography and prints from the 1700s to the present. Artists include Fatu Feu’u, Bill Hammond, Louise Henderson, Eileen Mayo, Ron Mueck, Balthazar Ommeganck, Ani O’Neill, Michael Parekōwhai, Agnes Miller Parker, Michael Smither, Ethel Spowers, Michel Tuffery, Francis Upritchard. [Board book]
>>Look inside!
First Encounters: The early Pacific and European narratives of Abel Tasman’s 1642 voyage by Rüdiger Mack $60
Rüdiger Mack seeks to rebalance our perspective by focusing upon the expedition led by Abel Tasman, in 1642-1643, which ‘discovered’ Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and New Britain, and visited Tonga, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. It also includes the first-ever complete English translation of an important resource for the voyage — from Nicolaes Witsen's 1705 book Noord en Oost Tartarye — as well as preserves excerpts and illustrations from the journal of Tasman's chief navigator, Francois Jacobsz. Rüdiger Mack has uncovered new and fascinating details around this extraordinary exploration, from the reasons for its secrecy, the competitive environment of 17th century exploration, and new insights on first contacts with the indigenous populations of the wider Pacific. The overarching theme is a new and fresh look at the very first beginnings of New Zealand's shared Māori-Pakeha history. The book covers the background, the planning and the European, Māori and Tongan accounts of Abel Tasman’s voyage in 1642-43 during which he was the first European to see Tasmania, New Zealand and several of the Tonga islands. The book is ground-breaking in several ways: —It is the first book that brings together all six known Māori oral history accounts of the first contact between Māori and Europeans. —The book publishes the first complete English translation of an important Dutch source which has previously been largely ignored. —Delving into art history the book has for the first time been able to identify the artist who copied the 45 illustrations into Tasman’s official account after the return of the expedition to Batavia in 1643. —It discusses a Maori place name on the West Coast of the South island which probably refers to Maori seeing Dutch ships at anchor there in December 1642. —The book identifies an archaeological site in Golden Bay, South Island which is connected with Tasman’s brief stay there. —The book discusses the authenticity of two well-known supposed paintings of Abel Tasman and suggests another portrait as a more likely depiction of the famous navigator. [Hardback]
One Pot: 100 simple recipes to cook together by Amandine Bernardi $70
The casserole dish or Dutch oven is an essential kitchen tool for creating convenient meals without compromising on taste. In One Pot, author Amandine Bernardi presents 100 effortless recipes featuring vibrant international dishes. This attractive cookbook offers a range of recipes for every occasion, from quick weeknight dinners to special gatherings. Home cooks will discover wholesome dishes like Ratatouille and Mujadara with Cauliflower; mains, including Beef Bourguignon, Coq au Vin, and Moroccan Fish Stew; and sweet treats, such as Baked Apples with Honey. With a guide to equipment, serving suggestions, and dietary symbols designating vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, and nut-free options, One Pot is suitable for novice and experienced cooks alike. [Hardback]
”As you may have guessed, every recipe in the book can be made in a simple Dutch oven — don't expect a sink full of dirty dishes and finicky specialty tools. Instead, you can revel in simple, elegant takes on ratatouille, beef bourguignon, and coq au vin (did we mention Bernardi is French?) without breaking a sweat.” —Katie Couric Media
>>Look inside.
For the People: Resisting authoritarianism, saving democracy by A.C. Grayling $39
Around the world the foundations of democracy, freedom, civil liberties are being eroded — what can be done? Are we living through the end of the democratic moment? The past few decades have revealed a fragile reality. Once liberal countries are turning to authoritarianism, wealthy individuals and corporations are interfering with elections evermore flagrantly, and faith in democracy has plummeted among every demographic. What happened? From gerrymandering and partisanship to corporate interference and tainted donations, A. C. Grayling reveals the forces undermining our democratic ideals and offers some solutions. [Paperback]
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.
I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews)
Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short — sometimes very short — stories. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Pure genius.” — Max Porter
”Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.” — Publishers Weekly
”Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.” — Kirkus Reviews
”Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form. The brevity of The Illiterate alone tells you that this is not her whole story. It is simply the one she tells.” — Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
”For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.” — Missouri Williams, The Nation
>>We can never express precisely what we mean.
>>Deprivation exercises.
>>The uses of illiteracy.
>>The Illiterate.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Notebook.
Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson $55
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as 'Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code. Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art. [Hardback]
”Joyously, brilliantly intelligent. In Wilson, Spark has met her true match.” —Anne Enright
”A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique — something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust. Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down.” —Lisa Hilton
”Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam — and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
”I raced through Frances Wilson's whip-smart Electric Spark.” —Ali Smith, Guardian
>>Odd things happened when she was around.
>>World-beating buster-upper.
A State of Siege by Janet Frame $37
After the death of her invalid mother, a retired art teacher leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerising exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live. SoS was first published in 1966, and is now back in print with an introduction by Chris Kraus. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Intensely personal, Frame’s writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'' —Hilary Mantel
>>Woman alone!
>>Wouldn’t you like to be normal?
>>The book was made into a film by Vincent Ward (1978).
>>Some other books by Janet Frame.
The Good Economy by Craig Renney $20
”The problems we face are a consequence of the economic model we have built up in Aotearoa over the past forty years. But that model is a choice — one that we can change if we wish to.” Aotearoa is grappling with tough economic challenges. The Good Economy asks what kind of economy we want – and who it should serve. Through sharp analysis that centres the experiences of New Zealanders, economist Craig Renney explores the values shaping our current system and asks what it would take to build a better one. Grounded, accessible and hopeful, this text invites readers to rethink the purpose of economic policy — and to imagine a future with wellbeing, fairness and opportunity at its core. [Paperback]
>>Other BWB Texts.
Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah $25
A critical examination providing clarity on the intertwined relationships of global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression, and challenges readers to rethink their understanding of Palestine. Dismantling the simplistic narratives that dominate mainstream discourse, Hanieh, Knox and Ziadah present a nuanced materialist analysis grounded in anti-imperialism. The authors argue that the Palestinian situation cannot be fully understood without considering the broader historical and regional dynamics of Western imperialism and capitalist accumulation. By integrating the roles of imperialism, fossil capitalism, and racialisation, this book offers a thorough critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project and the unwavering support it receives from Western powers. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>We teach life, sir.
Rock, Paper, Incisors (A ‘Skunk & Badger’ story) by Amy Timberlake, illustrated by Jon Klassen $28
Skunk’s and Badger’s life together has an easy rhythm — Skunk cooks! Badger cleans! — when they take in two orphaned rat pups, Zeno and Zephyr. Badger is working on an Important Rock Work article for Rock Hound Weekly and needs focus, focus, focus to write it. But how much trouble could two tiny rats really be? Some scheduling, a few strategically placed naps, and all will be well! But it's winter, and nothing goes to plan. Hibernation threatens every routine. Articles refuse to write themselves. And rats in the rock room? It will take a North Twist village to raise these rats! Featuring cosy drawings and full-colour pictures by bestselling artist Jon Klassen, Amy Timberlake's delightfully off-kilter adventure explores the complexity of friendship and the meaning of family in a wintery world where chickens wear parkas and Yard Sheep host spaghetti dinners. And wait! Is that a dinosaur? [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Read Stella’s reviews of the other ‘Skunk & Badger’ stories.
Legenda: The real women behind the myths that shaped Europe by Janina Ramirez $40
Ramirez peels back the layers of time to reveal how the identities of real women have been co-opted by those intent on crafting national identities. Their names are well known, and summaries of their achievements have been recited in classrooms for decades, but medieval women like Joan of Arc, Lady Godiva and Isabella of Castile have been misrepresented, their stories twisted and weaponised. Meanwhile, ground-breaking 18th and 19th-century women who blazed a trail through revolutionary Europe have been forgotten, their legacies too easily dismissed or ignored. Questioning established narratives and searching for the real women behind the legends, Ramirez interrogates what defines a nation and who gets to build it, shining a light on how history is so often hijacked to serve the ideological and political interests of the present. [Paperback]
"Janina Ramirez fearlessly deconstructs the dangerous historical myths and legends that have been shamelessly created to stoke division and hatred, finding complexity, truth and inspiration in this stunning — and shockingly relevant — new analysis of medieval history.” —Alice Roberts
”This is a history like no other, a top-down story of nationhood and mythology, a dazzling assessment of the past through the lens of the present and a rallying cry for the importance of history. Most of all, it's a plea to consider the real flesh-and-blood women who made the world rather than their sanitised, mythologised counterparts. A fabulous, invigorating and beguiling read.” —Kate Mosse
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt $38
For the first time since university, James and Roland's paths through life — one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering — began to cross. James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he's still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him. Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but a knack for derailing his own attempts to get started in life. When a chance encounter in a pub reunites these old acquaintances, it sets them on an unpredictable course through the upheavals of the 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter. Drayton and Mackenzie is an immediately engaging and ultimately moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life. [Paperback]
"Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon's friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)." —The Financial Times
>>Tidal power.
The Transformations by Andrew Pippos $38
In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper-it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a poetic streak and a painful past, George is one of nature's loners. As George grapples with shifting newsroom dynamics, the legacy of clerical abuse at his childhood school resurfaces, and a late-night encounter with a journalist named Cassandra begins to unravel his carefully managed solitude. As his colleagues depart and the final decline of the paper plays out, George is obliged to navigate an affair, learn to care for a daughter who has only recently become part of his life, and reckon with his own childhood trauma. The Transformations is a witty, melancholic, and very human novel about the stories we tell of ourselves. With an anthropologist's eye for detail and a novelist's grasp of emotional complexity, he explores generational change, grief, guilt, and the strange intimacy of workplace life. [Paperback]
”Andrew Pippos is one of Australia's best novelists. The Transformations shows his perfect emotional pitch, his gift for folding big things into small baskets of domestic life in prose that goes straight to the heart. Who knew he could write another novel as good as Lucky's? Here it is.” — Malcolm Knox
”In this intelligent, disarming and capacious novel, Andrew Pippos pulls the covers back on the public and private self. As we follow the gloriously messy lives of George, Cassandra and Elektra, we're reminded that the antidote to solitude lies in what we long for or desire. With its mysterious undertow, its delight in human fallibility, its backdrop of momentous social and technological change, The Transformations is a searching, fate-filled epic for our times.” —Mireille Juchau
”A novel of great clarity, precision and feeling. Whenever I wasn't reading it I wished I was.” —Robbie Arnott
Sabzi: Fresh vegetarian recipes for every day by Yasmin Khan $57
Irresistible vegetarian and vegan recipes inspired by award-winning food writer Yasmin Khan s travels — and the cooking she does at home for family and friends. Lifting its name from the Persian word for herbs , Sabzi brings you more than 80 accessible plant-forward recipes that celebrate the best of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian flavours. From bountiful salads to fragrant soups, colourful mezze, and heart-warming mains, Khan invites home cooks to make delicious meals that are good for the health of both people and the planet, while staying connected to the traditional food cultures that make us who we are. With easy-to-make recipes that put vibrant vegetables at the heart of a meal, dishes in the book include- Halloumi Lasagne; Stuffed Aubergines with Pomegranates, Walnuts and Feta; Smoky Tofu Shakshuka; Sweet Potatoes with Pistachio and Mint Pesto; Rhubarb and Cardamom Tart... and many more. [Hardback]
“An invitation into Yasmin's treasure trove of a kitchen, Sabzi is a celebration of the life-affirming and nourishing power of plants. In the world of food, Yasmin Khan is a beacon of humanity and light. This generosity and kindness is represented on every page of Sabzi, resplendent with bountiful vegetable dishes that beg to be eaten and shared. There isn't a recipe that I don't want to devour!” —Hetty Lui McKinnon
”You need this book in your life. Yasmin Khan comes to our rescue with Sabzi, packed as it is with bright, fresh, faff-free recipes.” —Nigella Lawson
”Pure poetry and joy. When I ask people what they're cooking, Yasmin's name always comes up.” —Meera Sodha
>>Look inside.
>>Food is about connection.
>>Off to Sabzi school.
Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My adventures in neurodiversity by Robin Ince $40
A personal exploration of anxiety, ADHD and neurodiversity, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal reminds us all — no matter how weird we feel — that it’s OK to be a little different. We all are. What if being a bit weird is actually entirely normal? What if sharing our internal struggles wasn’t a sign of weakness, but strength? For over thirty years, broadcaster and comedian Robin Ince has entertained thousands in person and on air. But underneath the surface, a whirlwind was at play — a struggle with sadness, concentration, self-doubt and near-constant anxiety. But then he discovered he had all the hallmarks of ADHD and his stumbling blocks became stepping stones. In Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, Robin uses his own experiences to explore the neurodivergent experience and to ask what the point of ‘being normal’ really is. Packed with personal insights, intimate anecdotes and interviews with psychologists, neuroscientists and many neurodivergent people he has met along the way, this is a quirky and witty dive into the world of human behaviour. [Paperback]
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5 December 2025
I entered The Rose Field with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. The long-awaited third instalment of ‘The Book of Dust’ trilogy has been much anticipated by fans of Lyra Belacqua and her daemon Pantalaimon. Six books and several novellas later, we finally are in Lyra’s world again, and at 600+pages the final book is quite a journey. We left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth in a dangerous place without Pan, and intent on reaching the Red Building, on finding her daemon and her imagination. Lyra is now twenty, and in many ways takes a more measured approach to her journey, sometimes heeding the advice of her guide, but still the Lyra of Northern Lights remains — now more determined than headstrong. Yet the same questions prevail. Who can be trusted? Why are the Magisterium making alliances and gathering an army? What is the connection between Dust and the red building? And who wants to covet it and who wants to destroy it, and why? And where is Pan? As Lyra Silvertongue and Pantalaimon travel, one across land and sea, the other high into the mountains, we meet the gold-loving gryphons, the witches return, and Lyra has a strange encounter with an angel. Pullman draws us to characters both appealing and not, he creates situations where the intentions of some are unclear, and puts us inside the minds of some we would like to escape. Like Lyra, we are bound to move forward towards the questions that need stories, rather than answers. Along the way there are intriguing characters. The charming and powerful Mustafa Bey, a merchant who holds in his palm all the intricacies of connection and trade throughout the region. Malcolm Polstead returns — scholar, spy, artisan, and protector of Lyra. While there is no Serafina Pekkala, there are other witches as admirable, and there are the gold-loving gryphons. But best of all, and my favourite charcaters of The Rose Field, are Pan and Asta. The daemons are the heroes of this book. Yes, there is adventure, danger, crazed autocrats (Delamare is a fanatic), there is disorder in places and in people (Olivier Bonneville being the most damaged and possibly the most dangerous), there is the emotionally charged relationship between Lyra and Malcolm, and the possibility/impossibility of a future for them, and as always the question which will always remain, even at the conclusion, of the windows to the other worlds. What do they mean? Why they are feared by some, yet strike curiosity in others? And for others are portals that stoke their power and greed. As Lyra sees the world in all its destruction, can she also harness the good in it?
As with all high anticipated ‘finals’ there is commentary galore, and I avoided this until I closed the back cover. I was curious to find some disappointed — they wanted to come full circle back to the stories of a youthful Lyra. A sentimental journey which I was pleased was avoided. (In fact, there were unexpected twists, yet all in keeping with the essence of the series.) While others felt the conversations about consciousness and self were overplayed (strange — as this has always been a core aspect of the series, especially considering the relationship between a person and their daemon). Another theme that annoyed some was the focus on the environmental destruction due to greed and power. This again, is a core aspect of the whole series. In Northern Lights, what they were doing in the north, through either the desire for wealth or scientific discovery created a constant tension between the greater good and the short-term ill effects for some. I was pleased to see the concept of Dust still held that mysterious quality, now joined in memory with the highly sought-after rose oil, and the beauty of the roses although we only encounter this in myth. Curiosity remains, and like all good stories, there is no ending, and the possibilities for interpretation are endless.
A puzzle, he said, noticing that I was attempting a rather easy and common sort of puzzle, one which I nonetheless was finding challenging, possibly due to the fact that he was observing me, a puzzle I was in any case doing only to fill in the time as I waited for him to stop talking, a puzzle is a poor sort of puzzle because everyone recognises it as a puzzle, he said, unlike language, which is a stronger sort of puzzle because it is not obvious whether it is a puzzle or not. I knew better than to ask him what he meant by this statement, partly because I didn’t really want to encourage him to deliver one of his long-winded explanations but mainly because I knew that once he had made a statement like that he would deliver one of his long-winded explanations whether he was asked to explain it or not; it seemed not to occur to him that any long-winded explanation delivered by him might not be received with the enthusiasm with which it was delivered. At least it was good to see him enthusiastic. He had just finished reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, and was now, it seemed, ready to explain it to me, although not yet having finished it had not stopped him explaining it to me as he was reading it, or at least from frequently exclaiming about it in such a way that was not sufficiently coherent to pass as an explanation, not that his explanations were in themselves generally in any case coherent. Parade, he explained, splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distil, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations (here he made that irritating gesture in the air with both hands about and throughout the phrase as if to indicate that if anybody were to transcribe the phrase they should put it in inverted commas (even though italics would be to my mind more appropriate)), the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the intimate and societal scales, or so he said. Parade, he said, continued Cusk’s project of the ‘Outline Trilogy’, of withdrawing the narratorial involvement from the novel, sometimes perfecting an entirely non-participatory, characterless ‘we’, without assuming, or presuming, really, access to the minds of any of the characters other than as evidenced by their actions or their words. “To see without being seen: there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation,” he read suddenly from a place he had marked in the book. Cusk achieves a wonderfully clean and perfectly flat style, he said, achieving an impeccable neutrality, almost an anonymity, on the most passionate and involving subjects, reporting conversations without contributing to them, but from a near perspective, like the parent in the novel filming her child in the school play so closely and so exclusively that, at least in her representation of it, the play itself made no sense other than that contingent upon the performance of her child. “Pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity, reveals the pathos of identity,” he read again, or had memorised, or was pretending to read or to have memorised in order to give his opinions more authority. There is no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive, he shouted, I think now lost to his own metastasising speculations, at best only barely suppressed, no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive other than as they exist in language! There are no persons, no characters, he said, and I think he was referring to our lived reality as much as to the book that he had read. It reminds me, he said, calming a little, of Nathalie Sarruate's Planetarium, in that persons are unimportant or are at least shown to be entirely constructed by phrases and thoughts and attitudes clustering together and adhering to each other, a phenomenon that is more the province of language than a property of any living actuality. Again, the impulses, motivations and attitudes that may or may not exist in the unconscious, so to call it, he said, or in the preconscious, and we cannot say anything about these states, which cannot be said even to be states because to do so would be to make them or at least their existence to some extent conscious, he claimed, these impulses, motivations and attitudes require and are also formed by the language that is used to express them in order to be expressed. Was he even making sense, I wondered, but he did not pause, seemingly untroubled by such a possibility. Cusk’s practice, kicking away the novelistic crutches, so to call them, he said, removing the distractions of plot, the illusions of character, or at least by demonstrating that plot is a distraction and character an illusion, helps us to see more clearly, to be both present and not present, both involved and uninvolved, both when reading a novel and when reading our own lives, for want of a better term to call them. Language contains the inclinations, he said, that we usually and by mistake apply to persons. I suppose that this is what he may have meant when he spoke of language being a puzzle of a stronger sort, but he did not give me a chance to ask him this. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels, he continued, and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction, Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. I exercised my concentration, finished my rather easy and common sort of puzzle, which at least was readily identifiable as a puzzle, and left the room despite his continuing explanation.
After the death of her invalid mother, a retired art teacher leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerising exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live. SoS was first published in 1966, and is now back in print.
”Intensely personal, Frame’s writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'' —Hilary Mantel
A selection of books from our shelves. 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 Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş $29
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love. [Paperback]
>>Building a bespoke culture.
>>The melancholic textures of feeling alive.
John Reynolds: The Lost Hours by Laurence Simmonds $85
The book frames and documents a series of paintings and collected associated writings from John Reynolds’s Lost Hours project. This idiosyncratic investigation delves into the mysterious 28-hour disappearance of Colin McCahon, a renowned New Zealand artist, in autumn 1984. The event occurred on the eve of McCahon’s major retrospective launch at the Sydney Biennale. The project not only pays homage to McCahon but also explores themes of time, memory, and the impact of dislocation on artistic consciousness. The book can be started either at the dark end or the bright end, with McCahon caught somehow in the pincers between the two. Impressive, beguiling, and nicely produced. [Wrappered paperback]
>>Look inside!
Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry $40
”There was relief, and there was loss — it was the saddest thing we'd ever seen, and the best thing we had ever done.” This is the story of the last days of Sarah Perry's father-in-law David's life, and also in its way the story of all our lives, and what we have in common. David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man — he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses — but his disease progressed so quickly that often they were alone with him. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief — it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. [Paperback]
”What a luminously beautiful book, an instant classic. Every page is suffused with such honesty, tenderness and love. Few people have written about dying with such clear-eyed accuracy and immense humanity. Never flinching, never sugar-coating, Sarah has captured brilliantly how caring for someone you love in their final days can upend everything you thought you knew about living. Please read this book. It may very well change how you live.” —Rachel Clarke
”I have just sat and read Sarah's wonderful book, nodding and agreeing with so many tiny details that she has noticed and reflected on with a writer's eye and a loving daughter-in-law's heart. Just beautiful. I hope her luminous writing will console and encourage her readers, all of whom are mortals. This book is a slice of reality that comforts even as it confronts us. It is a book filled with love and human frailty, and I was spellbound.” —Kathryn Mannix
Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces $39
Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from - the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain. Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet. [Paperback]
>>Life and language split open.
>>Cascading generations.
>>Great expectations.
>>Metaphorical breakdown.
>>Caleb Klaces’s latest book, Mr Outside, is also remarkable.
Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix $38
Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; ponytails are chopped off; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure. Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists' slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their eminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island? Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. [Paperback]
>>Gleeful scorn on the pretensions of contemporary literary life.
Lost Evangeline (A ‘Norendy’ tale) by Kaye DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall $28
When a shoemaker discovers a tiny girl (as small as a mouse!) in his shop, he takes her in, names her Evangeline, and raises her as his own. The shoemaker’s wife, however, fears that Evangeline has bewitched her husband, so when an opportunity arises to rid herself of the girl, she takes it. Evangeline finds herself far from her adopted father and her home, a tiny girl lost in the wide world. But she is brave, and she is resourceful, and with the help of those she meets on her journey—including a disdainful and self-satisfied cat—she may just find her way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>The other Norendy tales (they are not a sequence; they can be read in any order!).
>>Read Stella’s review of The Puppets of Spelhorst.
>>Read Stella’s review of The Hotel Balzaar.
All Consuming: Why we eat the way we eat now by Ruby Tandoh $45
Being into food — following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it — is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, making sense of this electrifying new era by examining the social, economic, and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and absurdities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh's laser-sharp investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own? [Hardback]
”A fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” —Claudia Roden
”Endlessly inspirational.” —Nigel Slater
>>Endless hype queues.
>>Too many recipes already.
>>Digested food culture.
Building People by Craig Moller $48
Building People is a playful collection of Ngāti Haua architect Craig Moller's lockdown-era drawings, where buildings come to life with human and animal traits. Blending humour, warmth, and charm, Moller turns architecture into a personal, expressive art form — reminding us that buildings, like drawings, are ultimately about people. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>Cheese scones.
This Way Up: When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Forman $40
Packed with humour and fascinating facts, This Way Up takes a deep dive into the world’s most intriguing and baffling map blunders. From ancient miscalculations to modern mishaps, each chapter uncovers a unique tale of cartographic chaos and the people responsible for it. These aren’t just ordinary mistakes – they are spectacularly wrong maps that tell a story of adventure, error and unexpected humour, with each one offering a new piece to the puzzle of ‘What on earth happened there?’ [Paperback]
”The funniest book on geography ever written.” —Rufus Hound
>>Meet the Map Men.
Japan: An autobiography, II by Peter Shaw $48
Following the success of his first volume, Peter Shaw continues his entertaining musings in answer to the question why he goes to Japan so often. Both novice and seasoned travelers to Japan will find invaluable insights and information to guide them on their next journey. The author takes the reader into rural Japan in the footsteps of the much-travelled poet Basho (1644-1694). Ranging far beyond the usual tourist traps, he explores easily accessible temples and shrines, delights in Japan's unique regional cuisine and engages with interesting people. The nicely presented and illustrated book also considers topics such as the place of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japanese life and unexpected connections between Japanese and Māori culture all from a uniquely New Zealand perspective. It is punctuated with anecdotes, tips, and recipes. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Get the first volume, too!
Behind the Hill by Robin Robilliard $40
Behind The Hill is a social history, recording people’s lives from interviews, from one end of Golden Bay to the other. Every portrayal has something to say about the values and norms of the time. The book follows the revolutionary changes that affected one of New Zealand’s most isolated areas over succeeding decades — with the arrival of hippies, worldly foreigners, IT specialists, retired professionals and bearded environmentalists. Robilliard identifies the advantage to children brought up in the pre-digital age, with little money, but with the freedom to run wild and take risks, to develop character and survival skills. Equally important, life behind the physical and psychological barrier of the Tākaka Hill, has forced residents to become resilient and develop leadership ability, that might not, in easier circumstances, and larger populations, have been discovered. From the author of Hard Country. [Paperback]
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28 November 2025
I thought for a while that horse racing was a sort of sport, and I wondered if there were other sports in which the people participating in them were relatively unknown, horse racing being done in the name of the horses, after all, not in the name of the jockeys, whereas cycle racing is done in the names of the cyclists not in the name of their bicycles, and then I realised that horseracing is not a sport at all, but a kind of competition more akin to marbles, a competition of ownership, in which the jockeys are just what make the horses go, the jockeys are the augmentation of the prowess of the horses with the will of their owners, nothing more, implants, marginal figures along with the other unknown persons whose collective efforts both enable and are obscured by the horses that they serve. But this marginalisation, together with the peripatetic nature of these professions, makes the contained human society of the racecourse backstretch such a fascinating and, for want of a better word, such a human one. In small worlds what would otherwise be small is writ large, and what would otherwise be unnoticed is made clear. Kathryn Scanlan’s wholly remarkable novel Kick the Latch is ostensibly the edited-down text of the Sonia half of a series of interviews between Scanlan and a longtime horse trainer (and subsequently prison guard and later bric-a-brac dealer) named Sonia, conducted between 2018 and 2021. Certainly there is a pellucid quality to these first-person accounts, the voice and language of Sonia are strongly delineated and very appealing to read, and the insights gleaned from them into the life of their narrator, from her hard-scrabble girlhood to her hard-scrabble but colourful life around the racetrack and beyond, are entirely compelling. In these twelve sets of titled anecdotes, Scanlan has succeeded in making herself entirely invisible (the text’s invisible but vital jockey), which shows invisibility to be a cardinal virtue for an author or an editor — and it is uncertain which of these labels applies itself most suitably to Scanlan’s achievement in making this book. Perhaps all good writing is primarily editing, primarily on the part of the writer themselves (and secondarily by any subsequent editor). Anyone can generate any amount of text; it is only the ruthless and careful editing of this text (before and after it is actually written down), the trimming and tightening of text, the removal of all but the essential details and the tuning of the grammatical mechanisms of the text, that produces something worth reading. The virtues of literature are primarily negative. I first came across Scanlan with her first book, the poignant and beautiful Aug 9—Fog, which was made by ‘editing down’ a stranger’s diary found at an estate sale into a small book of universal resonance. Kick the Latch could be said to be an extension of the same project: an applied rigour and unsparing humility by Scanlan that makes something that would otherwise be ordinary and unnoticed — found experiences from unimportant lives, as are all of our lives unimportant — into something so sharp and clear that it touches the reader deeply. What more could we want from literature than this?
Guestbbook is a project, as much as a book. My first Leanne Shapton experience was Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris — a novel about a relationship break-up in the form of an auction catalogue. Then Swimming Studies — a memoir of sorts with essays, photographs and illustrations (a new edition is on its way!) and also her collaborative work with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, Women in Clothes, which is just brilliant and endlessly browseable. But I think Guestbook might top all these. It’s an experience, an art project, a rumination on memory and story-telling, with its collected images and texts and wonderfully strange, clever juxtapositions. These collected pieces are various and endlessly fascinating. In 'Eqalussuaq', a series of black-and-white photographs worthy of old nature magazines of the Greenland shark is captioned with snippets from newspaper items as well as a monologue of culinary requests to the possible chef for a private party sailing trip. 'At the Foot of the Bed', a series of photographs, some from magazine advertising, of empty beds have an eerie presence on the page — disturbing by their silence and strange wanting for someone or something to happen. There’s the story of a traumatised tennis player, Billy Byron, and his imaginary companion who drives him to the brink — a pinprick look at highly driven competitive personalities. It’s no coincidence that this book is subtitled Ghost Stories. There are ghostly apparitions, tales of odd happenings, old houses with haunting fables. Shapton is delving into and creating the unexplained, using memorabilia, found objects (photos and images), reminiscences, resonances and mis-tellings to make us look twice and then make us look again — think again. Her artworks from various projects are interspersed throughout, watercolours, drawings, sculptural and photographic work, and the overall black-and-white printing gives a feeling of timelessness or 'timetrappedness'. In 'The Iceberg as Viewed by Eyewitnesses', she matches drawings (falsely attributed to eyewitnesses of the Titanic sinking) with the incident book from an upmarket restaurant and bar — the complaints and how the staff dealt with the issues, alongside recommendations for more appropriate actions next time. Humour underscores many of the vignettes. What is true and what is real are not considerations in this Guestbook, but the emotions, the philosophical musings, and Shapton’s role as witness of events and medium of ghostly apparitions will delight anyone who likes to look sideways at the world with one eye squinting and a mind wide open to intrigue and play.
When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal. Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art.
"C.C. Rose's genius novel is a book that shows it is possible for a novel to be at once highly original and to fit within an established tradition. We Live Here Now is both accessible and challenging, entertaining the reader with its ridiculous and sinister figures, even as it prompts more intellectual questions about the reality of appearances." —John Self
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.
Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan (translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwoord) $30
Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort — Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous — and much younger — boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot. Awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary prize. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Stuns and illuminates. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world.” —Bryan Washington
”A brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. A wondrous book.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
>>”Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel.”
TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker $33
”Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract? After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves. As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic tour-de-force that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth. [Paperback]
”Brilliantly over-the-top. Barker is known for experiment and brainy whimsy. There could be no better person to write a comedy about art and its discontents. It's a rollercoaster kind of excess, where the best part is that it's too much. Barker seems incapable of putting a foot wrong. This is satire that sees right through you, but forgives you and teaches you to forgive yourself. It's that rare thing, a serious work of art that is also a giddy confection: a vehicle of pure delight.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>We are all weirdos.
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing $38
It is September 1974 and two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova, and a youthful — and beautiful — apprentice is just what he needs. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini's horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising political tensions of Italy's 'Years of Lead', he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn't intend. [Paperback]
”Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet.” —Philip Hoare
”The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn't an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative.” —Celia Paul
”Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end.” —Nigel Slater
”A truly wonderful book.” —Edmund de Waal
”An enchanted tale of an accursed era. In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecitta when its creative masters were at their peak. The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning.” —Lucy Sante
>>Dark mysteries and glittery illusions.
>>Fictionalising a murder.
Significant Others: A collection of texts by frank r. jagoe $45
The world is always speaking to you. Held together by a shared language, all beings are constantly, endlessly chatting away, saying something or other. What this language constitutes may vary, but all matter is alive, and it always has something to say. Significant Others is not a world of magical realism, but a different means of describing the existing world. It offers an opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Other beings feature as metaphors, or omens, but also as fleshly, agential creatures. Often the encounters are erotically charged, using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life. In one story, the protagonist attempts to figure out how to have sex with a bathroom mirror; in another, a catfish drags itself through Piccadilly Circus tube station with an uncomfortable level of intimacy with all the surfaces they come into contact with; a person births a stone from their rectum; a lump of topaz in someone’s brain triggers their depression; a human tries to talk to a limestone cliff using touch; a swan drinks the bathwater of their human lover. This book is a collection of different fictionalised narratives, but across them they chart, somewhat anachronistically, a journey from total withdrawal to reimmersion in the ebb and flow of living, alongside a growing recognition that isolation is never truly possible. Life insists. frank r jagoe’s work is a reclamation of madness and monstrosity in opposition to the exclusionary category of the human. Often it explores communication with other-than-humans: in recognition that we are in community with each other; in acknowledgement of the personhood of other-than-human beings; and in order to displace a western hierarchy that claims humanity as the highest form of existence. They are particularly drawn to considering how madness and monstrosity are defined in relation to language usage, and in opposition to rationality, coherence, and ‘reason’. Highlighting forms of communication beyond words, beyond class-based language, beyond human forms of speech, feels an urgent imperative. Throughout they want to consider whose language is respected, whose language is engaged with, and believed, or even acknowledged. Influenced by medieval lapidary texts, jagoe’s most recent focus has been finding kinship with rocks, and trying to think through how we can communicate across vastly different experiences of time.[Paperback]
”Significant Others is a fully grown and highly original manuscript. It is a remarkable and beautiful piece of writing which forges a new language of material aesthetics to think and write beyond the human. There is a fluency and elasticity of invention here, resonating with the processes of artistic creation and encounter. Exciting, passionate and surprising.” —Bhanu Kapil, Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Price, judges of the 2024 Prototype Prize
Art on My Mind: Visual politics by bell hooks $30
”If one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonisation, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of reclamation.” In a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting and criticizing art and aesthetics in a world increasingly concerned with identity politics. hooks shares her own experience of the transformative power of art whilst exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. She positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be empowering within the Black community. Speaking with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Alison Saar, and examining the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Art on My Mind is a generous and expansive body of work that has become increasingly relevant since it was first published in 1995. [Paperback]
Privatisation and Plunder: Neoliberalism — causes, costs, and alternatives edited by Chris Werry and Richard Werry $30
Privatisation & Plunder lays bare how forty years of neoliberalism reshaped Aotearoa New Zealand more radically than almost any other nation. Privatisation, deregulation and austerity tore through public life, deepening inequality and fuelling today’s crises in housing, work and the cost of living. Bringing together leading voices from academia and activism, this powerful collection exposes the real legacy of the ‘New Zealand Experiment’ — and offers bold, practical alternatives: universal basic income, public ownership, democratic renewal and economic justice. Accessible, provocative and essential, Privatisation & Plunder is both a wake-up call and a vision for a fairer, more hopeful Aotearoa. Contributors: Geoff Bertram, Brett Christophers, Brian Easton, Max Harris, Jane Kelsey, Bill Mitchell, Jacqueline Paul, John Quiggin, Max Rashbrooke, Bill Rosenberg, Guy Standing, Chris Werry, Richard Werry. [Paperback]
Homework by Geoff Dyer $45
In Homework, Geoff Dyer reflects on his childhood and what it means to come of age in England in the 60s and 70s, in a country shaped by the aftermath of the Second World War but accelerating towards change. He was born in Cheltenham in the late fifties, the only child of a dinner lady and a planning engineer. Raised in a working-class area, Geoff and his mates found much joy recreating battles with their beloved Tommy guns, kicking a beachball around until its untimely death, and collecting anything and everything they could find; football cards, conkers and Action Man figures. When Geoff passes his 11-plus exams he gets in to a Cheltenham Grammar School, a school which drastically changes the trajectory of his life. [Hardback]
“Homework is wonderful Geoff-Dyer writing, which we've all learned to crave; something to delight and to move us and to edify us on every page. I find him an irresistible writer.” —Richard Ford
”Moving, atmospheric, truthful, perceptive and hilariously funny — I loved it: a piece of our English history, the story of a vanished time, which feels close at hand but thoroughly gone. What a story. What a great story.” — Tessa Hadley
”Geoff Dyer and I nearly share a name and a birth year. We were born in different countries, however, under different circumstances. No matter. Every page of this exquisite, witty memoir brought back a flood of memories and emotions that seemed to be my own, so lovingly and precisely does Dyer articulate them. A heartfelt book by a supremely intelligent writer.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
>>Catching up.
>>Giving up.
The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the birth of the Anglo-Saxon state, AD 630—918 by Max Adams $55
The eighth century has long been a neglected backwater in English history- a shadowland between the death of Bede and the triumphs of lfred. But before the hegemony of Wessex, the kingdom of Mercia — spread across a broad swathe of central England — was the dynamic heart of a kingship that discovered the means to exercise central political authority for the first time since the Roman empire. That authority was used to construct trading networks and markets; develop economic and cultural links with the Continent, and lay the foundations for a system of co-ordinated defence that lfred would reinvent at the end of the ninth century. Two kings, Thelbald (716-757) and Offa (757-796) dominate the political landscape of the rising power of Mercia. During their reigns, monasteries became powerhouses of royal patronage, economic enterprise and trade. Offa constructed his grandiose dyke along the borders of the warlike Welsh kingdoms and, more subtly, spread his message of political superiority through coinage bearing his image. But thelbald and Offa between them built something with an even more substantial legacy — a geography of medieval England. And they engineered a set of tensions between kingship, landholding and church that were to play out dramatically at the dawn of the Viking Age. [Hardback]
”In this this remarkable book, Max Adams breathes new life into the royal families of the largely forgotten Saxon Kingdom of Mercia, which we can now see played a crucially important role in the foundation of the emerging kingdom of England.” —Francis Pryor
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti, and David Mazzucchelli $45
From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his beloved series, The New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction. In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics. Now the wait is over. The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass, an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist's downfall. And in The Locked Room, another author is experiencing writer's block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel. Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art-directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster's sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Service by John Tottenham $38
In his late forties, John, a failed journalist and failing novelist, finds himself working at a bookshop in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighbourhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances. In between chasing noisy cell-phone users around the shop and wrapping books he hates for wealthy mums he hates even more, John reflects on his fraught relationship with service as an unrepentant outsider in an age of conformity. With dry wit, John Tottenham's debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. [Paperback]
”So heartfelt that we find ourselves howling with laughter because, despite his best efforts, John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity and re-creates himself in the guise of an unforgettable character in fiction.” —Colm Toibin
”The weariest bohemian, with a Keatsian death-drive he somehow keeps outliving, John Tottenham is my favourite nihilistic romantic.” —Rachel Kushner
”Hilarious, refreshingly mean-spirited and often brilliant.” —Washington Post
Anything by Rebecca Stead, illustrated by Gracey Zhang $40
Anything paints a tender picture of a father and daughter moving into a new home. Dad brings a birthday cake for the new apartment to celebrate their new beginning and tells his daughter she can wish for anything (or, more precisely, "three Anythings"). Over the course of the day, she wishes for some of her favorite things, including a rainbow and "the biggest slice of pizza in the whole world”. But she keeps some of her wishes inside. Because what she really wants is to go back home to their old apartment, with its big blue bathtub and space in the closet for hide-and-seek. When she finally admits this last wish, her dad takes her on a journey, and by the book's final pages, she is home . . . in every way that matters. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
A selection of ‘one-sitting’ essays from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
The Face: Cartography of the Void
Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books
I Will Write to Avenge My People
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.
Ngā Mōteatea : The Songs (Volumes 1—4) edited and translated by Apirana Ngata, Pei Te Hurinui Jones, and Hirini Moko Mead $270
This is a new edition of the classic work Ngā Mōteatea, the annotated collection of waiata made over 40 years ago by the distinguished Māori leader and scholar Apirana Ngata. This completely redesigned and reset edition, published in association with the Polynesian Society, preserves the integrity of Ngata's text and Jones's translations and their commentary but adds further notes from contemporary Māori scholars and modernises the typography by the inclusion of macrons. It also includes two CDs of waiata drawn from the archive of Māori and Pacific Music at the University of Auckland. An essential text for anyone interested in te ao Māori. It is good to have this important work back in print. [Four hardback volumes. Also available separately at $75 each.]
The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus $40
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it. At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut. Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is a piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge. [Paperback]
”It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written.” —Gary Indiana
”The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare — at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus's masterpiece. It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer — she is just one of the greatest American writers, one who is able to tell us what's wrong with the world and transform our stupor into thinking.” —Constance Debre
"The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable. I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too." —Rachel Kushner
>>Writing about all of it.
In the Circle of Ancient Trees: Our oldest trees and the stories they tell edited by Valerie Trouet, illustrated by Blaze Cyan $70
In the growth rings of every tree are ingrained and encrypted the stories of the tree, its environment and the changes through which it has lived. Growing archives of tree-ring samples allow us to read and decode these natural timelines in ever greater detail. In the Circle of Ancient Trees narrates the stories of ten ancient trees, considering why they grew where they grew; how they reflect their habitat; and the events to which they bore witness. Valerie Trouet curates chapter essays by ecologists with specialist knowledge of each tree, exploring how human and environmental history share common roots, while drilling down into the ecology, persistence and resilience of each species. Illustrated with commissioned wood- engravings and tree-ring infographics that visualise each tree's chronology and geography, In the Circle of Ancient Trees uses circular narratives — beginning and ending with the tree's relationship to its location and environment — that consider what lessons for our future might be discovered in our planet's past. Includes a section on the Kauri, by Gretel Boswijk. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard $26
What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach? In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse, this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow. The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness. [Paperback]
Storm Pegs: A life made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield $28
In her late twenties, celebrated poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetland archipelago to make her life anew. A scattering of islands at the northernmost point of the United Kingdom, frequently cut off from the mainland by storms, Shetland is a place of Vikings and myths, of ancient languages and old customs, of breathtaking landscapes and violent weather. It has long fascinated travellers seeking the edge of the world. On these islands known for their isolation and drama, Hadfield found something more: a place teeming with life, where rare seabirds blow in on Atlantic gales, seals and dolphins visit its beaches, and wild folk festivals carry the residents through long, dark winters. She found a close-knit community, too, of neighbours always willing to lend a boat or build a creel, of women wild-swimming together in the star-spangled winter seas. Over seventeen years, as bright summer nights gave way to storm-lashed winters, she learned new ways to live. In prose as rich and magical as Shetland itself, Storm Pegs transports us to the islands as a local; introducing us to the remote and beautiful archipelago where Hadfield has made her home, and shows us new ways of living at the edge. [Paperback]
”Storm Pegs is rich, attentive and beautifully written. Hadfield writes vividly about the tides, the Shaetlan language, and shows a great appreciation for the people and modern life of Shetland. This book has been my friend. I really loved it and I recommend it.” —Amy Liptrot
”Storm Pegs is a deeply thoughtful and beautifully written account of a life centred on making art in a lively island community. Hadfield writes with rare nuance about choosing and building a new life in a place that calls to many of us.” —Sarah Moss
”Delightful: at once intricate and effortless, playful and deeply felt. A heartfelt paean to a coldwater Eden.” —Cal Flyn
”What a wonderful book. Jen Hadfield just has to turn her languaged gaze to the world and it fizzes to life on the page. One of the most intensely realised accounts of a place — and time in a place — I have read.” —Philip Marsden
”A gorgeous portrait of a fascinating, ever-changing place, as well as very many other things: friendship, community, creation and self-creation, the cycle of the seasons and the toil and triumph of the elements. I adored it.” —Sara Baume
The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black woman in the Romantic archive by Mathelinda Nabugodi $50
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own. "Freedom, liberty, autonomy are the period's favorite words," Nabugodi writes. Romantic poets sought truth in the depth of their souls and in the mind's unbounded regions. Ideals of free speech and human rights were being forged. And yet the period was defined by a relentless commitment to the displacement and stolen labour of millions. Romanticism, she argues, can no longer be discussed without the racial violence with which it was complicit. Still, rather than using this idea to rehash Black pain and subjugation, she mines the archives for instances of resistance, beauty, and joy. Nabugodi moves effortlessly between the past and present. She takes us into the physical archives, and unpacks her relationships with them: what they are and should be; who built them; how they are entwined with an industry that was the antithesis of freedom; and how she feels holding the materials needed to write this book, as a someone whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers. The Trembling Hand presents a new way of reading the past. This transfixing, evocative book reframes not only the lives of the legendary Romantics, but also their poetry and the very era in which they lived. It is a reckoning with art, archives, and academia. [Hardback]
”Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter.” —Colm Toibin
”Mathelinda Nabugodi reveals the racial wounds behind the pristine face of British Romanticism. Her journey — part scholarly excavation, part personal pilgrimage — takes readers through abandoned archives and hallowed homes, where she confronts not just history but her own complex relationship with poets whose words shaped her life even as their era sought to erase people who looked like her. Nabugodi shows us how to hold two truths at once: beautiful craft and painful context, literary genius and racial violence. Her reckoning is a love letter written in disquiet, a map for those seeking the unvarnished truth of our literary inheritance, and a gift for anyone who values personal storytelling that illuminates our shared past.” —Professor DJ Lee
The Book of Lives: A memoir of sorts by Margaret Atwood $75
”Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.” Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents — entomologist father, dietician mother — Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: “It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.”), but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat's Eye to divided 1980s Berlin where she began The Handmaid's Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel. As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art — and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations. [Hardback]
The Haunted Wood: A history of childhood reading by Sam Leith $55
Do you remember the first time you fell in love with a book? Maybe you tumbled down a rabbit hole, flew out of your bedroom window, or found the key to a secret garden. And in the silence of that moment, your whole life changed forever. The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past — collective and individual, remembered and imagined — and invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of the children's literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations. [Hardback]
”Sam Leith has been encyclopedic and forensic in this journey through children's books. It's a joy for anyone who cares or wonders why we have children's literature.” —Michael Rosen
”One of the best surveys of children's literature I've read. It takes a particular sort of sensibility to look at children's literature with all the informed knowledge of a lifetime's reading of 'proper' books, and neither patronise (terribly good for a children's book) nor solemnly over-praise. Sam Leith hits the right spot again and again. The Haunted Wood is a marvel, and I hope it becomes a standard text for anyone interested in literature of any sort.” —Philip Pullman
Dead or Alive by Zadie Smith $40
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith takes a close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tar, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic — and the meaning of 'the commons' in all our lives. [Paperback]
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon $38
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he's been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there's no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement - and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he's supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can't see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it's the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he's a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question. Much anticipated. [Paperback]
Hard-Case Heroes: Stories from the Abel Tasman by Gerard Hindmarsh $40
Building on the success of his Kahurangi backcountry trilogy, Gerard Hindmarsh’s new book, Hard-case Heroes, focuses on some of the quirky and largely untold characters associated with the Abel Tasman coast and its uplands: early settlers and park rangers; an island hermit and defiant squatters; graziers and a limestone miner. Hard-Case Heroes is a highly readable and engaging book about a remarkable corner of New Zealand, written by a local with a love of the area and a nose for a good story. These largely untold and gritty stories from our social history will interest anyone who has experienced the Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand’s smallest and most visited national park, arguably our most beautiful too. [Paperback]
And back in print: Swamp Fever | Kahurangi Calling | Kahurangi Stories | Kahurangi Out West
And reprinting now: the popular d'Urville Island story, Angelina.